Carbuzz Builds Chinese Firewall To Lock Out Lone Dutchman

Man on a mission: Tycho at the Beijing Auto Show

Yesterday, we reported about Carbuzz purloining content from Carnewschina, and that it is continuing to do so despite vows of repentance. This morning, Carnewschina proprietor Tycho de Feyter opened his laptop in Beijing in order to visit vengeance on the presumptive “leader in car news and industry information.” He keyed in the Carbuzz URL and looked at an empty screen.

“Carbuzz.com is completely down since this morning (Chinese time),” de Feyter telegraphed from Beijing. “Maybe the owners got word of the mess? I hope they stay down, but sadly I can’t do my other articles on these bastards anymore…”

It turns out that Tycho was mistaken. Instead of taking the site down, Carbuzz erected a firewall that keeps out China.Everybody in the world can access Carbuzz, try it from China, and you get a blank screen. Writes de Feyter in today’s report from Beijing:

“The little redneck content-thieves from CarBuzz.com are trying to hide their criminal activities in China. They went quite far to do so by locking out all Chinese IP’s. CarBuzz.com is therefore no longer visible in the whole of China. I guess CarBuzz’ advertisers don’t like that very much. They will even like less what will happen next, but I don’t say what that is…”:

This is yet another episode of an unfolding man bites dog story. China erects a firewall to keep 1.3 billion Chinese in China. Carbuzz erects a Firewall to defend against one man in Beijing: Tycho de Feyter, the man on a mission.

Heavily SEOd, but mentally challenged Carbuzz forgot one thing: The circumvention of the Chinese Firewall is a national sport in the Middle Kingdom, and what can poke holes into the Chinese firewall can easily overcome a firewall hastily thrown up around a Carbuzz server that appears to be somewhere in Israel.

You need some determination to do that, but spurned Tycho has the determination. Last we heard was that Tycho is running each of the Carbuzz stories through Google to document from where they were stolen.

Should Tycho’s digging be successful, this could spell trouble in an unexpected country: India. Most of the alleged content in Carbuzz is served via alt-a.bitg.net. The owner of that URL is Bitgravity, Inc., Bitgravity is owned by Tata Communications, and, tada!, Tata Communications is a member of the sprawling Tata conglomerate.

Carbuzz: Instead of erecting firewalls to lock out Chinese IPs, wouldn’t it be simpler to give credit where credit is due?