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 ;)
is that the mirror site, http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/, is blocked by the copy of Websense used on my network. Heh.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
the vertical scroll bar even appears on the left side of my window in IE.
i've even got used to reading the url's backwards.
/usr/bin/awake/too/long
anybody have a mirror?
!doog pu me' kcuf
That's great it displays text backwards and all, but mirrors don't reverse the order text. Make yourself a nice big "R" and hold it in front of a mirror. See the difference?
If you use a mirror to read this google mirror you are going to see the letters in the right order, but they are all going to be backwards!
When you input a search term it has to be backwards as well, and I've never mastered the art of typing backwards. So if you suddenly forget the url for /., you have to type in "todhsals" at this mirror to find it.
So who is writing code for an OS mirror program? What a great idea for a browser plugin, a plugin that re-mirrors the text on the user's display so it can be read.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
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.
This is not a real Google mirror. The site will forward you to other (advertising partner) sites on certain keywords. I've tried "love" und "sex" (normal and reverse) and I am sure there are more.
but it's still better than the pathetic mind-fucking experience the gov't calls "their internet".
You realise that statement could apply to just about any country...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I'm sorry but Google can be used to find illegal files (some are legal, I know).
The flow of the text is reversed, but not the letters themselves. So if you look at this site in the mirror, the letters will all be in the correct order, but themselves appear reversed.
Ah-ha said Captian Nitpick!
http://kered.org
One way to do it is to alternate typing your letters with your left hand, and hitting the left-arrow key with your right hand.
t becomes "todhsals". You can type backwards pretty quickly this way, but it's probably also a good way to get repetitive stress syndrome so I wouldn't really recommend it to any aspiring Leonardo da Vinci's.
So s-left-l-left-a-left-s-left-h-left-d-left-o-left-
I wonder how it works for Chinese since it's traditionally written from the bottom of the page, starting on the right hand side. Do they do even have this functionality on computers?
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
What browser are you using? The characters are normal (not mirrored) in MSIE 6 and Mozilla 1.1.
> 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.
Fun with IP protocols.
;)
Slashdot - 1075594134
Google - 3639550820
Wonder if that would beat the Firewall also.
Discuss.
It's not illegal here. China doesn't follow the same rules.
Google has exactly the same effect as Napster does. Sure it may link to legal content, but it also links to illegal content.
Just stop thinking that your way is right for one minute, and make a rational judgement. You may disagree with the policy of China, but it is their policy. You can scream all you want, but unless you are willing to bring in one billion immigrants into your country, it's a very moot point. It's illegal content until the government says otherwise, and if it's that big of an issue to them, then the chinese proletariate should revolt.
As for government policy, at least they're only blocking content, rather than macarthy-esque witch hunts to bring down the capitolist dogs who would dare circumvent these controls.
It never ceases to amaze me how often economics impedes humanitarian issues. Why can't any country in the world do something completely benevolant? It's not that hard...
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
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!
Google Labs - allows full searches, can circumvent firewall
Soap Client for Google Searches
Google Groups - still accessible for usenet searching.
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Use . Used for arabic and middle-east languages.
¦ ©® ±
It seems that it works backwards if your computer has a compatable backwards font installed, no idea why any one (until now) would have one tho,,,
You forget, America is a superpower. Democracy and freedom happens to be in our best interests because free democratic states don't usually go to war with each other (or us). Besides, we're nice people. Your claim about the lack of benevolancy in foreign policy makes me think that you haven't looked very hard.
Your choice of "don't whine or allow a billion immigrants" is a false dichtatomy. There are many other options available. Applying economic or military pressure, for example. Attempting economic and cultural engagement for another.
At least they're only blocking content, rather than macarthy-esque witch hunts...
Oh god. You do know that you are clueless, don't you? China's witch hunts make McCarthy look like Inspector Clouseau. Have you heard of Falun Gong? Maybe you could tell me how blacklisting a few Hollywood movie stars is equivalent to imprisonment, forced labor, and execution? Do you even know what was going on in China just a few years after we had McCarthy? Ever hear of the cultural revolution? Do you know how many people died in the cultural revolution?
Seems like a bit of javascript could fix this?
"And like that
I mean...it's a site that covers a lot of linux & open source stuff (which China likes) but is also very liberal in the opinions expressed on the site.
.. I doubt it -- have they given any thought at all to that historically mirror-challenged group, the vampires?
>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.
IE switches the scroll bar to the left when the direction attribute on the body element is set to right-to-left:
<body dir="rtl">More information about right-to-left languages and HTML can be found in the specification.
Check out MKDoc a mod_perl CMS
Mirror mirror on the wall, who is feeling luckiest of all?
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Economic sanctions have proved real useful in the past. Cuba and Iraq are really bowing to the pressure. Economic sanctions and military pressure have had two results: the further impoverishment of the proletariate, and war. Ask the Germans about economic sanctions after WW1
I am not underplaying the death in China. I know of tiananmen square, spoke to classmates who had family there. I know of China's not-so-gentle naturalization of outlying provinces. And I know that China is not the only country to commit such atrocities.
However, in Canada, we sent back boatloads of Chinese refugees without consideration. We didn't even give them medical attention. How benevolant is that? Spending months at sea in cargo containers to escape a previous life, and getting turned back at the border, unsure if you can live the trip again. If my country starts bitching about everything going on in China and doesn't have the guts to even offer medical attention to these people, merely because it would be an inconvenience, I would call every one of us hippocrites!
Face it, the developed countries do not want economic prosperity in China. We are happy getting cheap goods from them. It is in a country's economic interest to hinder the development of other nations, because once we raise the standard of living to equal amounts throughout the world, we all live in a third world nation.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
So if you view the elgooG website in the elgooG cache to you get Google?
You can be sure that they don't block it for their own purposes.
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.
It requires that YOU type your text in the revers order :P This is way too hard to use :(
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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?
I have had for years the strange and useless "party trick" ability to read english equally well left to right or right to left (on paper or in my head, leading to "talking backwards"), and it struck me as cruel that such an awesome talent would be so utterly useless - trust me, in performance, it gets old after about five or ten minutes.
But now I can search for stuff backwards. Today, Google, tomorrow, the world! Muahahahaha!
ahem
Karma: T-rexcellent.
I will not feed the trolls. I will not feed the trolls. I will not.. ah Hell, here goes.
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.
Guess what? Right now, we are living in a democracy. However, that's rapidly changing. Given that corporate donations to PACs have been upheld by SCOTUS to be "free speech", corporations now have the ability to "shout" really loudly at congressmen; far louder than you or I alone ever could.
There used to be a time when a congressman (or woman) voted on a bill thinking "is this good for the people in my jurisdiction?" Now, though, the real question is "is this good for the companies that donate to my campaign, which allows me to tell the people in my jurisdiction what I've 'done'?"
Laws like the DMCA are the crest of a wave which will wash forward with increasing speed and power. The government passes laws now to "protect its industries" and protect profits at the expense of the welfare of its consum^H^H^H^H^H^H citizens. In fifty years, what say do you hope to have, if such outrageous laws are allowed now?
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..
You still have the right to unelect your congressmen, or to run for office yourself. You also have the right to protest unfair legislation. You're also able to see what's happenning in our government because it is legally required to operate in the open, and you can even see exactly which companies donated money to which politicians. None of this is true in China.
I agree that IP law has tilted in favor of corporations. You're extrapolating this trend to predict corporate-organized totalitarianism. For the benefit of those readers here who haven't yet reached high-school US history, we've been through worse before. Labor strikes used to be broken up with armed troops. Now our economy is tightly regulated to protect the citizens against the industries. The DMCA and SSSCA are troubling, but I hardly think they're any worse than the sort of corporate welfare that's existed for many years.
We live in a mixed economy; deal with it. Socialists and libertarians may not be happy with our system, but it's worked fairly well so far. There are always extremes, where laws unfairly penalize or empower corporations, but I view this is the price of prosperity. The worst of our system usually gets filtered out sooner or later. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant against abuses, but it does mean we shouldn't be as hysterical as you and the original poster.
Too bad it isn't useful. The searches return less results and I wonder if their indexing algorithm is reversed too.
Even you admit that the DMCA is "unfair". So why are you so pissed off at people who are attacking it?
Look, don't get me wrong, I realize DMCA is not the greatest possible evil in the world. I realize that we're very lucky to even be in a position where we can sweat the small stuff like DMCA. But does that mean we should just throw in the towel and let the DMCA slide? No way. Wrong is wrong, and it should be fixed.
Your rights are not being violated because the MPAA won't let you download Spiderman.
I don't give two shits about downloading Spiderman. However, I would like to play DVDs on my linux system. I would like to be legally able to copy excerpts from a DVD for fair use purposes. And I would like to be able to walk into a store and buy a region 2 capable DVD player. DeCSS makes these things possible. It should not be illegal just because it can do illegal things.
For the same reason, KaZAA should not be banned just because it can do illegal things. The original poster was right. By your reasoning, CD recorders would be banned since they can be used to pirate software.
If I was only allowed to eradicate one wrong in this world, I wouldn't choose DMCA. But fortunately life is not a zero sum game. We should work to eradicate all wrongs, not just the most serious ones.
They should only give access to a list of accredited sites. And block all others.
Otherwise they would be fooled endlessly by such simple tricks.
That would make the web almost useless. Then again, why should they care?
I wonder what people see when they click on a blocked link? Do they get "not found", or "you notty boy, that link is subversive"?
If the first, then people must think that a lot of sites are permanently broken.
The gov could get around this by redirecting the links to some proganda page that resembles the original, but that takes a lot of labor. Then again with a nation of 1.2 billion people, labor is not something in short supply. Are they hiring, by the way?
Table-ized A.I.
From now on, I won't allow any Cisco product to touch my packets. That'll teach 'em! Oh, wait... never mind.
You could avoid buying their products, at least. And you could educate your colleagues about how Cisco helps prop up totalitarian regimes.
Fade from black to a row of cubicles, all with Chinese flags pinned on the side. The camera enters one of them to find a Chinese worker at his computer, illuminated by the cold glow of his monitor and a single overhead light bulb.
Worker: [crying out in frustration] "I need to find info on democracy, but Google is blocked! Whatever shall I do?"
A man jumps in from out of nowhere, dressed in black, with a black mask and a long black cape, furling in the wind. He points his rapier to the sky, and calls out:
"Have no fear! I am El Goog! I will find your information, and vanquish your dastardly firewall!"
[cheers in background]
Firewall: "Curses!"
c-hack.com |
...is for Google to make a "mirrored" version of itself, like the H4X0R and Bork Bork Bork version...
That way the mirror will return easily readable results.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
France is communist? Oh I didn't know that! So that means all the ads on streets and all the private companies in France are all fake and made up, isn't it?
Hm wait a minute... if West-Europe is communist, then that means you American capitalists are actually a minority!
What I want to know is why none of the browsers and mail readers seem to come with a ROT13 codec any more. This use to be a common feature of a lot of text-viewing programs, but it seem to have quietly gone away.
;-)
Yeah, I can cut and paste into my own little perl one-liner that does the job. But it was sorta cool to have a menu tool or hotkey that did the job. Now, not even mozilla seems to have it.
(I'd love to be proven wrong about mozilla. What's the CTRL-Foo key that does it?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Yeah protect the few monopolies by now allowing the majority to share.
Exactly like China and Censorship to protect their government.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
They prevent you from sharing information with others, thus censoring you.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It looks like ROT 13 has been in consideration for quite a bit of time. Go to bug #66822 for the complete story. The short of it is that it is not built into Mozilla at this point, but someone did upload a scriptlet to do this.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
For right-handed people still using that old-fashioned kind of writing equipment that smudges bits of ink (or graphite) on a piece of dried pulp, it is kind of nice to see what you have written, instead of smudging it out even more with your wrist before the ink dries. But it is a minor issue, left-handers doesn't seem to have too much problems with it.
Ask the majority of americans if they like napster, gnutella, freenet and the internet, the majority will say hell yes, especially the college educated ones youth.
Ask the select few who own patents, the elite musicians who are the top 1%, the CEOs and they'll be for copyright.
Currently I believe the majority of Americans want information to be free, if they didnt, well they wouldnt be using napster by the hundreds of millions, they wouldnt be sharing information so freely.
"Western legal systems have recognized the right of content creators to control the distribution of their works for some time now. If you have a problem with this, move somewhere that doesn't respect these rights. "
No I'm not going to move, how about all the copyright owners move out?
Look, there was once a time when we needed record companies to distribute art, now we dont, adapt and move on.
Censorship is when anyone says you cant say something. This means when you say I cant share someone elses patented information, well thats censorship and I dont agree with it.
Capitalism does not rank higher than Freedom of speech. A few hundred thousand people out of the hundreds of millions of Americans will be jobless, a few elite musicians will have to earn their money from now on, but for the majority of people in this country, this will be good.
No more over priced CDs.
No more over priced college books.
Everything will be shared, if something isnt worth anything, you just wont make any money.
If people like what you make, people will keep paying you so you continue to make stuff, if you write good books people will pay you to write new books.
Without intellectual property, what we would be left with is services business, information services instead of selling information.
Honestly, I'd rather pay a cable company to access channels of information, pay to go on the internet and get the whole internet etc, Than pay per website, pay per TV show, pay per CD when i only want to hear a song.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I typed in "xes" and got "000,000,3,18 found".
... or somthing similar might be better.
Reading the blurb gave me an interesting idea. Say they are filtering text, not just IP addresses. Set up a search engine that doesn't return text, but an image of the text. I know there's software out there. Interesting idea - what would the processing power be to OCR the text, looking for keywords? Especially if it was just a JPG or GIF. And if that works? Just do a "mirror" image of the resultant picture - good luck OCRing that without help.
Note this doesn't solve the problem, though, since whatever site is built to do this could be added to the block list on the firewall.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
This site is really messing with my ability to use mouse gestures.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I figure the blocking is to make room in the search market for the new Chinese Google lookalike, OpenFind.
Da Blog
I would say 1 in 2 people are in the penile system.
And you provide such a shining example of repressed free speech! Obviously it must be really repressive here if you can post such criticisms (NOT). You have no clue of the difference between a free society like the US and a fascist country like China, or a totalitarian country like Cuba. If you did, you wouldn't blather that we are "well on our way toward government control like China."
The DMCA sucks big time - no doubt about it. It is a travesty. But in any society, capitalist, socialist, totalitarian, whatever... there are always big cheese who occasionally take away goodies from the little guy.
OTOH the Patriot Act doesn't take away *any* of your freedoms. None! Count them! ZERO. NONE! It certainly doesn't take away your free speech rights.
Our constitution promotes representative democracy and capitalism (othwise, why would we have the "property" clause in the fifth amendment?).
Capitalism cannot thrive without a functioning democracy (as China will find out). And a democracy cannot survive without an effective economic system, of which capitalism, in one form or the other, is the only proven candidate.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Sadly, this is just not true.
Governments control information because it works! The *first* thing to be lost in a totalitarian society is free interchange of information. Once it is lost, people *know* that they are missing something, and they *know* that the government lies. But what they don't know is the facts. The government counts on this and is able to influence their opinion, even though the people know they are being lied to.
A recent example was the USSR. Back in the Breshnev days, a group of high ranking Soviet scientists paid my family a visit in the US midwest. They thought that the US was one big slum and mass of violence, so they assumed, and stated, that they were seeing a Potemkin village (i.e. that the place they were visiting was staged for their benefit). My father took them for a ride, and told them to give him directions and he would take them wherever they wanted to go. As far as I can tell, they concluded that he lived in a very *big* Potemkin village since they couldn't find "the real America" wherever they went!
These were very intelligent people. They were near the top of Soviet society. They had more access to information than ordinary Soviet citizens. But they were badly misinformed about the United States because that is what their government wanted.
This is a result of the technique of the "big lie." It means that the government a lies a lot and the people know they are lying, but they still don't know the truth and hence lean in the direction of the lies. It is the basis for all modern non-democratic societies.
BTW... you see this sort of thing on a smaller scale with ordinary media. When my daughter went to an eastern school, and was the only student from Arizona, she was (seriously) asked questions about whether she had a telephone and whether any roads were paved. It's easy to draw wrong impressions, in this case where nobody was even trying to lie, just from small amounts of information. The Russians thought we still had cowboys our here shooting Indians. (We do have cowboys, and we do have Indians, but we most of the shooting is done by inner city gangs... including ones that have invaded rural Indian reservations... so much for stereotypes).
The only good weather is bad weather.
Perhaps China only blocked the main Google front door, but blocking other things at google.com should be obvious. What we really need are widespread anonymizers, whether they're Peek-a-Booty or Triangle Boy or some Apache plugin.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Leonardo da-Vinci wrote his journal right-to-left.
Do you consider him to fall into one of your groups?
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit