Slashdot Mirror
Google Mirror Beats the Great Firewall of China
An anonymous reader writes "TheNew Scientist has an article
about a Google search mirror called elgooG that apparently
beats the Chinese firewall to the outside world. It displays all of
the text backwards, requiring you to use a mirror to read the text." No big shocker- but imagine how many such mirrors could exist ;)
The Chinese don't give a fuck about the Google search page, or the results page either.
They're being blocked simply as collateral damage, the target of the Chinese filters is the google cache.
You see people were using the Google cache to gain axcess to Google's mirrors of sites that the Chinese were blocking, such as Tibet.org
Using this silly mirrored Google mirror site gains nothing you click any of the 'dehcaC' (cache) hyperlinks on its result pages & you end up on the standard Google cache pages which are still blocked.
> In the USA we are busy trying to censor
> Napster,Kazaa and programs that are peer to peer.
Had Napster and Kazaa been only used to trade scans of artwork made by children in reverence of their loving parents, no censorship would have taken place. As soon as these peer-to-peer networks were used to pass copyrighted material in a fashion that stepped outside the typical fair-use bounds, the hammer fell.
This isn't the same deal and you make a mockery of the issue of absolute censorship when you try to make the illegal distribution/procurement of copyrighted material equivalent to keeping a country's population potentially ignorant of a great many truths.
Google is nothing like Napster or Kazaa. Google is a snapshot of the free world, full of news, information and inflammatory, asshole-written comments. The people of China are being *deprived of the right to decide for themselves what is relevent*. It is a ploy by the Chinese government to maintain ignorance in the population, thereby making the population easier to control.
Are you more ignorant of the world if you can't download the latest Britney single for free, depriving poor, poor Britney the royalties due because you appreciate her tight little ass? I highly doubt it, mate.
it's only 5 days since slashdot reported that the rumors of chinese blocking of google were false..
Maybe I'm feeding a troll, but it's only 2 days since CNN reported that AltaVista has now been blocked in a addition to Google. Also, it's actually been 5 days since most of the Slashdot readers in China disagreed with the anonymous poster who claimed the initial reports were false.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
>Seriously though, this is a good reminder that there are billions of people on this planet that don't have the right to freely share ideas.
Don't deceive yourself. There are many corporate interests within the US which actively curtail our ability to freely exchange ideas. Unfortunately, since the "war on terrorism", it has become much easier to strip away free speech by saying it is necessary for security.
What with the advent of the US Patriot Act and other such measures, we are well on our way toward government control like China (both online and offline). It just hasn't gotten quite so bad, yet...
Our constitution promotes democracy, not capitalism. Unfortunately, these two are usually considered equivalient for some bizarre reason. Until people realize that democracy is what makes us great, expect your liberties to erode. Watch what happens in China closely.
If I elgooG a elgooG result, do I get the original?
HORSESHIT. This is one of the stupidest comments I've ever read on Slashdot. Hope somebody mods it as a troll.
Learn the difference between "censorship" and "lawsuits". In the US, the media companies are trying to shut down or control these networks to prevent trading of their IP. This is not censorship. The companies are using their rights within copyright law. The government enforces these rights, but does not act out of personal interest. Sure, laws like the SSSCA would change this, but that'll probably be DOA.
Using the DMCA to prohibit redistribution might be more like censorship. As far as I know, trade secrets have not been accorded anywhere near the same protection as copyrights. The DVDCCA does not have the legal protection for CSS that would normally allow it to pursue the DeCSS publishers like Kazaa et al.; the DMCA (unfairly, I think) allows them to do so anyway.
China is different because the government is not protecting anyone's "rights", however abusrd these rights may be. They're setting up their corner of the Internet to be restricted from the beginning, unlike here where restrictions are (rather unsuccessfully) layered on top of an uncontrolled network. They are attempting to prohibit access to ideas, not copyrighted works. They want to control how their citizens think, not where they obtain (or how they view) their entertainment.
I'm sick of whiny Americans who are so upset about the DMCA that they claim to be oppressed. Your rights are not being violated because the MPAA won't let you download Spiderman. You're so naive from living in a free country that you're incapable of understanding what people in other parts of the world have to go through. What the DMCA is being used for is incomparable next to the evil of communism and totalitarianism.
Want to strike a blow for freedom and democracy? Stop wasting your time bitching about the MPAA and instead organize a boycott of Cisco, a company whose actions imperil the freedom of four times as many people as are affected by the DMCA.
Am I missing something here?
The "horizontal mirror" thing is kind of weird and quirky. Heh. In the course of testing a content-rewriting HTTP proxy once, I had it replace all occurrences of "server" by "serverino". This falls into about the same area of interest I think.
Apart from that, it's just a proxy, right? Not an open proxy, just one which proxies to Google only. China filters out the proxy; no more story any more.
I guess if it became commonplace for sites all over the place to spring up Google-proxies, then that might be relevant, since the Chinese authorities would have a hard time finding and blocking them all.
But it's just one site, so what's the big deal?
Yes, but if they blocked everything but their own specified content I think that Chinese citizens might notice that 90% of their internet just went away and never came back. That kind of thing is what starts people thinking more than the goverment would feel comfortable with..