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Is China's "Great Firewall" a Fraud?
An anonymous reader notes an article up on ScienceBlogs that calls into question the efficacy of the touted "Great Firewall of China" — a program by the government of the People's Republic of China to block users from reaching content it finds objectionable. Researchers at UC Davis and the University of New Mexico have performed experiments on the Great Firewall, sending test content to destinations inside China and observing what gets through. They conclude that the Great Firewall is more of a "panopticon" that encourages self-censorship through the perception that users may be being watched, rather than a true firewall.
That Chinese government! They like to kid. Remember Tiananmen Square? What a hoot!
I hate printers.
...that the "Great Firewall" is only filtering packets that are outbound from China.
Not necessarily likely, mind you, but it's possible.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. Move citizen. You are being watched. Put up enough info that many things are prohibited and make the punishments public, and then make everyone think they are being watched. People will police themselves out of fear. It's effective and much cheaper than a true blocking system. And if you have at least some system to catch people, it becomes more effective. So the net effect is probably about the same.
Not a sentence!
It's completely ineffective and a waste of resources. All the Mongolian internet users just look for a weak point and then pour through in hordes.
I find that "panopticon" is something unfamiliar to many western readers. This concept, however was evident in many places where totalitarian authoritarian states were to be found. This includes the North American continent which has at least 3 known authoritarian states.
However, the Great Firewall is no surprise, as it is more likely civilian self censorship and self policing that results in most "apprehensions" of dissenters the Chinese government makes yearly. Many of these people are not caught by the "technologies" or police departments, but instead are turned in by "good citizens" (otherwise known as family members and friends).
Again this comes as no surprise to me.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Why must you remain anonymous, dear submitter? Are they watching you? Are you watching us? I ain't taking my chances! [clicks 'Post Anonymously']
It's like that telescreen in the living room, the point isn't that you are being watched all the time, but that you could be being watched at any time.
What they don't want you to know is that it is painted with lead paint!
Just imagine the effort it would take to continually watch even a small percentage of the population at any given time. Not to mention, effective surveillance would require people to do the watching (not just machines) and word would get out about it, no matter how oppressive the regime.
I would compare this with the carpool lanes on USA highways.They are one of the few instances that I could think of that has signs posted every few hundred feet to warn would-be violators about the dire consequences. It basically boils down to the fact that it is impossible to effectively police the carpool lane vehicle occupant policy (due to the fact that many vehicles have tinted windows and are moving at a high rate of speed, thereby making it difficult to see inside the vehicle), so they have to try and scare people instead.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
In communist China, YOU watch YOU!
This is in the science section. Why?
They call it 'political correctness'.
I live in China. I have always been amused reading about the "Great Firewall of China" in the Western media. It really isn't that big of a deal. Very little is blocked, other than porn. Websites advocating Tibetan/Mongolian*/Xinjiang separatism, or Taiwanese independence in Chinese are blocked, but similar sites in English rarely are. The BBC is blocked, not sure why. That is about it.
Proxy lists are widely available. You can ask for one in almost any Internet cafe. So the Firewall is easy to bypass. 99.9% of people using the proxies are looking at porn.
The "Great Firewall" is actually fairly popular in China, because it means people can let their kids browse without worrying about them seeing erect penises.
* Yes, I know that Mongolia is already an independent country. But most Mongolians don't live there. 80% of them live in China.
I saw a recent documentary about China's Internet Cafes...
an animated policeman turns up on the screens once in a while to remind people that they are being watched.
So it's more like the imaginary "weighted ball" that circus elephants -think- is around their leg, but really isn't.
There, a witty metaphor -- INSIGHTFUL POINTS NOW PLEASE.
I have been to china several times and I can't recall having seen a case of "content filtering", but then again I have not looked for it. However sites are blocked, last time I could not reach bbc, flickr or wikipedia as a few examples.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRSt4jfRTH4
there... the first interesting thing on slashdot since 2001
The West is familiar with a lighter form of the same technique, Dilbert calls it Management Lie #2: I have an open door policy
I see that nobody has mentioned FUD, yet.
Every employee in the Chinese government could spend 24/7 looking for "objectionable material" on the web and they're job would never be done. Even if keywords and ect. were blocked there would be ways around. Aren't there over 100 million websites up now, thousands more every day? It's an impossible task, and so and induced state of paranoia at the thought of punishment is a far easier solution. After all if China had to ask Yahoo who some bloggers were, how effective could their much touted surveillance be?
Hear me roar. no the firewall isnt much of a big deal. its an annoyance though. certain sites are firewalled - and sites get added or subtracted from the blacklist once in a while. wikipedia just came back on a few months ago, for example, after bieng offline for a few years. all that means is that if you wanted to read a wiki article you had to go through a proxy or use some kind of cashe/mirror (google had wikipedia cashed pretty well towards the end of its time on the blacklist) More important for some users - like those intending to build a website - is that if you want to put a site on the backbone (or at any reliable hosting service) in china, you need an ICP (internet content provider licance). if you dont have one, no one will host you, and if you do get a provider, your site will continue to work until it gets popular and then one day it will be removed from the DNS servers here... another annoyance is certain popular blogging sites go off line (i used to have a livejournal at fotoflo.livejournal.com, but no one here can see it anymore so it has become irrellevant.) ok, thats my three cents fotoflo
... I can definitely tell you there is a firewall. Short of using a proxy (thank you ssh -D), no machine can access Wikipedia, Blogger, etc.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
And, surprisingly enough, the vast majority of Chinese people can't read English. So the existence of English-language media discussing controversial topics is largely irrelevant to all but a relatively small elite.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
What if the CCP has purposely built their firewall to be circumventable with just a little hacking? A few years of this and much of the population has an interest and a little skill in computer tricks, increasing the pool of computer talent in the country for both peaceful development and recruitment for nasty hacker armies? They could be engaging in social engineering to get a leg up in computer warfare.
In WWII, one huge advantage the USA had was that every kid had grown up tinkering with old cars, so every tank crew had an amateur mechanic, without having to specifically assign and train them. This could produce a similar effect for the Chinese.
My experience from having lived here in a year is something like this:
/. I get 404 or something similar.
It is actively censuring the most common adult *cough*Porn*cough* sites, many news sites, a lot of blogs are inaccessible etc. For about 1/5 of the links from
Sometimes when I get too annoyed about this unreasonable amount of blockage and then cross-check with TOR running I get about 99% functional pages.
It works in another way as well, the basic communication from China to abroad is VERY slow. Basically downloading anything, that be software, articles playing WOW in EU server and so on is excruciating, if at all possible. Downloading from Chinese sites I can max out my band width.
Bigger hotels in international cities such as Shanghai and Beijing seems to by-pass the firewall, so for many visitors they will never notice this. On a related note, the big hotels also have permission to show international TV such as CNN, BBC, HBO, where local people can get StarMovie, TCM and the Hallmark.
If the authorities are actively monitoring what we try to get hold of, I don't know, but the functional effects of 200.000 people actively banning the internet can not be denied.
For anyone who doubt the existence of the firewall, I suggest trying to live in China.
STDK
The Chinese government will behave themselves during the Olympics. Attempts to control these kinds of actions by foreigners would result in heat from the rest of the world. They want positive PR, plain and simple. An outward appearance of freedom is more important than actual freedom.
They'll probably crack down once the Olympics are over.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I can tell you that the things in the west are very exaggerated. You can pretty much speak about anything you want here in public, as long as it doesn't cover a few hot-button topics. You can take photos and video anywhere. Many services are paid for anonymously, so there is very little tracking. And the public is aware that internet filtering is more of manifestation of a policy than the policy itself. This is very common in Chinese culture - the outward manifestation and the implicit reality being two different things. This allows for quick flexibility, whether it be bending the rules by those that obey them, or changing the rules by those that create them. You are expected to know where this implicit line lies so that you do not step on toes, even though it will never be explicitly described. It has it's positives and negatives, for example the ability to quickly override bureaucracy, but also greasing the skids of nepotism.
Anyway, the firewall is like DRM. It 'protects' the general public from seeing things they shouldn't, but it isn't really effective against anyone who knows anything.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
If China's censorship system were a true firewall, most blocking would take place at the border with the rest of the Internet
Well duh, the so-called firewall is certainly not the same firewall that everyone means, and the researchers should know better. The system was not setup to totally block/filter everything at the gate. Certain groups of users must be allowed to access all contents, regardless of political censorship at the time, this includes: foreigners living in China, certain government departments and agencies (some police departments, NSA-equivalent, CIA-equivalent, ...). For example, if you go to places where there is high concentration of foreigners living in China, especially in certain building, you can access everything, there is no blocking/filtering at all. For example, when there is any well-known, well-publicized international conference held in China, the whole block where the conference is held can have non-filtered access, especially in hotels where foreign guests are concentrated.
The system is setup to allow contents in and out, but certain routes are blocked/filtered, while others are not. That's why you see some messages passed through several routers before being blocked. If the system was setup to block/filter everything at the gate, this would not be able to achieve.
As someone who's written a lot about the GFW, I always remind people -- the Great Firewall only affects connections going into and out of China. For domestic traffic there is no firewall or filtering at the router level. There is another system for censorship of content on servers inside China -- good old fashioned licensing to be a "content provider" and local regulation. If you're operating inside the sovereign borders of the PRC, then there are other conventional means of controlling content, like telling your ISP to shut you down or serving your company legal notice.
So it's a fallacy to talk about the Great Firewall as the most important part of the censorship system. The majority of folks in China are looking at entertainment content on servers inside China, and not trying to lookup the latest human rights abuses on foreign servers. Similarly, Americans are more interested in Britney Spears and the latest viral YouTube video than they are researching historical abuses of Native Americans.
I'm writing this from a coffee shop in Beijing using their free Wifi (which is quite common). With all these sensitive words in the post, hope it makes it through. (Though I'm kind of tempting fate by hitting the Preview button repeatedly)
Surely there's only one outcome to that one.
Make your own ending to that one.
America, Home of the Brave.
Hence, everyone in China who uses the internet is a criminal...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The amount of man and computing horsepower required to maintain a list of banned sites at the packet level would be enormous even for China, so an automated filter with a bit of rolling analysis would be logical. It probably even runs on a distributed squid farm, probably based at the ISPs rather than at the national peers, with updates issued from a central authority. The appearance of the cartoon policemen was a bit of a giveaway as they could really only be written into a web page by a proxy, and there are far too many internet cafes to go to force the addition of a bit of code at the cafe's end. .cn IP blocks.
In that respect it's not unlike the passive filter in front of my connection in this office. It checks for keywords in URLs as well as a list of banned sites, so anything with 'games' in is banned (I can't see articles posted to games.slashdot.org) and anything that involves 'wine' or 'beer' for some reason. That probably means, as has been mentioned, that it could be circumvented by a proxy or SSH tunnel to outside the
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
I consider the control of ALL data-network access by the Chinese Governement a strategic issue. At the moment we do see the doors still wide open - as the test mentioned in the article shows. There were recently news on attempts of Cyber attacks on governements worldwide - coming - as is claimed - NOT from China. ;-) In my opinion the Chinese can shut the doors of their Great Firewall quite quick if they sense a Cyberattack targetting their own national network. This way they can prevent damage to their IT infrastructure - just in case.
Censorship capability is most likely a welcome side-effect.
A tremendous amount of sites are blocked. Many of them are barely political at all. I can not even get to my own blog. I can post but not view. Of course, there is wikipedia; but then, there is also VOA. It is incredible, the students are tested on a standardized test using material from VOA; however, they can not go to the site. To download the mp3s of the VOA broadcasts there are back door ways of doing it; but, it is just plain stupid. It is part of the TEM4 exam.
I am not going to bother listing the NON-PORN sites that I can not access. Rest assured that I hit one of these sites almost daily. Most Chinese are not aware of the firewall, this is true, they just think that this is the way the Internet works.
It doesn't sound very plausible to me. Just because someone uses a proxy doesn't mean they understand much about what they're doing, especially if they're just copying the instructions of someone else. (As an analogy, just because someone uses libdvdcss2 doesn't mean they have a clue what it's doing.) There are plenty of much more reliable ways the CCP could train people to be hackers.
Besides, why should a typical hacker feel any loyalty to help the government with skills they've learned as a result of the government trying to prevent them from getting what they want? It's like suggesting that people who hack around DRM technology would for some illogical reason feel motivated to patriotically use their discoveries to help the RIAA or MPAA to impose it on people elsewhere.
Now, it may not be an actual "Firewall" in the strictest sense but "The Great NetNanny of China" doesn't have the same ring. Like another poster said, it seems to work via reset packets. I'm not networking expert, I just know I get a lot of "connection reset" error messages.
The problem with the Firewall isn't what it blocks, but it's HOW it blocks...the sporadic, chaotic nature. I've been here for two years. When I arrived, LiveJournal (which I was using to keep in touch with friends) was fine. In October of last year, it got blocked. It remains so. Wikipedia has been blocked and unblocked SEVERAL times. As ShanghaiBill said, there are proxies, but THOSE sometimes get blocked. And it's NOT just porn or "politically objectionable" material that's being blocked. There was a "computer help" call-in radio show I used to listen to, but THEIR site was blocked. All manner of sites that have NO political, pornographic or otherwise "controversial" information are blocked for reasons unknown.
Another prime example is Google News. The HOME page often opens just fine, but if you try to click a link to follow one of the stories ON the home page? "Connection reset". I'll often get the same thing when trying to SEARCH from Google News. SOMETIMES it works, but you never really know WHEN it will and when it won't.
That's the big problem with it for me, the fact that you never know from one day to the next WHAT'S going to be accessible and what won't be.
I mention this not to complain, but to point out that any thoughts of "There IS no Great Firewall" are foolish. Like I said, it may not meet the strict technical definition of "firewall" because it doesn't do all of it's filtering 'at the edge', but the truth is MOST people not on Slashdot have NO idea how a firewall works. They just know it's supposed to BLOCK stuff. That's the case in China. The internet IS censored here MUCH more than it is in the US and many other countries I've heard from.
I once send an email to a friend in China about the anti Japanese riots in 2005 in the peak of the riot and it never arrived.
The firewall may not be a wall between China and outside. It's a net covers whole China. Emails inside China is watched too.
I think the firewall itself is not same in different locations in China. I have access to cnn.com in Shanghai area but not in Beijing area for example. And proxies are constantly blocked when found out, which is also not symchronised over the whole China.
It was not blocked when I was in Shanghai three weeks ago..
Though Wikipedia was blocked for most of my year in china from August 2005 to August 2006. So annoying...
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
"consumer product safety"
The test is also a fraud, or at least highly deceptive since the GFWoC or prior-restraint panopticon would be most highly tuned to outbound requests rather than unsolicited inbound (like email). The former are culpable and actionable. The latter have some deniability.
Even if we think someone (the Chinese govt) is totalitairian, unjust or other unpleasant thing, do not think they agree. Most likely they see themselves as perfectly reasonable. And so one must expect them to do many reasonable things mixed in with their villainy.
The great firewall does exist, but it's more of a really tall speed bump, than a wall.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Big boxes full of used pinball machine parts?
I was just in China for a month and I couldn't even access my personal website. I don't want to say china uses a whitelist only method or anything, but I don't even have any content there yet besides a web email browser via google apps. Lots of other stuff was difficult, to say the least. Maybe someone persistent and knowledgeable can work their way through/around it, but I think it is largely effective.
Exactly.
;)
Posting from China (yet again) let me tell you I have absolutely _zero_ desire to click on either of those links.
Let me put it like this: this weekend I took taking a friend from the States out to the great wall and was traveling in a rented car with a driver, tour guide and a friend from Taiwan. Friend from the States starts trying to dig up the name of some nutty group you dont talk about in China (happens to be one of the tags on this story). Me and Taiwanese looked at each other, laughed, and just changed the subject. I wouldnt even consider posting that name from my address (or really _any_ IP address in the good ol PRC).
You Just Dont Go There
Beijing is a wonderful place. You trade these things for the ability to: get on transportation and walk down the street not harassed by cops and having your papers checked, walk down the street with no shirt drinking a beer if its hot and you so choose, and buying damn near anything produced on this planet for about one eight the cost.
As long as you are not doing something the government is _explicitly_ telling you not to do no one harasses you. From what I hear EVERYTHING is technically against the law in China - but if you are a generally "socially harmonious" person you generally dont have anything to fear. The parent post references the really big one. From what I can tell you everyone in China knows both sides lost - it is regarded as "a very unfortunate incident for everyone" - but you be sure whenever anyone questions who is in charge that runs through their minds.
Right now the latest craze is all the free tickets on corruption are being called in. In the span of 2 months they charged, convicted, and executed basically the head of the FDA if you didnt hear about it - the heavy hand goes right to the top.
You self censor - its that simple. Everyone does it and after a while its just natural. As long as my searches get blocked and there is a camera on every corner I think its easier just not to talk about some things.
Now the question is do I post this under my name, or using a proxy, or......
panopticon (pan opti con)
noun historical
a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed.
ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: from pan- [all] + Greek optikon, neuter of optikos 'optic.'
Hope this helps some one :-)
I visited China in October 2006 and plugged my computer into the hotel's LAN.
I had seen this discussed so I was curious. I googled "democracy" and when I attempted to follow any of the top 10 links, I was shown a very Chinese-patriotic screen with a lot of red flags, yellow stars, and text all in Chinese, despite the fact that my Google results were in English. I would frequently see this page when trying to view many common sites.
However, I didn't have other problems. I could still login to US WoW servers, check my e-mail on US domains, and FTP into my own webhost and upload whatever I wanted.
So, at least the WWW is censored heavily. And since I'm guessing the majority of Internet users today spend the majority of their time http surfing, that's a pretty real firewall, regardless of what some geeks at a university say about useless technical details.
I live there/here/Beijing. No one gives a crap about anything you do if you are a foreigner. You can drive a car without a license and walk the streets drunk and pass out in a bus lane and they still won't do anything. It's like this unreal freedom. I can smoke some weed, but they won't know what it is. I can import prescription drugs in the mail and they don't give a rats arse. I can browse the internet looking at anything I want and I can write emails about my opinions about anything I want. They can't do crap. Unless I'm committing a real crime, like working without a visa, or smuggling drugs, you can do what you want. The same goes for the youth today. They do what they want. There are gay bars and rock chicks with tattoos. There are ferraris and porches around some times and yuppies in suits. It's such an illusion what the media paints of China and it's really pathetic. It reminds me of that Italian prime minister or something that wont let up about chinese eating babies and communism. People should get their own education and guts and shrug off the racial tendencies and visit the place.
I wish the US had the same standards as Japan. My wife would be with me now, instead of in a long, long immigration queue ...
That's your fault for being stupid. You should have just snuck her in.
Dumbass.
What is science? It's the application of the Scientific method to a problem. . . any problem. It doesn't have to be chemistry, physics, or biology.
In this case, the made observations about the technical workings of the Firewall. They then formulated a hypothesis based on those observations, devised experiments, ran the experiments, and correlated the results of their experiments to their hypothesis. That's what we call science, kids.
They also dip their toes into psychology and sociology, in discussing a theory/hypothesis about the Great Firewall being devised as a means to mostly get people to self-police.
The original story is posted here. Comments welcome on our blog.
Yeah, I'm a waiguoren living in Beijing, too- and you're absolutely right, no one cares if I smoke weed, or drive without a license (who'd pull me over???) or make an ass of myself drunk. No one cares because I'm a waiguoren, speaking English and having white skin. Do the same crap, or any political crap, and be Chinese, and you're in a different situation.
Most Chinese folks don't care much about government intrusion and restriction because they've grown up with it. But ask a college kid how he's going to do on his ideology graduation exam, and you'll see that it's not an echoing cavern of negative freedoms. Go out to the countryside and ask a villager about taxes. Or talk to anyone about real estate. China's a real dictatorship, not always softly applied.
If not, it's a fraud! :)
I was born in China in the 1970's. when I was kid and I had no many toy so I tried to fold a paper ship out of a newspaper, but my sister, who is 5 years older, told me not to do that because there was the picture of Chairman Mao on the paper. that was pretty much the only self-discipline event I have remembered. Then starting in the early 1980's, thing started loosen up. Nobody cared or worried if you said bad things about the government or the part or the leaders; we listened to radio from Hong Kong as well as Voice of America on the short-wave. Blaming and criticizing the government and the party are the daily topics around the lunch/dinner tables. In the current days, things are even more open. Like in July, when the government suddenly raised the stock transaction fee (to curb the rampant stock market,) there were over 270,000 messages in the sina.com.com news discussion board -- almost all of them were slashing on the government and its credibility in explicit wording as well as calling for democratic reform. What usually got blocked nowaday are the three topics: tiananmen, Fa Lun Gong and Taiwan independence. If you don't try to promote your messages on mass media and make yourself a big figure, nobody cares. All people and the government care nowaday is money.
The so-called GFW is actually a composition of all kinds of security, anti-virus, or firewall software installed on every node of China's internet. Even a netcafe-use rounter can be found having some kind of build-in active filter. Basicly the cencership's a part of China's IT industry, it's like a national standard of requirement.
China, in fact, is very fragile.
and accessed the Internet in apartments, Internet cafes, universities, and at a Chinese company -- in Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Chongqing, and Yichang. The following domains "had issues":
blogspot [never worked]
flickr [all images blocked]
google [cache never worked, images worked sporadically]
bbc [usually didn't work; once in a while it did]
cnn [when accessed via RSS reader]
other sites less important to me were blocked, but it's clear that the firewall is sporadic and certainly not thorough in suppressing anti-Chinese speech.
It's rumored that skype will be blocked soon, but not because of speech; China Telecom is losing out on too much domestic business it seems.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
This post has been blocked.
-Your friendly Chinise Government.
I think this study makes a bit too much of failures. That is, they claim since it blocks about 75% of the time, and lets more connections through during heavy traffic times, that it's meant more as a panopticon than anything. I disagree -- I think, as a practical matter, whoever implements the blocks simply decided that it was more practical to let some "improper" connections proceed than have the routers bog down or fail during peak usage times.
I am in Beijing, we cannot access wikipedia yet. Any webpage with political sensitivity words are blocked.
Nothing new here. American block is the same.