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!

Remind me again, why does China have MFN status?

[Scareduck]

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.

Comcast???

[Shakrai]

When the filtering system spots a banned term it sends instructions to the source server and destination PC to stop the flow of data.'

Comcast has service in China???

Re:Remind me again, why does China have MFN status

[MacDork]

I don't get why China gets as many breaks as they do

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...

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?