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China's Battle to Police the Web
What_the_deuce writes "For the first time in years, internet browsers are able to visit the BBC's website. In turn, the BBC turns a lens on the Chinese web-browsing experience, exploring one of the government's strongest methods of controlling the communication and information accessible to the public. 'China does not block content or web pages in this way. Instead the technology deployed by the Chinese government, called Golden Shield, scans data flowing across its section of the net for banned words or web addresses. There are five gateways which connect China to the internet and the filtering happens as data is passed through those ports. When the filtering system spots a banned term it sends instructions to the source server and destination PC to stop the flow of data.'"
I'm pretty impressed that they have the ability to scan the data in the first place. That must not be cheap, or easy.
However, if it is only scanning for keywords why aren't people bypassing it with encrypted websites, Freenet, etc?
I think if we were talking to some average Chinese students on the street we would get the real 411 on just how effective this "Golden Shield" really is.
That article looks awfully familiar to the one that floated to on Digg few days ago, see http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall @ http://digg.com/tech_news/Why_Internet_Censorship_in_China_is_So_Incredibly_Effective
But of course, that's nothing compared to the terrible censorship we endure in America!!
(I'm just tired of people complaining about this place becoming a police state)
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
what about stuff that doesn't cross those barriers? like crap that goes between chinese computers only
Lived in Shanghai for two years until last month. I could always VPN out through the Great Firewall of China to a server outside China (in Japan). It was slow but reliable.
And a billion Chinese looked at the BBC website, and asked: "What does it say? I can't read English."
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
This is editorialising. The BBC article does not have the term "Internet Browsers" in it. Nice trolling, by the way.
on much more data, they just don't block people.
This is just sad. I cant believe this type of censorship is still going on during this time in history.
Portland Homes For Sale and Vancouver WA Real Estate
Now the censors are rapidly going to discover that the firewall isn't working, because suddenly it's blocking all the stuff they want their people to be able to get to!
I don't get why China gets as many breaks as they do, including Most Favored Nation status (permanently!). The 2008 Olympics are looking more and more like the 1936 edition.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Just write a patch around this, source and destination see the firewall, don't accept stop requests from this source.
But of course this would be a small shell in the back and forth of any battle.
Comcast has service in China???
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Gee, the Chinese are just like Comcast.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I believe (perhaps naively) that this 'Golden Shield' will ultimately prove to be a failure, current methods to circumvent it notwithstanding.
More than ever, information is becoming the lifeblood of a people. Without access to the full volume of information freely available to the rest of the world, China will fall behind in crucial ways. The filtering solution won't block out everything important, but it will block out some. Maybe someone mentions Tibet in his chemistry thesis and it's filtered for China, or whatever. There's a piece of information the rest of the world gets for free that a researcher in China might well miss.
Ultimately I think China will decide it's in its best interest to allow the free flow of information into the country, and that in turn will help drive their country ever more towards modern democracy.
Of course, I could be completely wrong. Maybe the future will end up like Red Dawn.
China manufactures nearly all consumer electronics. And their domestic market is exploding. We need them more than they will soon need us.
They just don't want their citizens to know they ripped everyone's technology off and that they send baby toys to the US covered in lead. Call it national pride.
i'm pretty shocked that all of China is served through only 5 gateways.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Is comcast acting as a consultant company for China? This sounds familiar.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
A good way to bypass this system would be to use simple semantics. The government would eventually get fed up of tracking the different encryption techniques, and would probably give up.
And on another note, wasn't the Chinese government going to give this up? How would they specifically allow certain areas to get unfiltered access to the internet if the filtering occurs at the International Backbone level?
RutSum.com
Such a system is inherently weak in that even crude encryption techniques render it worthless. Imagine, if you will, a basic anonymizer service using a 128-bit key system. Almost immediately, the robots and spiders would find your communications gibberish. Even the url visited would be garbled and useless. And to attempt to shut down the anonymizing service would be problematic should such a service be switched to a P2P setup, rendering it next to impossible to break.
Absolutely pathetic come to think about it.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
My suggestion is to sabotage their filtering. Everyone should put key words and phrases like "Free Tibet" on every page on every site, regardless of the content. Then nothing will get through! That'll show'em...
End transmission.
Unfortunately there are a few orders of magnitude in the difference of power between the Chinese government and the RIAA.
Add that to their outbound filters or SMTP OK.
Anything to reduce the amount of SPAM that comes from those networks.
The Atlantic Monthly had an article last month about this, and what I got out of it was that the Chinese government doesn't have to block everything, just make it inconvenient enough so that most citizens don't bother and instead stick with the in-country sites. It was a pretty decent article for a non-techie publication.
Read the comments by Chinese net users
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7313998.stm
They don't think that their media is at all biased. They believe "western" media is biased and has an anti-Chinese agenda.
Too much fucking national pride is what it is. When I talk to Chinese people, in China, I often get this weird apologetic "our country is crappy in a socio-economic way", but "our morals and cultural values are superior to your hedonistic, non-family oriented foreign ways".
It's creepy. Take a look at the China-daily forum if you have morbid interest. It's full of the craziest ranting racists I have ever seen...and I visited 4chan once.
Bottom line is, I don't think the government oppressing the people with censorship should be looked at in such a simplistic way. There seems to be a need for the censorship for many people on some level. Like they can't take a single bit of criticism of their precious middle kingdom and it's 5000 (actually 50) year great history.
It's time to sever that tie. Chinese products even for consumer electronics are typically low quality, full of lead, and made by slave (by US standards) labor. Why companies get away with exporting all of their manufacturing over there when they get crap (literaly) in return is beyond comprehension. I don't mind stuff manufactured in Taiwan. At least that stuff doesn't break in a week. I'd like it even better if high tech manufacturing was done in the US but with equipment effecient enought to make it economical even when compared to China. I know it can be done. We just need some forward looking companies to jump on the bandwagon.
Wouldn't other countries pick up the slack if China lost most favored nation status and had to compete more fairly with other industrializing nations? Maybe even some of those jobs would move back to the US. China's advantage is lots of low cost manpower, and an extremely high tolerance for environmental damage. Many other countries have the same advantages. And US corporations may really want to get in on the ground floor of the newly growing markets in China, but currently the Chinese market doesn't matter for crap to the US economy. China is paying for a genocide in Sudan and committing one in Tibet. The US policy of promoting commerce in China in order to cool off Communist mass murder has utterly failed.
Anyone have their IP? I wonder if they could handle a slashdotting...
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Producing your own quality products in the US with US workers(or even a worker-friendly country) are 2 cardinal sins according to them.
What's needed is someone who doesnt mind screwing over the (globalization happy)business community. We came close to having someone like that with Spitzer, and Strickland of Ohio fills that role here quite nicely. We already had the means and the know-how to do it quite well in-house. Bringing it back does not mean raking workers over the coals.
We do not need them, for they only make junk.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Would it be OK to talk about a tea bet?
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.
Because they hold over $1.4 trillion dollars in US debt? Because they could crush our economy by unloading that paper and their dollar reserves on the open market? Because the US is still going to China to beg for handouts because we can't balance our budget? Because their population of men available for military service exceeds that of the entire United States? And possibly, because our leadership, world famous as staunch defenders of civil rights themselves, really doesn't give a shit about Chinese human rights abuses?
But what do I know? I'm just guessing here...
Or this football match between England and Germany in Berlin in 1938. http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/03/magazine_enl_1064218142/img/1.jpg
Can you guess which team is doing the Nazi salute? It's the England team.
If I had my way, the individuals within the Chinese government responsible for this censorship would be hanged, drawn, and quartered. I'd release videos of the executions on youtube.
It is so easy for people to forget how fragile their rights and freedoms are. Unless you're willing to fight for them, to the death if necessary, then they are little more than indulgences on the part of the powerful.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
(I'm just tired of people complaining about this place becoming a police state)
Some things may not be *as bad* in America as they are in China, but they can still be *bad*.
In fact, we are seeing a slow but stead erosion of various civil liberties.
Yes, things could be worse, but that is no reason to avoid making them better now.
Why don't they spent a little time on capping the flow of spam and brute force attacks? Greylisting and RBLs block nearly all the spam, and I've just created netfilters to block all traffic that isn't what I consider "core" (dns, smtp, web) from China due to the huge amount of brute force dictionary login attacks on my systems via ssh and ftp.
You forgot that the United States owes China a LOT of money. It's like one of those old sitcoms where one of the characters owes another character a debt they can't repay so they just make them into their slave. Then they have them do silly things like give them foot massages, or paint their house, or look the other way on blatant human rights violations. Stuff like that.
I have nothing compelling to say
"We do not need them, for they only make junk."
Sounds a lot like my old man, 40 years ago... talking about Japan.
Hmm... a list of these banned words and phrases would make a good source of text to use in response to the HELO/EHLO dialog on an SMTP server... Have China block a compromised computer from accessing your server automatically!
Pi Ran Out
While Japan went out of that, China hasn't.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The Chinese made junk are so welcomed in Walmart and Kmart, average Americans just love Chinese junks, the price is cheap, the quality is good. The working families can not live without Chinese junks.
...what would happen if the list of banned sites, and more importantly the list of banned terms were made public, then the Chinese people would have a list of all the things their government didn't want them to know about. I'm sure they'd discover many things they'd simply never heard of owing to the suppression.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Then there's the workers. In China, a person working in a factory for a full day will make less than an American working on American soil does in one hour (given minimum wage plus benefits mandated by law.) Now that money that they make goes a lot further over there, so even if they're being underpaid, it's not by the margin that most people reading this would immediately expect. Nonetheless, it's another cost of doing business that would skyrocket if it was handled over here.
Would you be capable of filtering all of China's net access using off the shelf boxes and some custom software, or would it need some specialised network hardware?
Are Cisco for (an obvious) example, supporting this censorship through hardware and/or software?
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
Because they hold over $1.4 trillion dollars in US debt? Because they could crush our economy by unloading that paper and their dollar reserves on the open market? Because the US is still going to China to beg for handouts because we can't balance our budget? Because their population of men available for military service exceeds that of the entire United States? And possibly, because our leadership, world famous as staunch defenders of civil rights themselves, really doesn't give a shit about Chinese human rights abuses?
But what do I know? I'm just guessing here...
Ah we have yet another person who does not understand M.A.D. Mutually Assured Destruction. If China destroyed our economy, they would also be destroying their own, we are after all by far their largest market. If China stops giving us loans, we will be forced to stop spending so much, which would destroy their economy (but would only be a temporary setback for ours). If China was to militarily attack the United State and was caught doing so, the entire country would be black ash within 2 hours, unfortunately so would we.They succeed only by giving us a free ride, their economy will have to have a fairly large middle class with significant spending power before they will be able to stop trading with the United States. Even if they were to have a large middle class with immense spending power the wealth that the United States has amassed by basically screwing the rest of the world would be far to much to resist.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e&id=50A38A55EB758C0C80256C72004773CD
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Im trying to bang this out quickly before Chinese class (I live in Beijing) so forgive the hurry:
There is some site about Things White People Like on wordpress - and the whole site is blocked. Now using a proxy like StupidCensorship I can access the site - but somehow even through that there is something written on the TWPL: Asian Girls page that still gets blocked even through a proxy here!
That and wikipedia is always blocked but answers.com (which 99% of the time HAS the wiki article within) is not blocked.
Odd. That said its a wonderful place to live - the culture of being harassed by bored cops that exists in America is nonexistant out here. Just dont protest for Tibet and no one is going to mess with you generally....
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Fuck China.
Oh, sorry! Did I offend anyone ? I didn't say fuck the Chinese. As wrong as it feels to my libertarian gut, a part of me wants to reach in there and shake people until they revolt against their abusive government. How many gazillion chinese people are there ? Surely enough to overthrow the system and actually enjoy all the money they've earned by producing the rest of the world's retail goods. Freedom, competition, tolerance for all.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If it is just keyword match, then you could get around it with simple ROT13 lol. :D
Btw goto http://www.baidu.com/ a popular Chinese search engine.
Now try search for "Dalai Lama".
It will close the connection.
We are happy here, so thank you but no we don't need your human rights police please! Apply it somewhere else, perhaps directly to your head?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Does anyone know if they get Slashdot there? In fact, if there's anyone in China reading this it would be great to hear what you think.
xterm -n 8
If US decided to boycott all Made-In-China products ( which would be very difficult) , This would cripple Chinese economy. Plus China have bought all those 1.4 trillion by resorting to unfair trade tactics like refusing to set dollar to yuan. It's an empty threat.
okay, so only loosing 50% of the economy is not a big deal? you're a fucking retard. loosing rouhgly 2 days of productivity on 9/11 was a huge hit on our economy. You're a retard.
By the way, China is not at all self sufficient. They have no native oil resources, very little natural gas, and suprisingly few precious metals.
I remember when PPP over analog modems was more popular and some modems had a guard time of zero, meaning that the sequence of text "+++ATH0" would cause anyone sending it to be disconnected from the Internet. Various exploits were based on this.
I can see "Tiananmen Square" and similar (probably written in Chinese, though) becoming the new "+++ATH0", affecting anyone in China...
I know I shouldn't be replying to AC, especially one who has been modded down, but for everyone else, here
The goal of such an act is not for china to get the upper hand over the United States, the goal of such an act would be to destroy the United States by a war attrition as opposed to a shooting war. In this game survival is the only requirement to victory so losing 50% or 90% of the economy is more than OK so long as China wins. The US is more reliant on luxuries than the Chinese people, they can easily suffer through energy shortages and famine and are capable of using almost any local resources from recycled metal to mud. China would be weakened without oil but the US would be completely destroyed without many of the products produced in china.
It would not cost China 50% of their economy to topple the US. With the weakened state of the US economy at the moment I put the estimate at about 1/3 which for China's rate of growth is recoverable within 5-10 years, the US has little manufacturing left to compensate for basic hardware like nails, screws, washers and ball bearings most of which are produced in Asia. However China would not do this but like having the capability, keeping the US buying their products is the Chinese national interest but rather keep this as their ace in the hold in order to prevent US and European interference into their internal affairs.
Mr Coward, you didn't understand the objectives, the stakes, the rules or the game. I could surmise that you sir are the retarded one, but I don't want to insult people with a genuine mental disability. There's a saying about the mentally disabled "see the person not the problem" but in your case Mr AC, the person and the problem are one and the same.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I think that if the Chinese ISP is providing VPN services, the government of China would only allow that if they could filter the connection despite the encryption.
I used to work for AT&T and IIRC the folks in the offices in China were connected to the AT&T network by private WAN connections and they could access the Internet through interfaces outside China. This would be true of many companies with private networks into China. But in relative terms, the numbers of people who could use them would be very small compared to the number who can't. Plus, private usage could be deemed to be theft of company time and resources. Freedom is something someone else has to pay for. ;-)
Only boring people are ever bored.
All major companies are using VPN in China, even a lot small to medium size companies. Cisco and other American companies are offering VPN services in China. I don't think the government care about VPN, they only care about filtering keywords in web browsing and blocking emails containing "key words". So if you are using VPN in China to get "Free" internet access, you will be fine. Considering the Internet has become the must business tool for the economy in China.
What I am trying to say is that if youj are browsing the web or sending and receiving email through a vpn connection, they still might want to filter for sites and keywords.
Both teams are saluting - and indeed why should they not? In 1938, the war was still a year off, and Hitler, though decidedly unpleasant, was not yet the genocidal monster history records.
Nonetheless, legend has it that one of the England players has in fact rotated his hand 180 degrees, curled up most but not all of his fingers, and is giving Hitler the salute he deserves ;-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
yes bbc is temporarily open over here. Wikepedia blocked, youtube off and on, other sites random, but what's really pissing me off is cbc.ca Canada's major news source is now as of a few days ago unaccessible. Feels like some evil monkeys are flipping coins turning things off/on at random
Interesting. My friend has been in Beijing for almost ten years now and is in touch with Chinese students. He is presumably reporting what they believe - true or not. Or, perhaps, it depends on who owns the Chinese end of the connection?
This would be mutual assured destruction. Dumping all that paper would not just hurt our economy, it would severely damage theirs as well, putting millions of Chinese people out of work.
China, the socialist paradise, doesn't even have unemployment insurance. Something this disruptive would lead to large mass protests that make Tibet look like a raucous city council meeting.
Most people don't know that there are already thousands of public protests in China every year, mostly around property rights (or lack thereof). Yes, it's a repressive regime, but not as totalitarian as some people thing.
Like they can't take a single bit of criticism of their precious middle kingdom and it's 5000 (actually 50) year great history.
They can't take criticism, because they are suppressing so much shame. It's the natural human condition - when you feel that pain inside of you, you reach for pleasant dreams and feelings of superiority to make it go away. The louder the racist/nationalist, the bigger the mental image they are attached to. People create that mental image for a reason.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Below is a list of banned words:
Happy China Thanks You! Golden Shield use from exciting internet.
a cloud of gay talk about of china in the bottom of a well!
Just the opposite. Things you mentioned are in every Chinese newspaper.