Googling Behind China's Great Firewall

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Googling Behind China's Great Firewall

Posted by timothy on Wednesday September 1, 2004 @06:35AM 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."

13 of 344 comments (clear)

I'm behind the by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-01 06:36 · Score: 5, Funny

And I not noticed any filtered . Life in China is and great, and we talk not blocked. I slashdot!
1. Re:I'm behind the by AKAImBatman · 2004-09-01 06:42 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Well that explains the speech of new Chinese immigrants! They're still suffering from post-filtering syndrome!
  
  "I no you! Understand?" ;-P
  
  --
  Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
2. Re:I'm behind the by winkydink · 2004-09-01 06:47 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Pidgin English is too similar to filtered English.
  
  --
  "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
3. Re:I'm behind the by DNS-and-BIND · 2004-09-01 07:38 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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.
  
  --
  Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
And the /. effect... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-01 06:39 · Score: 5, Funny

...will essentailly "censor" the report too. Whee!
This is insane by savagedome · 2004-09-01 06:40 · 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
Did you know? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-01 06:41 · Score: 5, Funny

China's great firewall is the only router visible from space.
Brutal! by eigerface · 2004-09-01 06:44 · Score: 5, Funny

I work behind my company's firewall.

I live off of Google's cache. ;-)
Re:s.e.x is filtered out... by winkydink · 2004-09-01 06:45 · Score: 5, Funny

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

--
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Comment removed by account_deleted · 2004-09-01 06:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

Comment removed based on user account deletion
Re:tunneling by secolactico · 2004-09-01 06:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

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...

--
No sig
Re:We're next by nanter · 2004-09-01 06:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?
My Own Experience by Effugas · 2004-09-01 07:05 · 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