Less than a month after it was launched the office has already seized more than 4 million pirated teaching materials. As a result a massive 182 printing companies were shut down as well as 100,000 stalls where the illegal teaching materials were sold.

“The situation of illegal publications is generally under control… However, pirate issue is still obvious. Those pirated teaching materials especially harm the healthy development of the country’s youth,” Li Baozhong, vice director of the National Anti-Pornography and Anti-Illegal Publications Office, said at a press conference earlier this week.

Baozhong did not elaborate on how knowledge and education will harm children’s health, but we assume that it has something to do with content that the Government may not approve of. How educational materials could hurt one’s health remains a mystery though.

China is of course known for its censorship and notoriously blocks websites that may ‘harm’ its citizens including Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook. Interestingly, BitTorrent sites have never been targeted and almost all of the are still accessible today.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It soon became apparent that VeryCD was not the only P2P website to be hijacked. A host of BitTorrent sites, including Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay were also affected. People in the Beijing area who attempted to access the sites were promptly redirecting to Baidu, China’s Google.

The domain hijacks continued for more than two days straight, but were lifted yesterday. According to some sources, there was never an attempt to censor the BitTorrent sites, claiming that a DNS error cause the problems. This doesn’t seem very plausible though, as the diversions almost exclusively involved P2P related sites, which are hosted right across the globe. Also, DNS issues can’t explain why all the P2P sites were suddenly redirected to another website.

Mininova co-founder Niek, whose domain was also redirected to Baidu told TorrentFreak: “We had the questionable honor of joining Wikipedia and YouTube on the list of websites that (at some point) were censored in China. Fortunately the people in charge made the right decision, and realized that blocking a search engine like Mininova wasn’t such a good idea.”

“I’m happy to see that the block is removed now, though it would be nice to talk to the people who made this decision so we can understand their motives,” Niek added. The true reason behind the hijack attempt will probably never come to light. Most importantly, the ‘problems’ are resolved now, and all BitTorrent sites are accessible again.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.