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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

So basically, it means that using Tencent's database Chinese Government can block access to unwanted sites in user's browser?

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China has many other more effective means of blocking websites for users within China mainland.

Since Tencent is used for a malware list instead of Google for all users who have their iOS region set to China (even if they aren’t physically in China) this would technically allow them to falsely flag websites as malware even for some people outside of the country. But, this is a user configurable setting, and you can always bypass the warning.

They don't really need to do that since they have the great firewall in place.

That would be the most incompetent implementation of censorship ever. All you'd have to do to bypass this is disable the safe browsing feature. At least school firewalls require you to use some sort of proxy service like google translate.

If you want to condition people that a site is bad but more subtlety than a outright block, it is a viable method. If you can visit it, but every time you do you are misleadingly told it is malicious, then that may have a subconscious effect (assuming you don't disable it outright), and you don't have to stop everyone from visiting to influence society as a whole.

In fact, there may be cases where being blocked by the Chinese authorities lends credibility to site, whereas being flagged for malware does not.

These are definitely edge cases, and no doubt the China government would to completely block a site in most circumstances, but it is another tool they could use. It also increases their coverage - the current censorship tools only cover China, but this covers any _device_ where the region is set to China (meaning it can apply to some people outside of China, and continues to apply to people who have temporarily left China).

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