Behind China's Great Firewall

DigitalDame2 writes "In light of the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing, more scrutiny is being placed on China's Web-filtering practices. In May, China's technology minister, Wan Gang, told Reuters China he would 'guarantee as much [access] as possible,' defending Web limitations as necessary to protect the country's citizens. Truly understanding this cat-and-mouse game means taking a close look at what exactly the government filters out, how the Great Firewall works, and how others have found ways around it."

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Article w/o ads or extra clickity

[flattop100]

http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a%253D228357,00.asp

Blogs

[goatpunch]

I was in China last month and the only sites that I had any problem accessing were blogs. It seemed that most popular blog sites were completely blocked. Wikipedia, Slashdot, Youtube, Facebook, etc. were all accessible. They don't seem to be using a whitelist though, as my own small unimportant domain worked fine.

In retrospect, blocking blogs isn't such a bad idea...

How it works.

[physman_wiu]

In America, the Internet was originally designed to be free of choke points, so that each packet of information could be routed quickly around any temporary obstruction. In China, the Internet came with choke points built in. Even now, virtually all Internet contact between China and the rest of the world is routed through a very small number of fiber-optic cables that enter the country at one of three points: the Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin area in the north, where cables come in from Japan; Shanghai on the central coast, where they also come from Japan; and Guangzhou in the south, where they come from Hong Kong. (A few places in China have Internet service via satellite, but that is both expensive and slow. Other lines run across Central Asia to Russia but carry little traffic.) In late 2006, Internet users in China were reminded just how important these choke points are when a seabed earthquake near Taiwan cut some major cables serving the country. It took months before international transmissions to and from most of China regained even their pre-quake speed, such as it was.

Thus Chinese authorities can easily do something that would be harder in most developed countries: physically monitor all traffic into or out of the country. They do so by installing at each of these few 'international gateways' a device called a 'tapper' or 'network sniffer,' which can mirror every packet of data going in or out. This involves mirroring in both a figurative and a literal sense. 'Mirroring' is the term for normal copying or backup operations, and in this case real though extremely small mirrors are employed. Information travels along fiber-optic cables as little pulses of light, and as these travel through the Chinese gateway routers, numerous tiny mirrors bounce reflections of them to a separate set of 'Golden Shield' computers.Here the term's creepiness is appropriate. As the other routers and servers (short for file servers, which are essentially very large-capacity computers) that make up the Internet do their best to get the packet where it's supposed to go, China's own surveillance computers are looking over the same information to see whether it should be stopped.

Think again of the real importance of the Great Firewall. Does the Chinese government really care if a citizen can look up the Tiananmen Square entry on Wikipedia? Of course not. Anyone who wants that information will get it-by using a proxy server or VPN, by e-mailing to a friend overseas, even by looking at the surprisingly broad array of foreign magazines that arrive, uncensored, in Chinese public libraries.

What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won't bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?

All the technology employed by the Golden Shield, all the marvelous mirrors that help build the Great Firewallâ"these and other modern achievements matter mainly for an old-fashioned and pre-technological reason. By making the search for external information a nuisance, they drive Chinese people back to an environment in which familiar tools of social control come into play.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall So they are going to let certain IPs get anything they want. So it won't even seem like there is a 'Golden Shield' to most foreigners that visit China for the Olympics.

Terrible

[gigne]

Ugh. A terrible article which you could summarise in one sentence..
"Use a VPN or proxy if you want to use the internet without fear or restriction."

I was hoping for more detailed information on the operational hardware involved in filtering a country, not confirmation it happens, which is already widely known.

blocked sites

[pangloss]

Some of the sites that I know to be blocked:

Blogger
Blogspot
Flickr (only the photo serving subdomains)
Typepad
Wordpress

Formerly blocked, but now open:
Wikipedia
BBC News

As far as I'm aware, the blocks on the blog-related sites are domain or netblock level--not the result of keyword or content-level filtering.

Foreigner Have It the Wrong Way Around

[mutantcamel]

Largely, amongst the well educated, English speaking professional Chinese people that I meet (I've lived in China for 2 years) who are in their mid/late 20's, the reverence and respect they havefor the CCP is probably more fervant tham amongst the older generation who helped to found the People's Republic. The patriostism gives way to nationalism, and I find some of my friends who I had respected as having been able to form their own intelligent opinions on the world at large have descended into China-loving, French-hating lunatics.

Westerners have to try to understand that the generation that's in it's mid-late 20's owe their standard of living and level income to the Communist Party, they and look to the party members for moral guidance. Propaganda, even on the "international" CCTV-9 has reached an all time high with wall to wall interview of people who have lost everything praising the work of the government.

When it comes to Internet censorship, it's largely a joke. Websites can be overcome with any number of web proxies, and even if you can't get to the porn that you want, you can go to the local computer markets in Zhongguancun or Chaoyangmen, where you'll be offered "DVD sex movies". The BBC had been unblocked, but blocks are still in place for servers on Flicker and on Livejournal and Blogspot.

The government here is rather sneaky. They don't say that they actively and specifically filter websites, rather, they ask ISPs to self-censor and these ISP's face heavy fines for allowing undesirable content through. This is the reason that websites that are accessbile in Shanghai aren't accessible in Beijing or other parts of China.

A good project to keep an eye on is Concept Doppler, which has a list of what keywords and phrases are filtered by the GFW. What is interesting is that of all the tests that CD team performed, a certain number of the phrases did managed to get through the filter, showing that the GFW doesn't filter everything all the time, but filters some most of the time, which creates the impression that everything is filtered, and, ultimately, keeps people scared.

Re:Firewall tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and no. According to Erik Laykin of Navigant Consulting there are 3 points that connect China to the interweb (I think maybe Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzho.) The Chinese government is indeed spanning all 3. But considering that you have traffic for over 200 million people flowing through those 3 points, there are hundreds if not thousands of devices scattered all over the country to make up the Golden Shield. Interestingly, many of those devices of censorship were supplied by Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. Long live capitalism!

Try China's Great Firewall by yourself

[pythonist]

You can register an SSH account in a Unix machine located in China and try GFW by yourself

http://www.unix-center.net/uc/reg.php

sorry but the page is in Chinese only

Re:Try China's Great Firewall by yourself

[pythonist]

or you can use 'pythonist' account:

ssh pythonist@x4100.unix-center.net
passwd: slashdotting

pls don't change the passwd

Re:Try China's Great Firewall by yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

I traveled from Shanghai to Kunming and then north into the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) last year. I was in China for a total of 28 days. I had my Linux-based laptop with me the entire time and never had a problem locating an open wireless access point. Nor did I have any problem using SSH to connect to my boxes back in the states. I use my own SquirrelMail based web mail via SSL, and only once in 28 days did I find myself blocked from that stateside box. Their firewall leaks like a sieve.

GFW reflects gap of generations in China

[pythonist]

Having gained my four year college education in University of Science and Tech. of China, I have some experience on GFW. Chinese people's attitude toward GFW reflects gap of old and young generations.

Almost all young Chinese, me included, think GFW is totally stupid and the people who are in charge of the blocking have pig brains. why?

1. CNN/BBS/FalunGong/TibetGIE should not be blocked since nobody in China reads them.

2. Some irrelevant websites such as sourceforge used to be blocked.

However, most of old people(our parent generation) have opposite opinions. They think Internet is full of pornography, additive games, violence and bad guys/gals. Indeed, I know some brilliant high school students including my own nephew ruined by net addition.

However, I think cyber censorship ss more like stupid ISPs' wanting to be "politically right" rather than central gov's direct command.

Another site to test the Firewall

[Anonymous Coward]

This site allows you to test whether a page is accessible from Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong.
http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html