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Defeating China's National Firewall
Bruce Schneier is reporting on his blog that a recent paper is discussing how to defeat China's national firewall. From the article: "However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall's reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We've done some real experiments on this -- and it works just fine!! Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall -- just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9¾."
But even in the west I feel more comfortable using Tor, a (well, close enough) anonymizing proxy.
I used to use JAP (a similar project but the client was Java based and less transparent) but Tor is considerably faster. Throughput up to 60K/sec on a 512k/sec DSL line (as fast as it ever goes with no proxy) means that it's practical to use for all traffic and makes the needle much harder to find in the haystack.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
From reading the article it's not just a hole, it's the primary basis of their "firewall". Their system is apparantly built the way it is because any other method would be too expensive and/or slow. TO prevent this workaround will require enourmous expenditures in reworking their network structure.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
They're Mongorians!
And before someone lambasts me for making fun of Engrish, I should clarify that I'm amused by all variations of the English language. A good number of my fellow Maltese citizens butcher English, for example, even though it's supposed to be a first language. Only in Malta can you fill your car up with pitlor (petrol), have your football team lose on a pineltri (penalty), and make windows out of enimielju (aluminium). By the way, those aren't Maltese words, those are what many Maltese people think the English words actually are. Oh, and they also think that Hoover, Jablo, Kenwood, and Geyser literally mean a vacuum cleaner, polystrene foam, a cake mixer, and a hot water heater, respectively.
Here's the South Park clip about Mongorians from YouTube.
*blinking cursor*
Exactly. When I was teaching a Chinese girl this time last year as part of my TESOL course I couldn't help but ask those questions. She said that most people she met in the uk had asked her about the firewall and censorship. She told me that most people she knew didn't really notice or care, even her father who teaches at a university. Make of that what you will. I'm not sure what to make of it.
No, people were pretty much crushed by tanks. You see, GP was basically repeating (and I assume satirizing) the party line. For instance, if you are in the United States and do a google image search for Tiananmen Square you mostly find pictures of tanks. Do a China google images search for the same term and you get a much more patriotic view of things. Hmm... the ratio used to be a lot more unbalanced... I wonder if Google is intentionally letting the filtering slide, or if reporters have simply found ways around the google.cn filtering rules.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman