Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Great Firewall Of China Marches Forward

Posted by timothy on from the let-a-thousand-satellite-feeds-bloom dept.

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?

1 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. This problem was quite evident in my recent visit by neonman · · Score: 5

    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.