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Googling Behind China's Great Firewall

Posted by timothy on from the wot's-all-this-then dept.

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."

6 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. This is insane by savagedome · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The keywords include 'paper', 'triangle' and 'simple'??
    Talk about censorship going out of control.

    Well, atleast they can search for 'cthulhu' ;)

    --


    Free XBox, PS2
  2. Pig Latin by BarryNorton · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...)

  3. Re:tunneling by the authorities by John_Sauter · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I bet those in the know get a free shell account in another country and ssh tunnel all their web traffic through it.
    ... because a high volume of encrypted traffic would never attract the attention of the authorities...
    I took the parent's "bet" to refer to those who are the authorities.
    John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
  4. My Own Experience by Effugas · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:My Own Experience by iantri · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This has been implemented in PuTTY for Windows, for anyone who is interested. Sets up a local SOCKS proxy.. pretty neat.

  5. Re:They'll never even see this?! by DrLZRDMN · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.