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An Inside Look at the Great Firewall of China
alphadogg writes "An interview with James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, who has experienced 'The Great Firewall of China' firsthand, an experience people from around the world will share this summer when the Olympics comes to that country. Based in Beijing, Fallows has researched the underlying technology that the Chinese use for Internet censorship. One good thing to know: With VPNs and proxies, you can get around it pretty easily." Will these Olympics lead to a more free China, or is it just corporate pandering?
Ha, I can't even get around my blocking software at work with proxies. You think China isn't going to be smart enough to block proxies and proxy lists, or reset odd VPN connections? Shit, even Websense is smart enough to do stuff like that.
Besides, the fear factor is what's REALLY going to scare most Chinese into avoiding "bad" sites. They're probably more afraid of being logged than blocked.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But, eventually, corporate pandering will lead to greater economic freedom for the Chinese, and then, ultimately, greater political freedom.
I don't mean to sound elitist, but most Chinese people in the USA that I have talked to have basically said that yes, while more human rights and freedom of speech would be nice, the problem is that the Chinese peasant class is so uneducated and so poor that there is a huge risk of total social chaos if China adopts the Glasnost route. They want to avoid a Soviet - collapse style meltdown.
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Will these Olympics lead to a more free China, or is it just corporate pandering?
Ask the international Olypmic commitee what they were thinking. The companies that make money off of the broadcasting and related licensing are going to make money regardless of where the games are held. It would likely be a lot easier, logistically, NOT to have to put up with the Chinese nonsense while moving the media army into place to cover the games. Which corporations are being pandered to, here? The corporation that is China? They (the Chinese) promised all sorts of open access and press freedom as part of the package they pitched while trying to seduce the panel that chooses the venues. They were obviously lying, a lot. How that broadly strokes "corporate" interests enough to refer to it that way in the summary is not clear enough in the summary to warrant that particular bit of editorial spin.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The "Great Firewall of China" was a neato headline when Wired did it over 10 years ago.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
They can put needles in collars of soldiers to force them to stay at attention (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=564629&in_page_id=1811&ct=5)
but they can't figure out how to block the internet from their people.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
China wants the olympics because it makes them a legitimate major nation in the international sphere, not an automatic enemy.
Suddenly we're giving them the olympics but making demands about Tibet.
Why Tibet?
I am serious- of all injustices in the world why has the Western world particularly adopted Tibet? No matter how you look at it, it's a rightful conquest. Do we expect France to come over and tell us to relinquish Puerto Rico? No- imperialist gains are imperialist gains. I don't see why China's dominion is evil while ours is not. Besides, Tibet was a theocratic feudal kingdom before China invaded, where most people were serfs who lived in hovels underneath lords. They revolt out of nationalistic pride, but in reality they are better off with China's modernizations.
What about the great firewall? Why do we even care? I think it has to do with American corporations wanting to profit off of the Chinese populace without hurting their marketing image in the US. "Hey, our company looks like a giant kindergarten at its headquarters, so we'd never want to support censorship!" Maybe China is protecting it political and economic goods. Thanks to the great firewall, Chinese corporations boom within their subset of the internet, PLUS they don't have to worry about their people embracing the American fascist economic policies because their websites are prettier.
We walk a fine line with China. Within China, they have total copyright freedom (something slashdot cares about)- but I think at this point they're working on modernization and keeping their citizens out of poverty instead of becoming a third world nation, exploited for its cheap labor while foreign companies get to start calling the shots in their government. China is in control of China, and I am sure they like it that way.
When I was spending more time in Saudi Arabia (several years ago) I set up a vpn to a stateside proxy. It worked very well... Though I have no idea what technologies they are using now there or in China.
Little known fact is that the Great Firewall of China is the only slap in the face to freedom that can be seen from outer space.
Excuse me while I gather the virgin sacrifice and assemble the pentagram required to solve your problem
Because across the world governments are tightening their grips, and some are trying to extend their grip well past their own borders. There was this saying about "First remove the beam from your own eye"
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What does an athletic competition have to do with the internal politics of a country?
At the risk of running afoul of Godwin's law, Nazi Germany hosted the Olympics before the beginning of WWII. They mostly used it as a propaganda opportunity, and it's hard to say that the event led to any more openness or political moderation on the part of the German government.
Corporate Pandas?
Honestly, do questions of this format need to be posed anymore? If there is ever an option for more corporate pandering, it will be taken.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Since when has any Olympic games, even the ancient ones, ever led to to resolution of any conflict? Did the 1936 Summer Olympics get Hitler to mend his ways? Did the 1980 Moscow Olympics get the Soviet Union to mend their ways? Did any of the Olympics held in the US do anything but promote self-importance and exceptionalism amongst Americans? Did the Tokyo Olympics, or the Nagano Olympics get Japan to mend fences with China and Korea over Japanese war crimes in WW2?
At the very best, it allows rival groups to fight each other in a less murderous way for a bit (and even that isn't a given, see Munich 1972, Atlanta bombing). That's a good thing, but expecting more than that is ignoring history. The people in the "Olympic movement" that see the games as a tool for peace and understanding are just deluding themselves. Even with the ancient games, wars were only put on hold, not ended, and that was only because it was a religious event.
The only people that ever make money on an Olympics are the ad agencies.
If you read the "SHA-1" article on wikipedia, you'll see it is Chinese scientists that first discovered weak points in the widely used algorithm.
In China, there are state-funded CS projects aimed at cracking SSL, SSH and alike. Apart from military uses, they are mainly used to implement censorship over private, encrypted communications.
China can't ban its citizens use encrytion on the legal level. If so, many business (e.g. online banking, and everything using HTTPS) would not exist. But they are working hard so that when they decide to pwn you they'll be able to make it.
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Doesn't lie in the people, really. The government is hell-bent on keeping its iron grip on the people. Think about this for a minute, if more people knew about proxies, wouldn't they be using them? I almost never see any Chinese online anywhere, so I assume that the vast majority, obviously, don't know about them. This is a fear factor. If you lived over there, wouldn't you be scared to death that you were found out finding a way out of China's protective bubble?
I might be over-reacting here with such an irrelevant, out of the blue statement, but look at Burma/Myanmar. The government there clearly knew about the incoming threat, and neglected to warn the people there. How do they expect to let the people figure out for themselves that a storm is approaching? By the same token, how do we expect anyone except for the elite few Chinese to even be aware that there is a world out there on the internet waiting to be discovered outside of the protective bubble?
Point being, if you control the one thing people nowadays depend on, that being the media, there is nothing you can't do to them. We already know this about China, but again, consider the fact that with little to no education for the majority of Chinese, how in the world would anyone but a handful even know the existence of such workarounds?
most of people in china don't read english at all so the information from west are useless to them. the firewall is bad for people who can read english but are computer-illiterate. i can get through the proxy with either tor(tor.eff.org) or ssh tunnel. i prefer ssh tunnel as tor's speed is not reliable.
I got an error 503 the first few times I tried accessing this story, was that supposed to be a joke a or is the great firewall of China watching my every move!? *puts on his tinfoil hat*
I thought it was common knowledge that there was a massive FibreBone coming into an old 486 running Squid and Squidguard?
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Seems funny to interview a magazine author. Why doesn't he just write an article about it?
I find the comment that the firewall is unpredictable to be interesting. Do Slashdoters think that this is on purpose so it can't be studied and subverted or is it just a case of banning the BBC when they have anti-Chinese content or is it just a case of a huge bureaucracy being contradictory (as they often are).
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
... why would we give them firewalls ?
*runs*
Does anyone know if Hong Kong is covered by the great firewall?
I am merely stating that we have no right to mess with Tibet. It's not our country, there's no genocide, there's only standard Chinese political oppression. If we were to turn on China, we would have to start making things again in the United States. Nobody wants that!
The fact of the matter is that most of the grief about Tibet is coming from dissidents who have formed a government in exile, haven't been in the country in decades, and have been successful at rallying world opinion to their cause because they say the right things to western ears that want to hear them.
Honestly, after Iraq, I'm done with dissidents and governments in exile. We heard enough about freedom and democracy from the likes of Allawi and Chalabi, and we believed them so much, wanted to believe them so much, that we ignored our own allies (and our own) intelligence estimates, and found out, AFTER we invaded, that the government in exile that we had hoped to install had absolutely no popular support whereas the government we displaced actually did. We find out that instead of supporting our sanctions against Saddam, the Iraqi people were actually pretty pissed off at us for them. Instead of roses, we got IEDs to greet us. Instead of changing the regime in Iraq, we would up becoming the regime in Iraq and, whether we stay there or not, we're going to be paying for that for quite some time.
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standing back and doing nothing while japan raped and pillaged their country
Uh, standing back? Hardly. Even before World War II the USA was sending support to the Chinese Nationalist government. Have you ever heard of the Flying Tigers? Claire Chenault? The gunboat Panay?
There were a long set of instances of USA aiding the Chinese against Japan. These included not only the direct military aid that I mentioned, but also a number of economic tools placed against Japan. Ultimately, prior to World War II, the USA and her allies would cut off Japan from all steel and oil imports, which really cramped their style. In response, the Japanese assembled a fairly powerful navy, and attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. The idea was to bloody America's nose enough to allow Japan a free hand in China. But, the USA instead built the world's largest navy, largest air force, beat the Japanese back to their little islands, firebombed them and nuked them - twice -, at a loss of hundreds of thousands of American casualties.
If that's not helping China, then I do not know what is.
he thing that sucks about it is that with their system they will totally kill us in the world marketplace, what is better than having a bunch of workers that don't get paid much and don't ask for anything?
Won't happen. People have a knack for wanting to speak their mind when they are economically empowered. If you've got someone who is completely dependent, then they will do anything to eat. But if that person is eating, then he or she will not long tolerate not having his or her opinions matter. Political change will come in China, but it is something only the Chinese people can bring about. The best way to help the Chinese become free, is to help them economically.
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let this be the last article on /. on the subject "can i use a proxy to get around china`s firewall?" for a while. The existance of the thing itself is already annoying enough, but in the end almost noone in China really cares all the much anymore.
Recently the subject seems to be used as a chance to point the finger at bad bad red red China all over again.
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By using Tor and a few hacks, you can have a look at Chinese internet censorship by yourself.
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As for the "Great Firewall" - seeing that it is very easy to circumvent, combined with the fact that the Chinese are no fools, shouldn't that make you think a little about the purpose of it? To me it seems obvious that they are not trying to isolate the people from all information that isn't approved by the government; after all that task would be so tremendous that nobody could seriously contemplate it. But the internet isn't just a place full of useful information and good, innocent fun, it is also full of crap like pedophiles, scams and other things that exploit the inexperienced. I can fully sympathise with the intention to try to protect especially the children, but also the many adults who access the internet for the first time - perhaps a firewall is not really the best way, but I don't really see any other technology that can even attempt to stem the flood of serious crap on the internet.
This is of course not just a question of protecting the morals of the Chinese people, although I am sure that is actually a major part of the motivation; the Chinese are traditionally and culturally very occupied with moral. Another aspect is probably that the number of entirely new internet users in China is growing rapidly. If they all come online and immediately get screwed over by a large number of scams, they are going to want to ask their government "Why didn't you try to protect us?" - though they will probably not put it quite as politely as that - there would be riots and uprisings. So the government tries to avoid that happening. By making it non-trivial to get through the filter they also send out the message that "If you go out there and get cheated, you know who to blame".
Okay, this view isn't new... but then you go and say that it was the Iraq war, alone of all things in history, that pushed you to it? I don't even know what to say. For someone who thought Bush was full of crap from the start and hopes for some improvement in the world, this sort of seamless progression from warmongering triumphalism to world-encompassing defeatism is pretty frickin' hard to take.
I am in favor of total isolation because I believed the Iraqi dissidents. I was in favor of this war and the Bush administration and honestly, the price of this intervention was too high. Knowing the cost of being wrong is so high, I don't even want to risk it again. It's simply not worth it.
So yeah, I'm in favor of withdrawing all USA troops from every country, not just Iraq. I do not want the USA to get itself into any more wars, unless the USA itself, or perhaps a very close ally, like the UK, is attacked.
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...ask yourself if this is X or corporate pandering"?!!?!!
If we withdrew from the World and adopted your attitude then sooner or later some aggressor country would threaten our interests (ala Japanese actions in China before Pearl Harbor)
At some point, you have to ask the question, just what the hell were our interests in China prior to World War II? I mean, whatever it was, everything we did for China during World War II didn't buy us a damn thing - 5 years after World War II ended, we were fighting the Chinese in Korea.
Except that history tells us that wars involving "them" have a nasty habit of sucking us in sooner or later
No, we just opportunistically jump into them.
I don't see how you take that lesson and come up with the 'sky is falling' attitude and claim that we can't meet our treaty commitments.
How do you justify to the American people that we should defend these countries? If North Korea invades South Korea, what exactly is the real threat to the United States?
So your solution is to withdraw from those alliances and abandon our treaty commitments to our Allies? I'm still looking for some rationalization for why that wouldn't blow up in our face like it has every other time we've withdrawn from the global community.
Check this out. We can completely withdraw from the global military community without having to abandon any treaty commitments. Even NATO only binds member states to "give aid". It does NOT demand a military response. So, nobody in our alliances is actually obligated to engage in any sort of military response in the event a member is attacked. All of the US military alliance treaties were written to allow the USA to selectively attack some other rival on the theory that they are attacking an ally. But there's nothing that obligates our allies to help us, and they either. So, if an ally of ours is attacked, we could send them a bucket of guns or something, and be off of the legal hook.
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