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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"
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."
on much more data, they just don't block people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, given that china's been doing this for a lot longer.... Comcast is just like China, I'd say.
Unfortunately there are a few orders of magnitude in the difference of power between the Chinese government and the RIAA.
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.
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.
(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.
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
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
http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e&id=50A38A55EB758C0C80256C72004773CD
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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
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
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