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."

Comments

This is insane

[savagedome]

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

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

My Own Experience

[Effugas]

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