Slashdot Mirror
Real-Time Testing of China's Internet Filters
mrbnsn writes "The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is conducting a study of Internet filtering in countries worldwide. As part of this study, they have put up a web page where you can get a real-time
report on whether any URL you submit is blocked by the Great Firewall. Check whether you'd be able to read your favorite web sites
in Beijing!" I've also heard that there are some "western" hotels that have non-blocked connections. Anyone from China care to tell us what it's like?
Oooo so close... I'm in Taiwan, could have been a really relevant (first) post...
I doubt the government would allow non-blocked connections. Otherwise you'd see 2 billion chinese packed into the Hilton every day :)
Its for your own good, I mean, good citizens only want to view things like Aunt May's puppy page right? Who would possibly want to view anything 'objectionable'? Criminals, thats who!
heh.
...the downfall of Chinese civilisation:
Testing complete for http://www.stileproject.com. Result:
Reported as accessible in China
Testing complete for http://www.google.com. Result: Reported as inaccessible in China Oh shit - I knew it... this must me new though cause yesterday I worked.
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
slashdot is blocked in chaina apparently
on the percentage success that peek-a-booty can get around a random sample of these Chinese-government blocked URLs. It would be interesting report to read, if anyone who has the capacity or people connections to can get some good effectiveness data.
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
What I want to know is how we, the coder community, can help people in China get around the site filters! I know there's one research project underway with proxy servers, but it'd be great if someone could come up with a cheap and easy hack that solves this. Any ideas?
...it depends. I was in China recently, visiting an old friend who lives there. He signed a document saying he was officially a foreigner and suddenly got CNN on his cable. Seems you can get away from most of it by not being Chinese, even in China.
:)
I prodded the "Great Firewall" when I was there, and realized some sites were cut off, like the CNN. Besides Yahoo and some other sites have tailor made pages for the Chinese. I made a SSH-tunnel back home to god old Norway though (no restrictions on protocols/ports it seemed, only some IP-adresses), so I had no problems. I don't think it would be much of an obstacle for most slashdotters
no one IN china will be able to tell us, slashdot is on the list of known blocked sites.
http://code.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.html
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
Of course in the mind of lunatic GOP nationalists nobody in the world outside of the US ever had an idea about freedom or human rights. But the Berlin wall failled and so will the great firewall.
The criticism that will bring down the communist party is local. That is why they are so afraid of an AIDS activist who described how careless officials spread AIDS to whole villiages collecting blood plasma.
Outside comment can play a useful role but politicians who agrandize themselves by claiming to have brought down communism in other countries are largely hot air bags.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Are you sure this thing works?
Both http://www.taipeitimes.com and http://www.chinatimes.com.tw are reported as being accessible in China.
Also, I believe it is 4 star and above hotels in China that do not have restrictions on Sattelite TV and Internet access.
Hong Kong is now part of China. I saw a rumour, can't remeber where, that there are secret undersea fibre optic cables running from Hong Kong to Macow to supply corporations with an uncensored internet connection.
Testing complete for http://www.camwhores.com. Result:
Reported as accessible in China
Whoohoo!
Apparently stileproject works too.. lol.
I just got back from China. I've stayed three weeks in a hotel in shanghai with unlimited internet access in the room. The only website that was blocked (not in the dns) was www.cnn.com. europe.cnn.com and asia.cnn.com worked just fine. The speed was incredible.
The next three weeks I travelled around the country (Chongqing, Chengdu, Xi'an, Beijing and more). At most of the internet bars I could watch the dutch news full screen at very high quaulity, something I'm not able to do with my cable modem at home. The highest download speed I got was 450 Kbytes/sec. (from messenger.microsoft.com of all places)
At some places they do have filters, I was reading a newspaper online that had an article about porn, that article was blocked.
The places I mentioned were public internet bars cramped with Chinese people. Most of them were playing online games though...
So, if you can live without online porn, internet in china is just fine.
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
218.2.131.246 - - [30/Aug/2002:18:18:43 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 1110 "-" "MSIE 5.0b1 ( Windows 98)" Rock on.
Starting testing...
Stage one testing complete.
Stage two testing complete.
Testing complete for http://www.snuffx.com. Result:
Reported as accessible in China
Starting testing...
Slashdot is accessible apparentlyStage one testing complete.
Stage two testing complete.
Testing complete for http://slashdot.org. Result:
Reported as accessible in China
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
They block google? I assume because of the cached pages. ug, the internet is just a incoherant mass without google.
Really though, this shouldn't be considered a big deal. It's china's business on how they want to run their country not the rest of the world. Maybe I start critizing china when the u.s. is perfect, till then MYOB!
Geocities appears to be completely blocked.
The Chinese government doesn't like Playboy or sex.com - hmm, do we see a correlation between repressive government and antisexual morals there? Nah, couldn't be.
I have no idea why they censor {Insert Something Funny}, an obscure weblog, an anti-tobacco group, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Columbia Earthscape, or Columbia University.
Google is on their shitlist. No surprise given its cache and large index. The Wayback Machine isn't - I'd expect that to change in the long term. Anonymizer is accessible as well.
Peek-A-Booty and Freenet are not accessible, of course. It appears that all SourceForge sites are blocked (unless the testing engine is slashdotted and not working properly, but other sites are reported as accessible). I presume this might be because Freenet is hosted at SourceForge.
It appears that freenet has been blocked (IPv6 tunnelling). For obvious reasons.
I believe that you can still get Freenet from Debian, and that isn't blocked.
I wonder what would happen if people set up IPv6 sites and ask people in China to do 6to4 tunnelling?
Seriously, if Znet/NPR are not blocked in China, I don't see what the big deal is. Either Harvard folks coded that url checker with QBASIC or China is a Great place to live in.
It's quite interesting. I'm a chinese but I can watch pr0n.
Having a look at the recent requests on the main page I see:
http://slashdot.org - Reported as accessible in China
But on the Inaccessible Sites page I see:
# http://slashdot.org - 8/29/2002 11:39:06 AM
Something wrong with the test?
Testing complete for http://www.goatse.cx. Result:
Site not reachable from US testing location. Check URL and web server.
I guess somebody up in the Chinese government got tricked into going over to goatse.cx and got a real scare...
eTrade SUCKS
Extensive testing by worried geeks has shown that slashdot.org is still accessible from the Chinese part of the Internet. Further tests are scheduled for the next couple of days to make sure it stays.
bash$
Now, which country was it that was behind a Great Firewall?
Starting testing...
Stage one testing complete.
Testing complete for http://goatse.cx. Result:
Site not reachable from US testing location.
Now when will we have a real-time method of testing MPAA / RIAA's filters?
Anyone interested to study this?
I've also heard that there are still some "eastern" ISPs which do not block P2P applications.
Apparently http://midgetsex.com is a threat to the communist party.
They got *that* one right!
I was in Beijing two months ago. Stayed in the Crown Royal. There was a computer in the room, with full time internet and none of the western sites I checked were blocked. CNN International was on TV as usual.
Remember, it's the internet cafes' that are mostly affected (and then not that often), not Hotels were foreignors stay, or massive groups of individual users.
Having an entire coutry filter content is ridiculous.. don't they realise how futile this is against anyone with even the most basic understanding of computers and network? It doesn't take a genious to setup an ssh tunnel to a proxy outside of china, or to do any other number of things that could circumvent the filters. Oh well... that's alot of money down the drain for nothing.
I just arrived in Dalian, China three weeks ago and I'm going to be here for a year working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
One of my main fears about coming here was the internet access. I was afraid that they would block any western site that could talk about democracy or badly about China in any way. Could it be possible that I might not be able to, gasp, read slashdot for an entire year? After I got here I found at that isn't the case at all. I can get to Slashdot, CNN, Yahoo, pretty much every site that I use on a regular basis. The only one that really pisses me off is sourceforge. Out of all the sites to block, why the hell did they pick that one? Maybe because they figure that if anyone does find a way to write a piece of software that could get around their firewall, that would probably be one of the first places it would be posted. I can't seem to come up with a better answer. Any ideas?
Anyway, Google is not blocked, and neither is the cache, so if I ever do find a site that I can't get to, I just use Google's cache to get a general idea of what is there.
Also, as far as the blocking of Playboy and other sex sites goes, any country where you can walk into a bar and have two prostitutes sitting on your lap within 5 minutes (no joke) has far more serious moral issues to deal with than a few internet sex sites. Enough said.
All sites tested here will be reviewed by party apparatchiks for inclusion in the filters.
This site is nothing but a ploy to collect objectionable websites!
Ok, not really. I just wanted to use 'apparatchiks' in a sentence. Btw, autopr0n isn't filtered! Come on and visit, horny chinamen! (and horny Chinese lesbians too). Coincidentally, there happen to be lots of Asian chicks featured...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Every site that you guys are saying is blocked is showing as not blocked for me. I'm in Seoul, South Korea and I don't see why it should matter where I test from.
I think the so-called test site is randomly picking sites to tag as blocked.
Np, it apparently does not. All the sites I test that others claim are blocked are fine.
The Harvard test is bogus.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
China is doing it all wrong.
They should try to adopt more western policies.
For instance, arrest the person running anti-american website and seize the servers as "evidence". Or if someone says negative things about american financial interests i.e. big business, just sue them into oblivion. Then once the pesky dissenters are silenced you let huge media cartels roll in and control everything that the public sees.
This way you still give the illusion of free speech, but no one can really say anything that threatens the ruling class.
China is doing it all wrong.
But... it is blocked now (or slashdotted, which is less probable)... maybe slashdot shouldn't have posted this story in the first place...
From the formbox;
http://www.google.com - Reported as inaccessible in China
http://www.communism.org - Reported as accessible in China
http://www.google.com - Reported as accessible in China
It is obviously broken!
Pixels keep you awake!
This is just another anti-china propoganda tool.
It reports sites as being blocked which aren't really blocked. This is garbage. China is really the only non-western power that can threaten america and it's allies. Of course this all part of a propoganda war, which slashdot is happy to aid. Just like being against genetically engineered foods is looks like a "Grass roots" movement it's really just a way for the EU rulers to control imports from america. There is constantly this anti-china crap in western media outlets geared towards the tech savvy. Don't buy the hype. The west isn't so free as you think it is, and china isn't so bad as you think it is.
If my government want to do censorship, it should start from the inside. At least few major US or UK sites will link to goatse.cx-alike on the front page.
Does anybody know anything about the actual infrastructure that is the "Great Firewall of China"?
I've done some googlin' but can't really find out anything about it. I think I heard once that Cisco had been involved in putting it together.
I'm just idley curious - where is it/they? What platforms are used? What are the bandwidth requirements etc. Anybody know?
must be those dame scientologists in beijing
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
the only reason kuro5hin hasn't been blocked is because they blocked: www.kiroshin.org, and then kiro5hen.org, and all the other logical sounding spellings. It will be awhile before they reach the maximum illogical numeral/letter configuration that finally blocks the site.
Your corporate has blocked some www sites? Is your surfing being monitored by some software which logs all the sites you visit? Worry no more brother.. All you need to do is -> point your browser to some site which does translations and "translate" the page which is blocked! The only thing that shows in logs is the URL of the site that does the translation!
I was in China last spring break for a series of concerts. Wheil we were in Bejing, we stayed in the Carey Centre Hotel, which is one of the nicest in Bejing. So when we got to our rooms, obviousy, the 1st thing I went for was the internet connection. Well, It was a little box that looked like a TiVo which had come CAT5 cable coming out of the back and a coax cable to the TV. so we turned it on and..... it ran a chineese version of LINUX! My room mate and I were thrilled and we stayed up all night playing with the thing.
s t/ go.asp?URL=http://www.cnn.com
Anyway, back to the firewall, it seems that CNN is accessable by the harvard website on this page
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/te
my experiences are that the firewall only blocks certan IPs, not just allows certan IPs. So, you can telnet to your home box, use Lynx to brows the web remotely, and have no problems!
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Yeah. Looks like it is true. It was programmed with QBASIC. :(
Most people don't have even the slightest background in computers- chinese or otherwise. 99% of web-browsing americans wouldn't have any idea what to do if they typed in a URL and a page came back saying "Website not available". If they'd never been there before, they'd probably think the site doesn't exist. The difference is that americans could go find books or other sites to learn the loopholes. China probably blocks this education. I wonder if many chinese even know that they're being blocked, and only know the internet that they are allowed to see.
They blocked playboy.com but not whitehouse.gov.
I bet they blocked whitehouse.com.
Here's my experience while accessing the net through internet cafés, both officials and less official ones. Yeah, cnn.com is blocked. but money.cnn.com was not. It's not a very smart filter it seems.
Some sites will just time out. In some places a proxy generated page will tell you about a breach of user agreement, both in english and chinese.
It does not prevent young chinese boys to access plenty of pr0n in plain view in some cafés.
Slashdot.org was accessible when I tried it. I even posted a comment on a similar story while a was there.
Thank Cisco. :)
With Peekabooty the Chinese can un-block whatever the states wanna block.
4, Interesting ?
Let's see if I can make up something similar:
http://www.slashdot.org - Reported as accessible in China
http://www.slashdot.org - Reported as inaccessible in China
http://www.slashdot.org - Reported as accessible in China
http://www.slashdot.org - Reported as inaccessible in China
http://www.slashdot.org - Reported as accessible in China
http://www.slashdot.org - Reported as inaccessible in China
Very odd indeed.
SUPPLIES!!!
(probably noone will get it, sigh)
Testing complete for http://www.whitehouse.com. Result: Reported as accessible in China Chinese Male 1: Ooooh! Rikey amerikan presidensu! Chinerse Male 2: Yes yes. I rooking and get BIG penis!
I would create a sig, if only something of value could be said with just 120 chars.
click me
Me too.
Just keep making web caches of the banned documents and they will have a "whack-a-mole" problem.
As for the percentage of young regular smokers, I find it hard to believe. No one in my middle school or high school dare smoke in public.
A week ago I got there (from china). Using links(1), of course. The text along is scary enough.
I lived in China for 2 1/2 years, retuning 2 years ago. In general, the Chinese gov't does little to restrict foreigners' access to outside world. They just don't want the average citizen to have access to "corruption". I have never had my baggage searched going in and out of China (many times) but the Chinese are frquently pulled over for inspection. TV is controlled. I lived in an apartment building that had only Chinese living there. TV had only Chinese programing on it. On a building for foreigners there is no problem setting up a dish and getting what you want. I had internet access in Shanghai and Beijing. I could never confirm it, but it seems there were dial-in numbers for Westerner's accounts and then there were different dial-in numbers for Chinese accounts. There were some websites I simply could not connect to. The only one I can remember for certain was anything on Geocities. But there were others. Generally speaking, Westerners are not bothered unless they want to attend, for example, a Falungong activity. :>)
(This sig has been removed at the request of the patent holder for Sigs.)
... to test out the rumored blocked sites when I was in Tian Jin (a city near Beijing) a few weeks ago. Well, there I found a netcafe, and got online for a few hours. Slashdot was definately accesible there, and IIRC google was accessible too. I forgot to get on those sites with "controversal" information, so I'm not sure. I didn't have the feeling that sites were blocked though... But the connection... you could expect it was pretty darn slow ;-p
Don't quote me on this.
After checking your site and seeing that it really was blocked I was stunned. That prompted me to check my hobby site, namtog.com. It is also blocked. I can not believe it is the content. I took a screen shot. MNF is rarely dangerous, unless your on the field.
The Chinese government is reading /. today to find out what good sites they missed.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
1. You don't have to be 100% effective to be effective.
2. Maybe the point is to remind Chinese citizens they can filter any part of the Internet whenever they want. This keeps the censorship precident active, in the event they want to *really* lock down on unfavorable opinions.
3. Maybe they want information to slowly seep into the country to reduce the risk of information shock.
These sort of arguments apply well to content protection schemes. It doesn't have to work 100% to work.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
And no - this isn't tipping anyone off there... slashdot.org seems to be blocked too.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
i have a friend of mine that moved to china about a year ago. he had mentioned that a number of US media sites (cnn.com, msnbc.com, etc) were blocked. i set up cgiproxy, an anonymizing web proxy perl cgi - it's the script that runs anonymizer.com. my friend can now establish an ssl connection through a normal browser to jump around any webfiltering in place.
Is the "Real-Time Testing of Internet Filtering in China" actually working ?
I'm struggling to find a site that's blocked and some of the URL's I've entered you'd expect to be blocked.
www.tibet.com - now there's one that's "Reported as accessible in China"
I think this test is seriously flawed...
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
What about the Noam Chomsky archive? Whether you agree or disagree with him, he's certainly not irrelevant. Just look at his success with his book 9-11. No corporate media coverage, and he still makes the bestseller lists.
I am a US citizen who has been living in China for almost 2 years. About 1 month after Bush's visit to China, a lot of previously blocked web sites, such as cnn.com, suddenly seemed to open up. However, close inspection revealed the evil truth. China has implemented filtering and logging on an amazing scale. Last year, China Telecom signed a contract to buy roughly $50M worth of custom networking hardware from Cisco. Since then, they have been "upgrading" the networks and international connections with hard-core filtering and logging. Thanks a LOT CISCO! They have also hired a small army of nerds to actively monitor and block specific articles or whole sites that are not part of the Chinese brainwashing program. When I read CNN, I have to use a proxy server to see the real propaganda from the US. They seem to block or altar most articles about China. I also have to change my proxy servers at least once a day. They are actively blocking proxy servers now.
/. nowadays. When this article was first posted, I had no difficulty reading it. Now, I have to use a proxy server to read it and make this post.
Interestingly, they seem to be watching
sneaky bastards...
There is no political solution to our troubled evolution.
I can confirm what the AC above my post is saying. It is a Japanese imitation.
I encourage you to watch your mouth when you are within a 5 foot radius of a Chinese person. However, I fully encourage your racist rantings in front of a Chinese Triad member to get an asskicking you deserve.
Happy holidays, racist trash.
Please wait for testing results. Full testing can take as long as 120 seconds.
Starting testing...
Stage one testing complete.
Stage two testing complete.
Testing complete for http://www.slashdot.org. Result:
Reported as inaccessible in China
This is what I saw:
http://www.nypost.com - Reported as accessible in China
http://www.google.com - Reported as inaccessible in China
http://slashdot.org - Reported as accessible in China
http://www.bmezine.com - Reported as accessible in China
http://www.halturnershow.com - Reported as accessible in China
http://www.beliefnet.com - Reported as accessible in China
http://145.94.54.56 - Reported as accessible in China
http://www.insex.com - Reported as accessible in China
http://www.bukkake.com - Reported as accessible in China
http://scimail.uwaterloo.ca - Reported as accessible in China
I guess porn is good, but google is bad somehow..
Morphing Software
I'm the geek behind stileproject.com, camwhores.com(mentioned in another comment), etc.
.cn government, but that every few days which IP of ours was blocked would change, but it was never more than one IP at a time, so he could still get in eventually.
:)
About a year ago, we had www.stileproject.com resolving to 6 different IP's in a round-robin DNS arrangement.
Someone from China reported to us that we got blocked by the
I'm not exactly sure why, but eventually they either gave up, or decided that the site's content wasn't worth banning anymore because they dropped it and nobody's emailed me in many months saying they were having problems.
And yes, we've had several people from China send in subscriptions (always in cash, wrapped in a dozen sheets of paper) for camwhores.com. I think no matter what country you're in, there's some huge appeal of foreign porn.
Stage one testing complete.
Stage two testing complete.
Testing complete for http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/test/ . Result:
Reported as accessible in China
Seems that you can access the testing site itself from within China. :-)
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
www.sfu.ca (my university) - inaccessible
www.porn.com - accesible
Lol, those commies are dumb.
...but then they'd have to shoot me :(
db
Cig:
ôô
America is #1.
Sorry to rub salt into your obvious wound, but that's how it is.
Mark Oberg, proud American.
(410)715-2440
Many thanks to all who suggested sites. Logs reflect a substantial number of newly-found blocked sites -- many of them going beyond the sites Professor Zittrain and I have been testing to date. (We've obtained sites tested to date using extraction from Yahoo and from Google.)
There have been several messages in this forum about getting multiple results re certain sites of interest, slashdot and google in particular. It's certainly odd to see a given site listed as both "reported to be accessible" and "reported to be inaccessible" mere minutes apart. But as it turns out that's not an unusual result in our testing of China -- perhaps reflecting network congestion, perhaps round-robin DNS (using multiple IPs for a given host, and only one or several but not all IPs are blocked), perhaps some other factor yet to be determined. Accordingly, in our "final reporting" of blocked URLs (as distinguished from the preliminary results posted in real-time by the testing system), we'll report as "inaccessible" only those sites that pass a reasonably rigorous test ("inaccessible on at least 60% of tests, and inaccessible from at least three testing locations"). Meanwhile, http://code.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.html should be taken only for what it is; I've added a link to the FAQ to the top of that page to encourage folks to read more on this subject. Most importantly, look for our forthcoming report -- expected later this fall -- which will detail the sites we in fact found to be inaccessible, consistently, over an extended period of time.
Finally, a few readers asked whether the "test another url" form is working properly. I can confirm that it is. However, the testing site uses frames, so the URL listed in the Address Bar can in some instances get out of sync with what's really being tested. With any luck I'll fix this later this afternoon. My apologies for the confusion.
Any thoughts on what technology or technologies China might be using to block access to specific web pages? My testing to date suggests that blocking is generally at the level of an entire IP -- affecting all web pages (and all virtual servers) hosted from that IP. This sort of blocking is straightforward -- just load a "blackhole" file into the router, and that's that. On the other hand, blocking specific pages is harder -- usually the kind of task that requires a proxy, with all the cost, complexit, and performance implications that entails. Is it your sense that that's what China is doing? Or something else? Any references available?
Okay, I've lived in China for the past 6-7 years from the beginning of net access to the cybercafes of today (except in Beijing :) where we are now.
Anyhow, my observations, and daily experience is such:
Email is not a problem. About as reliable as in the states, with certain exceptions when the infrastructure is having problems, like when they cut that trans pacific cable a few years back, and other nonsense.
Almost EVERYTHING is accessible, in terms of content, from Pr0n to anti-China news.
There are a few sticklers, like:
The Chinese Association of Students and Scolars
(which has a lot of Tiananmen rhetoric up)
MAJOR news sites, like CNN, WashingtonPost, LATimes, ChicagoTribune, etc.
(But who gives a damn!? Most of their articles are bought from wire services and you can still read them on Yahoo!, MSNBC, ABCNEWS, Google's cache, etc. I mean, Chinese business interests still have to keep up on their stock portfolios!)
Many of the "Free Website Services" are blocked because people put up all kinds of shit (that can't find funding or a feasible business model) there anyhow. (mostly lots of anti-China, China Democracy movement, and Fa Lun Gong, and Tiananmen rhetoric)
>> Side note: Don't blast me because I use the work 'rhetoric'... I use it both ways, to describe all kinds of people that keep moaning about the same damn things instead of getting anything done about them. I know people who were 'fasting' in Tiananmen, and what CNN didn't tell you, like: Ice Cream, Yoghurt, and Beer are not considered food, so they could have those. And, the fast was only during the daytime. After nighttime many of the students went ahead and ate. It was more of a WoodStock to most of the Yoots invovled, at least before the tanks rolled in.. much the same as the protests on the American Embassy after the 'bombing' of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia.::
Anyhow.. I don't think this is such a big deal to most people on the Internet in China. Most people are just happy to get online, play games, see what's going on in the outside world, etc.
Most CHINESE CHINESE (i.e. Not involved with the foreign community enough to speak English on a daily basis) don't have any interest in going to most of the sites mentioned because it's IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE! They're content to get most of their information from sites like Sina, Sohu, Tomtom, etc.
Most ENGLISH SPEAKING CHINESE are independent enough to get news from multiple sources if they want English news, but for the most part, it's through interactions with people, and not through spending time online checking websites. China has much to great a social life (i.e. you actually get out and meet people instead of being holed up in front of a glowing screen) for them to spend isolated looking for information on English websites. Why look it up when you can just talk about something over dinner with friends?
Most FOREIGNERS in China follow the ENGLISH SPEAKING CHINESE habit (or vica versa), but still fall into the morning 8-10am massive news surfing habit because they want to keep up to date on what's going on back at home, or simply can't read Chinese news and need something to comfort them.
In any case, in China everyone's so freakin' international that if there's something they can't get access to, we just send an email off to a friend and ask them to send us the text from a particular URL.
No, it's not INSTANT GRATIFICATION like in the US, but it's manageable without too much hassle. I'd say nine days out of ten it doesn't really matter.
It's more of a token demonstration than anything. The more you point it out, the more valuable the token becomes.
If anyone wants more specific insights into China's internet, send me email.
Someone shared me the awful feel of being filtered out by the great firewall; bigger sites which are blocked: time.com, geocities.com (it's unblocked after Yahoo's purchase), and most sites which has the smell of democracy, tiananmen, tibet, etc. They also told me that web based proxy/anonymizer are mostly blocked.
Spent time visiting several cities in china. Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing CNN was accessible, only sometimes. Slashdot was accessible, only sometimes. Yahoo was accessible. The Great Firewall works, only sometimes.
We first hang the republicans, then deport the spics.
I noticed someone posted that they had no problem getting email through, I thought this odd after something my father told me.
;)
My dad is in a program whose focus is to teach Chinese students English via (email) correspondance course. The course is sponsored by a Christian organization.
The problem my dad was having is that he was able to receive the emails from the students, but the students informed him that they were not able to receive his emails. My dad asked the organization if they had any ideas what was going on and they were baffled. Finally through a series of trial and error my dad found out that if you did not fill in the subject line, the message made it through.
Again I'm less certain about this after reading the other post about email. Maybe my dad's address has made it into the "Western Devil" blacklist
~nico
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
I see the same kind of thing right here in the good USA. I just got burnt for "excessive" personal internet usage at my engineering job. My peers don't know what a google search is much less slashdot. Trying to explain that this a software news site and that I read it in part to keep up programing skill would be futile. Other people listen to online music, read CNN and other less work related things with impunity.
As freedoms and personal dignity wane here, the rest of the world will suffer that much more.
Look for your ability to post anything that would require filtering anywhere to go away. As multinational publishers and telcoms continue to gobble up the web, your ability to publish uncensored pages goes away.
Anyone else want to build alternate networks? Think light and radio based backbone nodes with 811.b local distribution. No, I don't want to republish RIAA crap, swap porn or other Warez. What I want is the ability to publish MY content without AOL/McDisneySoft looking over my shoulder at my big five megs of advert wracked Geo Cities "web" pages.
When all the censors finish their work, what's left will be a serries of billboards not worth browsing.
End Rant.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
phase one: Switch toward capitalism phase two: filter a bunch of sites phase three: ????? phase four: Profit!
You know what would happen if he did that? Nothing. They would probably laugh because they are as equally racist themselves. The Chinese don't have an inferiority complex like the niggers.
I propose that to handle the distribution and maitenance of live/cached data, we resort to the P2P method. Persons from inside (china) will have self-propogating lists of servers that may get the information they need. "Pirates" that host tunnels and other exploits will be easily recognized as "super nodes" and free, external or "alternate configurations" of DNS server can be listed.
In overview, internal users, will be constantly searching for content cached on other internal users' computers, while live content will sucessfully seep through holes in the great firewall by means of private piracy and exploitable errors in the system. Moreover, this application would allow the fastest collaboration of network status's and trade instability for redundancy.
I hope this inspires a revolution to such an extensive feat of censorship.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
riaa.org is reported as inaccessible.
So there.
Ciao,
Foggy
I stayed at a person's home in a city in southern China and I was able to access, to my surprise, cnn.com, nytimes.com, yahoo.com. and slashdot.org. Recently, back in the US, I tried exchanging photos via photos.yahoo.com with 2 people living in two different cities of China but they told me they were not able to see the pictures (still not 100% sure if it's a communication or firewall problem). It's strange how different people who visited China are reporting different experiences. Maybe the great firewall of China is not centralized?
The firewall blocks sites by IP, so sites like yours are collatoral damage when one server hosts a lot of sites (called vhosting), one of which has probably been deemed objectionable.
Other people have said that Geocities is inaccessible, but it looks like your actual site is still accessible. Just tell all the Chinese Monday Night Football fans to go directly to the Geocities site.
Why hasn't this post been moderated as INFLAMMATORY, OFFENSIVE, or TROLL? Why is the full body even listed at the top level? Or perhaps the slashdot mod on this thread has a tendency to look the other way?
You, deadb0lt, are a prime example of the Walking Braindead.
I used to live in Shanghai the biggest problem I had was sourceforges virtual domains for the projects are blocked so you can't get to the project home pages. This was reported and verified with sourceforge. Now taking it up with the Chinese goverment is a diffrent matter but hey maybe the firewall guys in china read slashdot :)
NO! The problem is NOT the wetbacks, it's the FROSTBACKS from CANDA!
Get rid of Peter Motherfucking Jennings, Michael Jackass Fox, and Joe Fucking Lieberman.
WE DON'T NEED NO CANADIANS. NO STINKING FUCKING CANADIANS.
The filter seems to block my school's main site, but not the CS Department's site. Any Ideas?
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
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
Oh its you, the white trash posting various anti-non-europeans messages here!
They would probably laugh because they are as equally racist themselves.
I know many collegues and friends of Chinese descent, and I can tell you for a fact that their "racist tendencies" are far below that of DeadBolt's.
The Chinese don't have an inferiority complex like the niggers.
Ha, say that in front of a black person and you will likely get a beatdown. Try south central L.A. Go on. I dare you.
1) They're on different IPs.
and,
2) There's something else on the first IP that China doesn't like. You might be able to find it (try a google search on "china site:www.caltech.edu"). You might not.
Remember, all indications to date (to my knowledge, at least) are the filtering operates at the granularity of an entire IP address. If so, there's no way to block just one page or directory or even domain name (if multiple domain names are hosted on the same IP, as is of course standard these days). So China might "have" to block www.caltech.edu notwithstanding that the page they "want" to block is www.caltech.edu/deep/link/path/filename.html .
I can visit slashdot.org, yahoo.
but I can not visit sf.net in last month,
I can not visit google in last day.
yes, it's fascistic
as far as i know, the Great Firewall is not that simple, it's not only based on IP address filter, it do filter IP packet, i mean, even if i use some proxy server outside the wall, i still can not access some website (the proxy itself is not been blocked), i doubt the wall is based on content filter: if it find some sensitive words (mostly, the domain name of the website) in an IP packet, it just throw it out as junk.
i don't know if this comments will be seen by the slashdot editor, but i really don't like to see this kind story on slastdot, because CCP are fascistic, they are insane, they even banned sourceforge, they can ban slashdot in no time. i just afraid....
With the multiple ssh and other scans, combined with so many spam images hosted in China, I have most of China's major ISPs blocked at my firewall. I have a network to protect.
I figure that just blocking off the ISP is better than notifying them that they have someone trying to tunnel through my servers. What would an ISP there do after investigating logs to see who it was?
Probe that later on. Many parts of China got hit by major DNS problem on 31/8, Beijing time. So the results were not at all reliable during the first 12 hours after this story was posted in slashdot.
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."
People are using it to axcess the google cache mirrors of blocked sites
Okay. So, the Chinese Ministry of Keepin' the Brotha Down is going to see all these experimental packets bouncing off or whizzing past the firewall while we Free Stupid People go bouncing the URLS/Addresses of our favorite probably-controversial-and-harmful-to-the-people-i n-china web sites, and you don't think those sites that aren't blocked are going to end up that way before long?
Idiots. Quit helping them out.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Google has always been committed to providing our users with the most open access to information possible....
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Your Excellency:
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is very concerned by the Chinese government's apparent blocking of domestic access to the Google Internet search engine. Such censorship directly affects China-based journalists' ability to conduct research and impedes citizens' access to news that is unavailable in China's tightly controlled domestic media. . .facsimile
Cisco Systems, said on Thursday it will supply routers and switches to help the Shanghai unit of China's largest telecom operator upgrade its network. Cisco did not disclose details of the contract. . .(reuters/ZDnet)
Meanwhile, China Mobile Picks Nortel: Leveraging the Optical Ethernet capabilities of Nortel Networks metropolitan optical portfolio, the Shanghai network will support real-time, mission-critical data applications, including Shanghai Mobile's evolving Business Operation Support System (BOSS), billing and network management. . .