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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."
Damn impressive proof of concept for the US/UK governments. Lets hope they don't get any ideas. There are already some laws in place that prevent US citizens from viewing foreign content, concerning security patches etc. on some foreign software. Perhaps they could use the chinese method for filtering that out or any other unlikable for that matter.
The keywords include 'paper', 'triangle' and 'simple'??
;)
Talk about censorship going out of control.
Well, atleast they can search for 'cthulhu'
Free XBox, PS2
The fear of punishment? Tanks?
Certainly this isn't hard to get around, do they filter out images for example? Rot-13, images containing text (or even with the text tacked on the end of the image), or any number of other ways that data could slip through, isn't the Chinese govt fighting a serious uphill battle here? Though one must wonder what the penalty for circumventing the firewall must be.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Insofar as instant/SMS messaging in English is also concerned (also discussed in the article), surely nothing more advanced than Pig Latin (known to confuse many poor parents... for a while) would be necessary to circumvent this.
(I'd thought this was a novel idea, but I understand from a quick Google that it's been done for similar reasons...)
I wonder what they're going to do with Gmail users - say you are a Chinese user, someone sends you pr0n spam (keyword: fuck) or some travel spam (keyword: Tibet) and there you go - sex and independence ads instantly appear on the side!
:-)
If they can block those from HTML content (shouldn't be too hard to eliminate contents of that table cell with ads), perhaps they can commercialize the technology
On the other hand it's going to be fun to see how Google reacts to this type of control - if it weren't for their don't be evil stuff, they'd still want to protect revenue from ads - even now, if only 3% of searches time out, they lose some advertising money. And the visitors get the idea that "Google sucks".
The list of blocked words is really funny - "naive" is considered dangerous, but "biatch" is not on the list...
I wonder if it makes any sense - it's only 1000 words...
Interestingly, the Google Mirror is NOT blocked, allowing full access to google through the inverting proxy created by alltooflat.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
So, a couple years ago I put together a patch for OpenSSH that added what I referred to as "Dynamic Forwarding" -- put simply, it turned SSH into a sort of "poor man's VPN". You could (and in fact, I do) access almost all Internet services, tunnelled and encrypted, over an SSH session.
After I first presented this hack, I had these three Chinese guys walk up to me, and start asking quite literally the most detailed questions about my architecture that I had ever heard. It quickly became clear that, for the rest of the world, censorship avoidance is a sort of "first step" that anyone who's serious about network access learns to master. The whole line about censorship being damage that the Internet routes around is astonishingly true; the level to which complete non-geeks participate in proxy bouncing, encrypted tunnelling, and whatever else it takes to get out is quite astonishing.
--Dan
In terms of personal rights this is the opposite of the personal internet filter packages that have been so consistently trashed on /.
Think about it: what would you rather have, personal choice or goverment control.
Wouldn't you rather have a Nanny product installable by parents in their own home who decide for themselves whether a word like 'sex' should be filtered?
Btw, 'sex' by itself does not appear in Net Nanny's list because it's too general, you have to add it yourself if wanted.
My point: we ought to be supporting products like Net Nanny as a workable alternative to governmental control and loss of rights.
The Chinese don't use Kanji. That's a Japanese thing.
But, regardless, how would google be able to find anything using a search query 'encoded' in leet-speek anyway? We're not talking about person to person communications here. These are google searches they're filtering.
Aw crap, ninjas!
Given that the list of filtered words is available, couldn't someone design a mini-web server that processes pages and converts offending words into readable but unfilterable variants? eg: human rights -> h.u.m.a.n. r1ghts etc. I'm sure a single site offering this would be blocked, but if it were some distributed thing like SETI that a bunch of people could run around the world, it would be very difficult to block or filter.
Parent is making a joke that because of his use of filtered words in his post this page will be filtered and will not be seen in china. Its a joke not a troll. Aparently the mods use a similar filter and mod down posts containing obscenities regardles of their pertinence to the discussion.
The word "freedom" is blocked. It seems quite "s*mple" to me that there won't be a "fr**china" for a long time to come.
/. accounts.
I wonder if the chinese propaganda ministry has
OK. My only point is just that if I were, say, a Chinese geek setting up a linux box, ssh would probably be one of the first things I'd install and use, for the same reasons it's one of the first things I install here. So there are probably plenty of people using ssh there for the usual stuff--logging into their server to check their mail, encrypting a remote X session, etc.
Thus I'm questioning the claim that Chinese authorities could use the presence of encrypted traffic to find censorship-circumventors. Such traffic could very well be lost in the bulk of everyday VPN and ssh traffic.
Though of course sufficiently sophisticated traffic analysis might still be a threat. (E.g. it might be possible to recognize that a bunch of ssh traffic to an outside site has packets whose size and timing looks like ssh-tunneled http traffic from mozilla).
--Bruce Fields