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You can’t read that in China. DNS is intercepted and overwitten - *.bbc.co.uk is directed to a random IP address that is typically in an AS that should be somewhere in the US, at one point it was a netblock owned by facebook, although with a 20ms response in Beijing.

Same applies to many other sites. To westerners, the Internet is effectively unusable until you establish a vpn.

HN works though.

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Can someone explain why a netblock owned by Facebook would have a 20ms response time in China? Does Facebook have Chinese servers?

I assume the inference is that the Government is hijacking the address within China and routing it to a state-controlled server.

So they could make it plausibly look like it’s coming from a foreign IP while locally censoring the content on the site.

If you have control over the network, hijacking the whole site is easier to do than trying to MITM traffic between users and the site, since HTTPS would hinder your efforts. As long as you don’t start to do it too late that people have HSTS information saved in their browsers.

And for that there is HSTS Preload.

https://hstspreload.com/

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