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?
...the downfall of Chinese civilisation:
Testing complete for http://www.stileproject.com. Result:
Reported as accessible in China
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/
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
HK and Macau were both *NOT* part of China for a long time. They're now both Special Administrative Regions and very independent.
I'm in HK and, trust me, there are no restrictions on the internet here.
As for cables to Macau, it would make some sense to run cables across the Pearl Delta from HK (it's not that far) just to avoid going through the Mainland, and because it's a shorter line. It would have been done a long time ago, though, well before Macau was handed back to China.
Macau was only returned to China in 1999, *AFTER* HK (1997), so I can't see any advantage - if there was a crackdown, HK would have been first.
Some of the sites on the 'inaccessible' list were for pro-Taiwan HK newspapers, so sites in one part of China are blocked from the main part.
ah-wai
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
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.
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$
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
must be those dame scientologists in beijing
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Or if you were really hardcore, and slightly paranoid about the Chinese government sniffing your login details to your home machine, you'ld use SSH to connect to it.
;)
Or even better, use the ssh -L port forwarding command to forward a local port on your machine in china to the squid port on your machine back home and browse the web using your browser of choice
Thank Cisco. :)
ssh -X unrestricted.host
is the way to go.
Forward X Window apps through the beauty of ssh. When people talk about the Internet routing around censorship as damage, this is what they mean.
Mail me at anything at mmdc dot net if you truly need an unrestricted connection over ssh.
I'll set you up (if you can use mozilla over X)...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
I'm in China and I can view it fine.
- HeXa
... 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
People are using it to axcess the google cache mirrors of blocked sites