Slashdot Mirror
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."
I honestly want to see pictures of that thing. I mean, every single packet that goes in and out of China goes through a giant box. That thing has to be huge to filter any sort of serious bandwidth.
Until the USA starts filtering my access to the BBC, I don't really know why they even brought that up -- its just like workplace filtering at any other job.
This is an illustration of the slippery slope and we all should show this to anyone who wants to censor or regulate the internet for obscene material or to "protect the children".
As a matter of fact, here's a perfect illustration how the "think of the children" rhetoric can be and is used for oppression of a people.
Protect them?
PROTECT THEM???
From WHAT??? Other than finding out what a murderous bunch of thugs run their craptastic fascist gov't?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Now that I think about it, the way China is right now is strikingly similar to how view an Internet in which Net Neutrality has been soundly defeated and one can only visit approved sites. There are, of course a few differences...govm't approval vs. corporate sponsorship. But the end result of a strictly regulated Internet experience remains the same. Or I could be completely full of it.
.-.
It's more the pity that the biggest threat would be no one showing up to offer support to the Butchers of Beijing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a%253D228357,00.asp
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...
Worst BBC News Stories
Physics is imagination in a straight jacket. ~John Moffat
...necessary to protect the country's citizens. It's not protecting Chinese citizens that's the problem. It's protecting the rest of the world from the Chinese citizens that concerns me.One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
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
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.