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Unblock Google Cache in China
An anonymous reader writes "A new feature in CustomizeGoogle (Firefox extension) modifies the Google Cache urls so that they are no longer blocked by the Chinese firewall. This feature is only available in CustomizeGoogle zh-CN, found here.
This is how it works: All links to Google Cache, from the Google search result, are slightly modified. The Chinese Great Firewall doesn't recognize the new links as Google Cache links, and therefore they are accessible for everyone."
I keep trying, but all I get is "Nothing to see here please move along"
how 'bout I give you the finger....and you give me my phone call.
because that will probably give the everpresent "them" the tip the need to block it.
Petyr Rahl
"The Chinese Great Firewall doesn't recognize the new links as Google Cache links"
After this article, I bet the firewall WILL recognize the
new links.
Go Google and Chinese citizens! This just goes to show how politics will never truly beat the will of people who want access to information.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I give this a few weeks before China figures out what Google is doing and either finds a way to block it or threatens to remove Google entirely from the Chinese web. Is Google willing to risk losing those eyeballs?
Come play Moral Decay!
I wonder how big China will have to get before they realize that it's hopeless to control information. I guess the people in power figure that as long as they maintain tight control for enough generations, the lack of information will just feel commonplace to the Chinese people. I don't think human biology will allow for that apathy about the world though. Although I could be wrong [ie. growing US apathy about non-domestic issues].
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Best,
url80
Best,
url80, The Bounty Network
A more useful solution would be one that kills the bastards who ordered and set up the censorship in the first place.
Isn't this just an elaborate game of Catch-Up? Meaning, now that there is a way around the firewall, the Chinese Government will just find the loophole and block it? And then there will be another loophole, and the same pattern of catch-up will continue?
Also, reporting about this kind of ruins the whole Cloak & Dagger feel.
Useful in China and when my share ratio is too low.
...do the same thing with a proxy.
Cache over proxy..very nice.
Pat
Without the front-page attention, this might have slipped by unnoticed. The PRC would like to thank you for bringing this dangerous counter-revolutionary thinking to their attention.
I think this is a solid move by Google. As others have pointed out though, it is now only a matter of time before the current implementation will also be blocked. What I think is possible and feasible would be to have the URL that is used to bypass the block mutate over certain intervals of time. Since it is embedded in the toolbar, it is entirely resaonable to assume that this could be done. I wonder what the feasibility would be of Google being able to offer cached pages as Torrents and putting some sort of torrent support in the toolbar?
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
Google should be careful. Even though they aren't responsible for this, it is going to appear that way. China is a HUGE market, and yahoo and msn have a strong start. Its not like it is here in the US, the playing field is far more level, and Google isn't the media darling it is in western media.
If Google isn't careful, China will block them all together. That would be a huge problem for them. This firefox plugin seems pretty cool on the surface, but at the end of the day, it will only hurt firefox and google in the Chinese market. Not because of the people, but because its a communist nation that will squash what it doesn't approve of. This is something that it won't approve of. Don't be surprised if firefox.com gets blocked from their network all together.
It's an interesting idea... but is slashdot or information the feature itself blocked by their Cisco-backed filter?
the "Great Firewall of China" instead of "The Chinese Great Firewall"?
...is exactly what this seems like. This is not a long-term solution - in fact I suspect its life will be measured in days if not hours before these links are recognized as belonging to Googleborg and blocked accordingly.
These quick-fix workarounds are nifty and amusing, but are no substitute for a permanent end to the Great Firewall. I understand that is a bigger problem to solve. Ultimtely I hope the Chinese realize that they cannot block a thousand floods, and realize that as an (emerging?) first-world country, with global trade alliances, seat on the UN Security Council and so on, that worldviews and perspectives and ideas flow across the border as readily as cash and products.
Until then, keep whacking.
Regards, John Hancock.
there's no way I would try such a trick. It would provide evidence that I was deliberately circumventing the state's right to control my every thought. I'd be afraid of ending up in a re-education camp. OTOH, there are lots of people in China circumventing the government's authorized measures even as I write this.
we must try at all costs to humbly honor their wise demands...
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
This is nutty.
Didn't Google build the "Great Firewall of China"???
Did Mao not pay his filtering bill this month?
Is Google blackmailing China?????
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I missed this whole thing...are they trying to keep the Mongolians out of their network?
FWIW a journalist friend who lives in China assures me that anyone who needs it has already figured out one way or another of bypassing the so-called Great Wall. Usually via proxies from what I'm told.
Three Squirrels
Why are you people praising Google? Google is not bastion of free speech. Google is assisting the Chinese government in censoring it's content. Some third party found a simple "hack" workaround (which will soon be patched), Google will quickly patch it up. Google itself is not at all interested in bringing uncensored content to the Chinese people.
...I need a plug-in to access the google cache links here at work! Any suggestions to get around my firewall in the States?
Because I don't like encouraging people to break the law.
can be found on this site here:
/ globalization/goldenShieldEng.html
http://www.ichrdd.ca/english/commdoc/publications
this is truly some 1984'esque reading
Bodø community site
So the great firewall is just a name blocker? So what, do they just remove entries from all the DNS servers in China? That's so weak! I mean, just get the ip addresses via some means and you're all set.
The great wall of China will probably be around for a long time. While trying to filter all that content, the government is ensuring innovation in filtering and firewalling techologies. They won't ever succeed at stopping everything, but watching them try is fascinating. Regardless of your political views, the challenge faced by the engineers implementing the system is an inviting one. I mean, wouldn't it be kinda fun to filter all references to Al Gore and replace them with, for example, the Rocky Horror Picture Show?
"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" - Leia, Ep. IV
Unfortunately, many high-tech companies are all to eager to do business with a regime that has killed 80 million people. Western companies' equipment, software, and expertise are what allow China's 30,000+ full-time internet censors to block this kind of breakthrough soon after they're discovered. They couldn't have built such a system without our help.
...which of course would not keep the Chinese from getting Firefox from one of the quazillion official or unofficial mirrors.
Keep the faith, free China.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
It probably now should read...
therefore they were accessible for everyone
I run a small webserver with a few peoples pages on it. I really don't care if the chinese block access, Actually I'd have no problem with that as most of my serious port scans tend to come from china.
So... If I put up a Pro-Falun-Gong website, or some other material the chinese government finds offensive, will they ban my IP from their community?
Ha! Have you seen their logo today? That looks evil to me.
I read
It is called responsibility. I know it can be confusing, but the fact that I can buy baseball bats does not mean I walk around crushing everybodie's head. No need for government nannies.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
Namaste
It got to last atleast a week, as this has been out for a week already. But now that its on slashdot China will have an easier time finding about it.
1. Read /. to notice way around Great Firewall
2. Redo firewall to detect everyone using workaround.
3. Arrest and fine a few high-profile violators and send most of the rest nasty letters hand-delivered by the police saying "don't ever try this again." Make it clear that to conserve resources they didn't try to identify ALL the violators but they will next time. Those who didn't get a letter get the message.
4. Next exploit appears and only real dissidents use it.
5. PROFIT! Er, I mean arrest the dissidents.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
BUT we need to send repeating signals that information should not be restricted. The reason for that is the unfortunate ability of homo sapiens sapiens to adapt to almost any environment. May this be extreme climate, sparse resources, or supressive political regimes. I bet you that a great majority of Internet surfers in China were probably upset when they first learned about those restrictions - but over time they probably accepted this as 'normal' and happily made due with the information that is presented to them. In some ways we are doing the same here in the U.S. and I make it a point to watch news shows from Europe to counter-balance the often one-sided and myopic reporting I mostly witness on most U.S. news stations/channels.
So, if this can shake up some complacency and re-instill the hunger for freedom to all information, then this is a great little work-around. We all need to get a kick in the keester to sometimes not simply seek a position of maximum comfort and non-conflict. Remember the old expression: If working towards freedom, prepare for war. I'm not quoting this expression to be taken literal here - I'm saying that it's always dangerous to accept the status quo.
Sorry for the rant - I'm getting off the soap box now...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canute_the_Great
Now I can find stuff in China as well! Really, what do I care? If I want to find stuff on Google I am only really interested in the stuff written in English anyway. When was the last time you said to yourself "Damn! I can't find what I am looking for in Europe or the US, maybe the Chinese have it?"?
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Translation: Technological solutions will solve social problems every time.
Come on.
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
Everybody whines that posting this loophole to /. means the end of the loophole. What ya'll don't seem to realize is that this is another tactic to make Chinese business less competitive; by forcing the closure of access to as much of the web as possible, western capitalist societies assure their own continued advantage by free access to information while tricking their Chinese competitors into wearing blindfolds.
Intentionnally leave the hole, but log everybody doing it. Wait 3 to 5 week then arrest them for anything else. It can't be that difficult to come up with something. So that way they can catch everybody using the loophole, punish them, *AND* make sure the probability of people searching for another loophole will stay low... Closing that loophole would be shortsighted since you might have more difficulty to find out about the next one.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
St. Augustine - "An unjust law is no law at all".
Therefore, I would feel no remorse "breaking" this "law".
"I wonder how big China will have to get before they realize that it's hopeless to control information."
About the size of North Korea.
Chinese think: Nice people, give us a way to see the internet again, then blab about it so the gov't finds out.... Nice people?
Sig Hansen?
You're not the real Kilgore Trout.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
We (the western world) aren't doing this. the Chinese are. They can't stand the idea of the world not agreeing with them, so they want to block anything that doesn't agree with them. And we aren't going to change the entire internet to pro-chinese stuff (and I'd like to see them try, because it'd be a pathetic failure).
As you'll have figured out after reading the threads a bit more, the point is to help net users within the PRC to see content their government doesn't want them to, not for you to surf into China.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I fucked up guys, that stuff was supposed to be blocked.
Boy is my face red.
=Ming Wu, firewall support tech
Do we know for sure the Firefox devs working for google had nothing to do with this extension? It would be nice to think google is making the PRC heavies think they are doing their bidding while secretly helping each restriction be worked around...
first China prevents the citizens from free information, now /. will kill the server showing how to view this new world. buncha insensitive clods...
Beware the fury of a patient man
- John Dryden
It's an entirely different culture than the one you are used to.
According to people I know who live there, the citizenry accepts this type of control and even a type "double-think" based on their fundamental view of their place in society. The group as a whole is far more important than the individual or even the individual's need to be able form a logical narrative out of state sponsored information, which constantly unapologetically contradicts itself.
Just because your own culture is deeply ingrained in your psyche does not mean it's a basic part of human biology.
I got confused.
Ignore my post about Google and China
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The google cache loophole in Great Firewall of China has been closed. Additionally, the entire .org TLD has been blocked for distributing misleading, unpatriotic propaganda on the subjects of freedom and democracy.
Update: The chinese government get word of this and block google all together. Smart move google!
Scott Swezey
this is good news but now "they" will know about it and fix it so it no longer works. hb.
Now the Chinese can look up Dallas!
If you can't convince them, convict them.
filter all references to GW Bush and replace them with, for example, a video of a chimpanzee scrathcing it's ass and then tasting its fingers? /partisan balance achieved
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They have already figured out what this slight modification is and began blocking it too... :D
come on people this is 1999 opps 2005
Arash
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
You know, I feel really bad for the chinese. They do get to use the internet, but only the demo version.
...Google could always [use dynamic URLs to avoid blacklisting]."
China could then use a whitelist, or some combo white/blacklist. Rest assured, 500 million Chinese are busy making information ever more secure. Of course, the other 500 million are busy making information ever more free. What an awesome fight!
Anyone actually know what combinations of whitelisting and blacklisting the Great Firewall uses?
I've already done it. But nobody seems to have noticed.
Indeed--I don't think anyone could honestly blame Western authorities for this sort of thing. The Chinese government is hurting no one but their own citizens by restricting access to materials hosted in other countries. The thought of an educated public scares a heavy-handed government, but they are biting their own tail with actions like these.
To the sung to the tune of a well-known Chinese Communist propaganda song:
If you live in Chi-na
You must obey the Party's law!
The Party makes the rules, you see,
And you have no rights at all.
The Party makes the rules, you see,
And you have no rights at all.
A pistol shot, in your brain,
Corrects your lack of class consciousness;
And you'll worship, the Par-ar-ty.
You will slave, for eternity,
For the everlasting Communist Party!
wow.. having born and lived in China i know what this means for google.. profit.. you have to understand that it's not impossible for people to get books or other literature restricted by the goverment. before the internet, the CCP would put restriction on a book (a banned book in other words) and the next day there will be millions of people wanting to read that book, regardless of if it's good or not. when CCP put restrictions on the internet, there was no way around that for a normal person. another thing i have to mention is that the Chinese search engine is http://baidu.com/ everyone in China uses it like us using google. google is not popular there compared to BaiDu. so with this uncensor, there will be millions of chinese flowing to google in order to read uncensored information on the internet. and since google is not a Chinese businese (unlike BaiDu) the CCP can't do anything about it. so google's influence in China will finaly increase... all i can do is applaud google's business tactics... wow... /offtopic/rant
as far as the "evil communists" goes, it's not all evil. the person over threw the Qing Dynasty, and made China democracy country, Sun yat-sen, was the leader of china when he wanted to have 2 kinds of goverment parties. one is democracy and one is communism. he believed that people should have freedom but not complete freedom because that would cause alot of problems. thats how the communist party came into power, before that they were a tiny little political party that had no power.
when Sun yat-sun died he gave the position of president to Shiang Kai-shek (as you can see China wasn't completly democracy back then, probably because a voting would have caused too much trouble in a already poor country and some people doesn't even know who was their leader and stuff) and Shiang kai-shek hated the Communitst. he ordered secret assasination of communist party members which furthur worsen the relationship of the 2 parties. so the communist party members basicly said "why are we waiting to be assasinated? why dont we just rebel?" so thats how they started the war and then the japanese started attacking china and the rest is history. so as you can see, the communist struggle to power was hard and when they were finaly in power, there were still lots of pro-democracy people around and letting the democracy party people having a taste of their own medicine, they started torturing the democracy party people and murdered lots of innocent people, because they came to power because the KMT gave them power, they learned the lesson of the KMT and never gave any other part in China significant power, just to establish themselves as the official goverment in the people's eyes. Shiang Kai-shek escaped to Taiwan and established his own democracy goverment there (and i should metion that he purged all of his old KMT party members form mainland) , and later died and the presidency to his son (not as democracy as he say he is :P ).
if Shiang Kai-shek didn't decide to assasinate the communist party members we might actualy see an example of a democracy goverment AND a communist goverment co-exist and govern on country together. where the people have freedom, but not too much that it endangers the country's existance. /end rant
anyone know the IP of this 'great' firewall? =p
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
is the unspoken objective of many corporations: Worldcomm, Enron, SCO the list goes on.
CustomizeGoogle (http://www.customizegoogle.com/) is a a GPL'd FireFox extension. It wasn't written by Google and Im pretty sure Google doesn't like it too much since it removes advertisements and adds links to competitors sites to name a few things...
The Chinese Government will move to block this, won't they?
I'm trying to not troll here, but thanks for letting the cat out of the bag. Here comes one more restriction to their information.
I'm willing to bet that eventually they will move to block our IP addresses and create their own network.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I didn't know wikipedia before it was blocked! How good it is! Thank CCP! Proxying...
Why, that was very Asian of you.
Hehe, bad joke.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
Via your own journal, you have shown that you do not care about laws, covnents, or morals. Just about every city, and county in the USA has laws that prohibit you from polluting others personal property. In addition, just about every subdivision has it written in the covnants that you are not allowed to mess in your neghbor's lawn. Finally, I think that just about everybody in these discussion would agree that the ethical thing would be to pick it up. So you are a lawbreaker, unethical, and a total idiot.
As other posters have asked; if you have a problem with it, and you say the question about morality/law is irrelevant, then what problem could you have with it? Certainly not a moral one, because that would be irrelevant, dixit yourself.
;-) which dehumanised the jewish people should be obeyed, because 'they are law'. Would you claim, then, that you would have 'a problem' saving human lives, by breaking those unhuman and unjust laws?
Apart from this obvious contradictio in terminis, even when one would follow you in this reasoning, then breaking the law poses a problem (presumably of moral origin), because it breaks the law *regardless* of the morality of that law. This is of course a silly notion, because that would imply that 'breaking' unmoral laws would be unmoral (or at least would pose a moral problem). Well, it is not: if you don't subscribe to unmoral laws, you are being ethical/moral, and thus, where is the problem (in a moral sense)?
If you would follow your reasoning consistently, then the nazi laws (yeah, I know, I invoke the nazi's
Well, heck, I would have a problem *not* breaking them, or supporting people in breaking them. I fail to see how you can have a problem with that, *unless* you deem the law to be just and moral. Yes, you are right; that is subjective. But the fact that you claim it gives you problems supporting the breaking of unmoral laws, says more about your own level of morality, IMHO.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Rosa Parks absolutely has a great deal to do with this case. She is on record as saying that she would never have stood up to the bus driver without the activist training she received the previous summer at Highlander Folk School. She needed encouragement from many other people.
Without their help, the entire civil rights movement would have been delayed by years. The bus boycott was the flash point that brought a certain preacher to national prominence, who of course was also encouraging MANY other people to break the law.