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.'"

Comments

How to frustrate the censors: a simple proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese censorship works by picking out key terms. So here's a simple way for you webmasters to really frustrate the censors. Everybody who's a webmaster for scientific and engineering and technical sites-- the ones that the Chinese really want their people to access-- here's what you need to do. Drop a couple of the forbidden terms in-- say "Free Tibet" and "Dalai Lama" and "Falun Gong" and "June 4 1989"-- at the end of your site. It can even be in white text on white screen; it doesn't matter if the humans can read it, as long as the robots can.

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!

Re:SSL? Freenet?

[wbean]

Well,yes, you can do that. But I have a friend who lives in Beijing and he tells me that if you use a vpn and have too much traffic across it they will shut it down. So the firewall is aware of the presence of the vpn and can measure the traffic. Furthermore, too much use of a vpn may cast suspicion on you.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

[Sigismundo]

A Chinese colleague of mine explained a simpler way that some Chinese have used to get past the censors. For instance, the character fa of "Falun Gong" gets split into two characters. The left part (the three dots) represents water, so shui is used instead. Without the three dots, fa becomes qu. So rather than write Falun Gong, a message board poster might write Shui-qu-lun Gong. This could be figured out by a person reading it, but wouldn't be found by computer search.

This was a while ago, and I assume that such a simple substitution would get figured out pretty quickly, but I thought it was neat.

Re:Censorship

[VJ42]

Being a Brit, I love comparing US news sources to others around the world, including those of our "enemies", and I regularly find that news sources from the USA are very introverted compared not only to the BBC, but even Al Jazeera and Chineese State news are more outward looking (even if somewhat biased). It's not just the news of our enemies either I look at other allies news, they too are less introverted than their US equivilents. And it's not that you can't produce quality news from around the world, compare the versions of CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/
http://edition.cnn.com/

But who would think to put "edition" at the beginning of a URL?