Great Firewall Of China Marches Forward

geophile writes: "This article in Salon says that China will be building its own 'very own information superhighway.'" The story basically repeats the optimistic-sounding promises of the Chinese government that the new system will be faster, safer, brighter and fight cavities, too, though it does mention in passing that the Chinese "government routinely blocks Web sites of foreign news organizations and groups it opposes." Speaking practically, how easily can the worldwide dataflow be arrested in a country as populous and geographically diffuse as China?

Comments

Anonymous Proxies

[Yxes]

When I was in China a couple months ago I found it very easy to see sites like CNN.com by using anonymous proxies. Some of them even used secure SSL encryption and the Chinese firewall didn't detect anything. The sites came up fine.

I have my doubts about enforcing something like censorship on the net.
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Resume

Not easy to block but ...

[John Jorsett]

I don't think the data can necessarily be easily arrested, but it can be monitored. A few showy 'examples' can be made of people to keep others in line, sort of the way the U.S. Internal Revenue Service announces prosecutions during tax season. Besides the governmental monitoring, there will also be the neighbors. There are 'block captains' who keep tabs on who's up to what (one of the ways China enforces its draconian "one-child" policy). I'm sure there will be ways around the blockades, but anyone wanting to access forbidden information is going to have to want it pretty badly. As a point of comparison, think of possessing a gun in New York City. It's possible, but the consequences of discovery could be dire.

Control the gates and you control the internet

[helarno]

I don't have the exact figures off the top of my head anymore but sometime around 97 or so, China's main internet links to the rest of the world were two 45Mbps links, one from Beijing and one from Shanghai. Almost all outgoing traffic went through these two pipes and were filtered by the ISP in charge. There were a few other small links, like 1.5 Mbps or 128kbps, but these were usually owned by a university or government organization and traffic was rarely routed through them. The general populace used those two main pipes out of China and it sure got congested during peak hours.

Since then, I'm sure more bandwidth has been added but it is still all under the control of the (government controlled) ISPs. At these chokepoints, you can implement all the firewalling and filtering you care for.

This problem was quite evident in my recent visit

[neonman]

I just got back on Wednesday from a journey around China. I attempted to use the Internet service in from the business center of the Guilin Sheraton Hotel, and barely downloaded a single page of html. This was google, and after 7 minutes of waiting. Images never downloaded for some reason.

I was able to confirm my understanding that all HTTP traffic in China is channeled through centralized filtering proxy servers. It can't even be called Internet Access. The proxy server would not handle anything other than HTTP and SMTP(which didn't work when I tried to send a message). I wanted to try using PuTTY to do ssh to my server at home in order to check up on email and other things, but this was impossible, even when I tried to configure the client to use the proxy.

There is no way for inhabitants of China to do normal IP routing between each other and the rest of the world. I suppose one could set something up to tunnel IP over HTTP, but other than that, they're out of luck. I would have rather had a straight ol' 2400 baud PPP connection to my U.S. ISP.

I understand that the Chinese government has good totalitarian reasons for censoring the Net, (although they are moving towards reform) but the system they use should be passive, and not involve tcp proxy servers.

I've seen systems that can simply monitor and replace ethernet packets that contain discedent HTTP data.

Internet Free China

[scotteparte]

Remember "Radio Free Europe"? Same basic idea here... satellite uplinks provided by the Land of the Free, then they can see all of the Internet. Periodically, we also insert anti-China propoganda, of course.

However, after this year's budget is passed, they will not be able to access porn and other sensitive material, because the satellite link will have censorWare on it. Oh well, looks like the US and China deserve each other after all.

An Evil Government...

[tbo]

...that deserves to be overthrown, preferably with much bloodshed among its leaders.

Not that I really need to repeat it for the /. crowd, but censorship is evil. The government of the "People's Republic of" China routinely practices censorship, sometimes by such barbaric methods as sending tanks into crowds of peaceful student protestors.

Sneaking "subversive" data past this firewall is a good cause, worthy of the efforts of the Rubberhose Project and other open source initiatives designed to increase personal privacy and freedom. To all of those developers out there who are working on encryption or steganography software, these (Chinese citizens) are the people who really need your help.

A quote from the Xinhua report:

The current one by itself... is incapable of satisfying the needs of the Chinese government and companies as they enter the digital age.

Notice that the needs of the people are not mentioned. The only legitimate purpose of government is to serve its people.

Of course censorship kills.

[Eloquence]

Censorship never directly killed anyone.

Nor did many Nazi leaders.

Censorship can prevent life-saving information from being spread. Much of the overpopulation of the last 2000 years can be attributed to lack of knowledge about contraception, which has been (and still is) actively censored by religious pressure groups.

The Dark Ages were the best example for the killing power of censorship. During that time, the church held a monopoly on the truth -- and the consequence was that most knowledge of ancient times was lost or suppressed, and science stagnated, which was especially important with regard to the medical profession, which practically did not exist. I have a huge file on the absurd rituals and practices that were used to "heal" people in the Dark Ages. Demons were believed to cause all illnesses, and those who strayed from this belief were outcasts and often persecuted. As you may know, exorcism is still practiced by the Catholic Church, even in the Vatican.

The fact that repressive governments like China can remain in power and continue to kill people is also a direct consequence of the fact that they censor information that could mean change. Censorship prevents change, and change can save lives.

Recently on German TV, there was a documentary about a US sect that prevented the use of traditional medicine. They showed a cemetery where all the victims of this irrationality, many of them children, were buried. Surely these people would love it if nobody had access to this information. By trying to pass legislation that would have outlawed a lot of drug-related information on the Net, the US gov't would have done the first step in that direction.

Always remember: Where they burn books, people are next. Censorship kills. Sooner or later.

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advertising slogan

[British]

China's Firewall version 6.0: So easy to use, no wonder it's number one! It's the only one!

Re:BS

[slashdot-me]

I read through 10 posts on this thread looking for the one that said:

"None of you even know how your own telephone works. That you might even suggest making a 'long distance ADSL call' from China to the US underscores your ignorance. For heavens sake, shut up!"

Sadly I found no such post and had to write one myself.

Ryan

Re:oh please

[slashdot-me]

They did it to Roger Rabbit.

Ryan