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

I'm behind the

[Anonymous Coward]

And I not noticed any filtered . Life in China is and great, and we talk not blocked. I slashdot!

Re:I'm behind the

[winkydink]

Really? Why is it that I can never access the San Jose Mercury news web site when I am in China, regardless of where the connection originates from?

Re:I'm behind the

[AKAImBatman]

Well that explains the speech of new Chinese immigrants! They're still suffering from post-filtering syndrome!

"I no you! Understand?" ;-P

Re:I'm behind the

[winkydink]

Pidgin English is too similar to filtered English.

Re:I'm behind the

[DNS-and-BIND]

The BBC is blocked as well.

As an aside, I set up a simple unencrypted squid proxy on a box in the USA, and whenever I encounter "the block", I just hit F12-x in Opera, and reload the site. The simplest of proxies will defeat the Great Firewall.

They'll never even see this?!

[garcia]

They will never have the freedom to see a bunch of fucking shitty sex that will help them be free to have incest while reading Playboy in the Bermuda Triangle!

Triangle Man beats Firewall man!

Re:They'll never even see this?!

[DrLZRDMN]

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.

tunneling

[Raleel]

I bet those in the know get a free shell account in another country and ssh tunnel all their web traffic through it.

Re:tunneling

[secolactico]

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...

Re:tunneling

[Shisha]

Read the parent please! SSH tunneling means that the even "HTTP GET" will come accros as something totally garbled. Whether they'll come after you, just because of encrypted connection, or whether they found a way of cracking SSH on the fly is another question (unlikely thought).

BUT! They're not bothered. If a few geeks read forbidden stuff, that won't change much. I'm sure there's already dissident minority. What they don't want is some critical mass of people getting the wrong idea. Which won't happen for a while, because most Chineese haven't seen a PC. On the other the peasants never really mattered in China, so maybe they (Chineese government) have a good reason to be paranoid.

And the /. effect...

[Anonymous Coward]

...will essentailly "censor" the report too. Whee!

We're next

[MikeMacK]

As our tests below indicate, China blocks access to the Google cache and to searches that contain certain keywords

I can't help but wonder how long until this begins to happen in the US, all in the name of fighting terrorism

Re:We're next

[garcia]

People don't care about viruses, worms, trojans, MPAA/RIAA funded relgulations in the government, political parties, voting/e-voting, wars, etc, but they do care about something...

And that something is the freedom to view porn. Once the US government decides that it is acceptable to expand their reaches to cover the indecency of porn on the net people WILL get pissed off enough to end that bullshit.

Re:We're next

[MikeMacK]

Maybe when the government stops taking away our rights.

Re:We're next

[nanter]

That is not an answer to my question. Name one right.

The right to due process of law as granted in the 5th Amendment.

Want more to be listed, smart guy?

Re:We're next

[LoveMuscle]

Name one right the government has taken away from you in the last 4 years. How about the fourth amendment. Go read the patriot act section 213 for more.

Re:We're next

[MikeMacK]

OK, since you obviously have not read it (like most members of Congress). How about my right to privacy. The government, for whatever reasons they choose, can wiretap my phone, find out what I read at the library. How about my right to a fair and quick trial - they again can detain me without cause - just because my name is not Abdul does not mean that it won't happen. Wake up.

Re:We're next

[DAldredge]

1st adm via campaign finance reforms. Look what Bush and Kerry say about 527's.

Corps paying for the convention and all the closed door parties at it is OK but if normal people spend their personal money it's a crime.

Tell me how that makes sense.

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' ;)

Re:This is insane

[bobbozzo]

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

Triangle Boy is/was a anonymous, encrypted proxy system that had a distributed structure. Anyone could run one, and publish it's IP. I think you can understand why the Chinese gov't would want to block people from finding it.

I don't know if it still exists, but Google brings up lots of (old) links.

Personally, I use SSH to tunnel to a remove private Squid proxy to get around evil corporate firewalls/filtering. I don't know if SSH would work from within China or not though. It would probably be dreadfully slow though.

Re:This is insane

[Dun Malg]

How would you know? Did you try it? I dare you.

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.

Did you know?

[Anonymous Coward]

China's great firewall is the only router visible from space.

Re:Did you know?

[darth_MALL]

Apparently some of the original designers who died while working on it are embedded IN the hardware!

Re:Did you know?

[darth_MALL]

FYI:
"Can You See The Great Wall of China from The Moon?
For some reason, some urban legends tend to get stated and never disappear. This legend even appears as a erroneous Trivial Pursuit question. The legend? Many are familiar with the claim that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from space or from the moon with the naked eye. This is simply not true. From a low orbit of the earth, many artificial objects are visible on the earth, such as highways, ships in the sea, railroads, cities, fields of crops, and even some individual buildings. While at a low orbit, the Great Wall of China can certainly be seen from space but it is not unique in that regard. However, when leaving the earth's orbit and acquiring an altitude of more than a few thousand miles, no man-made objects are visible at all. NASA says, "The Great Wall can barely be seen from the Shuttle, so it would not be possible to see it from the Moon with the naked eye." Thus, it'd be tough to spot the Great Wall of China or any other object from the moon. Furthermore, from the moon, even the continents are barely visible."

Incest banned, Pedophilia OK?

[winkydink]

I guess the Chinese govt has problems with big words.

A sample list

[Anonymous Coward]

- Cisco IOS
- DVD license
- Human Rights
- Tibet
- Taiwan
- "fall of communism"
- "Cuba" and "Fidel Castro"
- "funky cold medina"
- "Fragglerock"

Brutal!

[eigerface]

I work behind my company's firewall.

I live off of Google's cache. ;-)

Re:s.e.x is filtered out...

[winkydink]

Suuuuure... The country has, what, 1.6 bln people and claims that table tennis is their biggest indoor sport?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Forbidden Chinese sentence

[MyShinyMetalAss]

"Bignews: This hypermart bitch is making a naive paper triangle on my simple boxun."

Pig Latin

[BarryNorton]

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...)

elgooG

[phreakv6]

this is the site which shows the mirror image of corresponding Google page.This gets u thru the great chinese firewall :))

Re:tunneling by the authorities

[John_Sauter]

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)

wiki

[phreakv6]

Here is a wiki which discusses abt the Internet censorship in China

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

Re:My Own Experience

[iantri]

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

What diffrence does it make?

[Viceice]

All the chinese goverment is doing is fooling themselves.

People will notice in the course of daily conversation that certain words when typed won't go through and they will improvise. Soon a whole sub-language will develop and the goverment will be back at square 1.

I'd ask my housemate from China about it, but i can't articulate this sort of topics very well in Chinese.

Man-searchian Candidate

[slumpy]

They should've just listed the words you can search for, would've saves some space.

missing the whole point

[circletimessquare]

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

The "banned" mathematics problem...

[mikael]

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?

I can't resist

[Tairnyn]

In mother China, Google filters you