Slashdot Mirror
Googling Behind China's Great Firewall
xcham writes "The OpenNet Initiative, a joint project of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, and the Advanced Network Research Group at Cambridge, have released a bulletin regarding the type of filtering applied to Google by the Chinese government. Most notably, certain keywords are filtered, as well as Google's 'cache' function. More information on how the keyword filtering is implemented is available in a previous bulletin."
I bet those in the know get a free shell account in another country and ssh tunnel all their web traffic through it.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I can't help but wonder how long until this begins to happen in the US, all in the name of fighting terrorism
It seems you lack some sense of humour! You've been staying in China for a too long time...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Chinese (mandarin) is not the most difficult language to understand in a conversation. The difficult part is to speak it. Japanese is easier to speak (from a french background).
attacking the west all the time is not intelligent
i would have thought that this slashdot story would have served as an object lesson of something to be thankful for in the west: a tradition of adherence to free expression not found in other areas of the world
this is of course a right we must always be vigilant of encroachment upon and something we must always fight for
but how you can still find reason to attack the west is laughable to me in the context of this censorship by the chinese government, a lesson in how rights of free expression don't exist in other places, and must be fought for in those places
silly me, the real lesson here is for me, not you: some people are just hell bent on attacking the west for whatever it does, whether it is an intelligent criticism or not, simply because, apparently, that is all they know how to do
how about you fight the real fight for free expression: not on hypersensitive esoteric issues like security patches for software, but instead on real, fundamental issues like some of the words you find in the censorship list on the link in the story
i will of course get angry replies to this diatribe of mine if this gets modded up
proof that those who obsess over molehills, while missing the mountains, need a heated rhetorical approach to maintain their pov
always attacking the west is simplistic and navel gazing
there are great fights, much more important fights, going on outside the borders of the western democracies for rights most of us take for granted, and that is a shame, as real good can be done if the children of the western democracies took up ideological and rhetorical arms in that fight, rather than obsessing over comparatively much more minor issues in their home countries
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Don't forget about copyrights, mp3 files, and other 'bad' things the corporation backed government doesn't want us to have access to.
Looking at the list of banned words, the following mathematics question is also banned:
How do I calculate the GCD of the sides of a simple triangle that is drawn out on a sheet of paper?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I think they only block the search terms. Otherwise, I wouldn't be seeing this page now (221.136.x.x).
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I used to work in intelligence for the US Army. The first thing you do is filter out the crap (e.g. random losers saying "bearded middle east man") so you don't waste limited resources chasing dead ends. Believe it or not, intelligence professionals look at context. In fact, context often gives produces better intelligence than the initial flag. Contrary to the beliefs evinced by their paranoid rantings, most people will never warrant a second look, no matter what they say in email, on the phone, etc. Like most of us, they're not that fuckin' important because they're just another random slob. The best defense against government poking its nose into your business is to be boring and lame. Fortunately, most of us here already qualify in that regard.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Seriously, the people at Yahoo and Cisco that helped them implement this filtering regime (custom firmware for routers and consulting services), along with the executvies, should be tried for crimes against humanity and hanged. Slowly (the hanging, not the trial).
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
that the fight for uplifting the rights outside of the west to very basic levels is of greater import than the fight against esoteric threats to rights within the west
call me crazy, but i think the mountain is more important than the molehill
to say that, as a citizen of the west, you don't have control over things outside your country, is wrong on 2 counts:
1. then you are guilty of navel gazing and selfishness, thinking basic rights end at the rio grande, a sin of xenophobia more commonly used as a criticism of conservative westerners but perfectly appropriate to liberals who are hypersensitive to minor abuses within the west but deaf and dumb to outrageous abuses outside the west (it is a grand liberal tradition i might add to have a global, rather than a provincial outlook)
2. as one can plainly see by the text in the slashdot article above, it is entirely possible to fight evil happening outside of the west from the vantage point of the west: "The OpenNet Initiative, a joint project of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, and the Advanced Network Research Group at Cambridge, have released a bulletin regarding the type of filtering applied to Google by the Chinese government."
so by all means, continue obsessing over your molehills, and ignore mountains of evil, but don't expect me to respect you for continuing to do so after i have brought this discrepancy to your attention
all i ask for is intelligence, and i see none in the obsession over the minor intrawestern threats, and the ignoring of the major extrawestern threats, by all measures of what is a minor and major threat to a person's basic human rights
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
look up the word "hyperbole" in the dictionary of your choice
As of now, I AM treated like the people in China.
this is patently false, and reveals in you an ignorance of the rest of the world, and perhaps even the country you live in
We need the voters to take action...
reason number one why you are not treated like the people in China
you are full of some major hyperbole
and a good dose of fear, uncertainty and denial as well
what i am looking for you to have instead is wisdom, and intelligence
you have not demonstrated any of that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
China is friends with the US, foreign-policy-wise, in spite of being a massive aggressive communist country with ongoing gross human rights violations and a stated desire to invade other democratic countries. The US government seemingly has no pro-democracy agenda whatsoever, nor are they 'defenders of democracy and human rights' in any sense, in spite of what they claim are amongst the main reasons for spending billions of dollars of tax-payer money, sending thousands of Americans to die, and killing many thousands more innocent foreign civilians.
im currently behind the Great Firewall and without a proxy i can access most of the sites i usually visit: nytimes, the post, guardian, der spiegel, newsweek, grouphug o.O & co., scmp and of course /. with this story.
also, other good things that will get you around the wall (and that i am also normally using at home) are p2p software and freenet. and for your IM needs, use trillian with encryption, nothing will be blocked.