Slashdot Mirror

An important part of network design is understanding what traffic is going to "nearby" locations, and designing things so most traffic stays local and doesn't use expensive or scarce facilities - things like putting big hulking routers in San Francisco and San Jose so traffic between Silicon Valley companies stays in the South Bay and Multimedia Gulch companies stays in the City without needing to use too much bandwidth around the Bay, much less sending copies of all of it on three-part-carbon forms to NSA's Fort Meade, Ashcroft's J. Edgar Hoover building, and Dick Cheney's stockbroker before delivering it.

That doesn't mean that there weren't rumors from reputable sources a few years ago about active wiretaps on MAE-West sending extra copies of some packets to somebody else, or that the Russian renamed-KGB's 1998ish SORM (another URL) project didn't try to force Russian ISPs to build a full-sized wiretap feed to them (at the ISPs' expense, of course) or that there aren't Eurocrats trying to do the same thing in their countries today. And then there's the whole Echelon Wiretapping System. But it's still impractical for them to force ISPs to deliver everything everybody's reading or emailing, though I'll be happy to send them copies of most of my spam if they'd like.

On the other hand, the publicly-accessible parts of the web aren't all that big. The Wayback Machine has a copy of all of it, with reasonable samples going back a long time, and Google and the other search engines crawl it periodically, and AllTheWeb.com presumably claims to have All The Web.

Anyway, I assume they lifted the ban just until they have had time to develop the system so that it is a bit harder to go around it. We might see the blockings again within a few weeks.

Many reporters have highlighted Wan's work in raising awareness about HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, - and also Gay & Lesbian rights in China. CPJ also highlight Wan's role as a webmaster - and as a leading critic of Beijing's neo-fascist Information enviroment, and cult-like Pledge of Self-Discipline Yahoo!

CPJ concerned about safety of Web publisher

Wan Yanhai is a courageous man - our thoughts are with him, Su Zhaosheng - his wife, and his family.

Read: The Great Firewall of China, by Xiao Qiang, Executive Director, HRIC - and CPJ's Asia Research Associate Sophie Beach, from the L.A. Times of August 25, 2002....

http://www.aizhi.org/ [aizhi.org]

Starting testing...

Stage one testing complete.
Stage two testing complete.

Testing complete for http://www.aizhi.org/.
Result:

Reported as accessible in China

Tested at request of Greg Walton,
China's Golden Shield, Corporate complicity in the development of surveillance technology in China Le bouclier d'or de la Chine

Open Source Intelligence

Http://go.openflows.org [openflows.org]

Related stories:

Where is Wan Yanhai?
China's most prominent AIDS activist has been "disappeared" - believed to have been detained by the police, relatives and human rights groups said yesterday.

China Net Spies

...there was recent evidence that state censors had removed the blocks on some banned Web sites to see who tried to access them. "The reverse-trace route monitoring we do on a regular basis shows a surprising number of interesting sites that were once blocked are now going through, but with anomalous traffic signatures, suggesting some systematic surveillance of sensitive sites. Perhaps the PSB [Public Security Bureau] is trying to learn more about surfing habits," he said.

The "Great Firewall" is failing
Beyond the Great Firewall - from censorship to surveillance
Gartner: China's Internet Strategy: Struggling to Maintain the "Great Firewall"
China, Nortel, and the Net

or Ethan Gutmann's Who Lost China's Internet?

if you're still interested.....Chapter Two of the private RAND study published Tuesday, "You've got dissent"offers an authoritative analysis of the evolving, multi-layered counter-netwar strategies deployed in the PRC -> increasingly redistributing the focus of the so-called "Great Firewall" from the International Gateways, through the ISPs and out to the cybercafes [;-)cracked versions of these filters available], the possibility of .cn ISPs setting policy on individuals' firewalls in offices and homes

Endnotes: Zi Xiang Mao Dun

P2P geektivists could note a parallel decentralisation of resources in the Future Trends section, in Chapter One for more on innovation at the Edge of the network:

"Dissidents, Falungong practitioners, and other activists in the PRC and abroad may increasingly turn to emerging peer-to-peer technology to exchange information."

All this augurs a mighty struggle deep indside China's networks in the coming years, but with China sending dissidents to mental hospitals a culture of self-censorship is probably the gravest challenge to free experssion.

Note to CowBoyNeal,language barrier: this installation has problems with Chinese charcters - there'd probably be people out there who have modified SLASHcode to handle Chinese UNICODE, and perhaps publish automatically to USENET, Freenet etc.

they'd probably also find time to translate this thread.

i'd like to go on, but some government employed s'kripty in Yunan's is busy thinking he can backdoor my network - its not an ethical thing - its the aesthetics i've got a problem with...so crude, juvenile. I'll leave you with a final link

Back in the days of the Cold War there was a joke that went like this:

Q: Mr. President, the Russians have just deported the Moscow reporters for the Associated Press and the New York Times. How do you intend to respond?
A: We're aware of the situation, and in accordance with standard protocols we will be deporting the Washington reporters for the AP and New York Times as well....

In a very real sense, the Internet will come to be viewed as the ultimate secret weapon. Information is very hard to control, and free access to information is a serious threat to the despot. The Chinese and the Saudis both fear free access to information--they're sufficiently connected to the rest of the world to know that they can't simply disconnect their people from the Internet, but they're trying very hard to prevent access to "bad information." The Chinese, in particular, are cracking down on Internet cafes (here's an article from the official People's Daily, a slightly different perspective from the Digital Freedom Network).

An effective way to attack injustice is publicity--and an effective retort is to say, "oh, but [name other country] is doing it too--we agree completely." In this case, the Chinese and the Saudis can loudly and publicly proclaim their agreement with "the Americans" and continue tightening the screws on their citizens access to information.

One of the great strengths of America is that any clown can run for elective office. One of the great weaknesses of America is that so many clowns manage to get elected.

So WHAT if they aren't perfect? Improve them.

How would you design your censorware to distinguish between Rep. "Dick" Armey and "Dick" meaning male genitalia? I'd like to see the algorithm you propose to use that won't set off too many silly false alarms.

People who are rabidly anti-filtering forget that for some purposes it is useful.

Explain it to Heather, who encountered censorware that changed her name to H****** because of the substring "eat her." The words "freedom of s***ch," "pe***ion," "cl***," "cu***ber," "**** school," and "A Plu* **am" are also perfectly legitimate, but because they contain substrings, they trip false alarms in hypersensitive filter software. See this page about a pe***ion for a sample, and see this page for more information on false alarms.

Morlocks eat Eloi

Not after the conclusion of The Time Machine . Extrapolating from the events of the story, the Eloi (who look like Precious Moments figurines) rediscover fire and kick the Morlocks to high heck.

shouldn't your high school's filtering software have kept you from slashdot?

Schools are starting to drop censorware because they're finding that it just doesn't work as advertised.

Then there's the stupider kind that filters out key words. You'll never do research on cucumbers (embeded bad word, c-u-m), names like Dick Sexton would trigger the filter, and the list goes on. And heaven forbid you should want to know anything about Matsushita or Essex. My favorite, however, is from one of the people at peacefire:

Peacefire's Bennett Haselton takes the prize for his fun with Cybersitter. Bennett started with this phrase: "Gary Bauer is a staunch anti-homosexual conservative who sees the gay movement as absolutely pure fascism and thinks movies of men with men are the greatest terror."

After Cybersitter's keen filters attacked it, here's what came out: "Gary Bauer is a staunch anti-conservative who sees the gay movement as absolutely pure and thinks movies of men with men are the greatest."

> For instance, if a page has "sheit" on it (like many posts on /.) it would place ---- instead and let the page go through.

That reminds me of one of the winners of DFN's Foil the Filters contest, a former science teacher's website with a filtered forum. When postings starting showing up spelling "class" as "cl***", he removed the filtering software and hasn't used it since.

The winner of the contest was Carroll High School's library, whose censorware blocked the high school's own website for using the word "high".

--
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of s***ch, or the right of the people peaceably to ***emble, and to pe***ion the government for a redress of grievances.

I just thought I'd point out the Digital Freedom Network's Foil the Filters contest. Many fine examples of censorship gone wrong. DFN contest

If anyone forgot about this link, it is the best way to explain to people why censorship software is bad.

http://dfn.org/focus/censor/contest.htm

Recall that Richard "Dick" Armey's site is blocked by Netnanny, Surfwatch, Cybersitter, N2H2, and Wisechoice because of his nickname. Of course this is more than mildly funny only because Armey is one of the many conservatives who believes that Censorware is the solution to the country's problems.

More information is available at http://dfn.org/Alerts/contest.htm

• Step 1 - Find out who your representative is in the House of Representatives
• Step 2 - call them, write them, email them -- whatever it takes to let them know that you are against censorware in our libraries.

As for the problem of simply banning any word or text string, no matter how innocuous, Alexander Pope had the best word in his Essay on Criticism

All seems infected that th' infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye

I have used this with great effect when combined with the latest follies from automated censorware.

DFN, the Digital Freedom Network is running a contest until September 25th to find the most egregious example of censorware error. The Foil the Filters contest is being held to coincide with the American Library Association's Banned Books Week.

Entries can be either a site you'd expect to be filtered that wasn't, or one that shouldn't have been but was. WIRED is running a story on it here

DFN, the Digital Freedom Network is running a contest until September 25th to find the most egregious example of censorware error. The Foil the Filters contest is being held to coincide with the American Library Association's Banned Books Week.

Entries can be either a site you'd expect to be filtered that wasn't, or one that shouldn't have been but was. WIRED is running a story on it here

There are still a few days left in the Foil the Filters Contest. They're looking for failures at both extremes...