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Free Tools To Evade China's Web Censorship
narramissic writes "The Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) offers a set of free tools that can be used to circumvent Chinese Internet censorship. The group claims approximately 1 million people in China use its tools to access the Internet. And, says Tao Wang, director of operations for GIFC, 'it's a very good time to remind Western reporters that there are such tools.'"
If the websense software on my workplace computer can block this site, I'm pretty sure the Chinese government can too.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Tao Wang to go missing in 5..4..3...
I doubt many western reports will have problems. If you work for a company of any size, the company has a VPN. You log into the company VPN. ( I promise you China does not block them. I live here. ) Once you are logged into your VPN, you surf where ever you want. Plus, it is encrypted - so no spying.
One problem that is not commonly discussed is what I call the "great American firewall". For better or worse, a lot of western sites block all requests from China. It is really annoying if you want to make a few online purchases and you aren't trying to hack their site. I should start to compile a list of specific examples.
"It's a very good time remind Western reporters that there are such tools," said Tao Wang
I don't know. You get a couple hundred (or thousand) reporters getting censored while reporting on a very high-profile event? I think it would do more to call attention to China's policies. They'll talk for months about how hard it was for them to do their jobs and the freedoms they had to live without. If they use these tools, they'll go home afterward and forget all about the fact that they needed them at all.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
That way you won't have to see the cute internet police on your browser every 30 minutes.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I think that the major news outlet will play nice during the Olympics, reporting only State-approved news and events. However, when the Olympics are over and everyone goes home (free from the clutches of the Chinese government and their censorship), then the real reporting on China whill begin.
Working around the censors will be the quickest way to be detained in China for a long time.
soon they will be needed here, in the western world, where instead of stopping you they just slow you down when you go in 'unwanted' direction. does not look there is too much difference to me. they do it for political reasons, we do it for business reasons. either way, people are restricted.
I predict insightful moderated posts about how people are going to be executed or "disappeared" for downloading some software, by people who have never left their own country before.
Yes there are many technical ways of circumventing the Chinese firewall or any other net censorship. The real issue here is that the vast majority won't use them because they can't be bothered, leading to widespread ignorance about issues that really need to be addressed.
The reason censorship works so well is because people are generally lazy, regardless of country or race and don't go hunting for information that isn't spoon fed to them.
So to summarize, the definition of success when it comes to censorship isn't that they stopped 100% of information getting though, but that they stopped it a little, combined with a disproportionate amount of easily digested propaganda leading to an impenetrable wall of ignorance that no little circumvention tools are going to help.
There are 1,313,973,713 people in the PRC.
20.8% (male 145,461,833; female 128,445,739) are 14 years old or younger.
71.4% (male 482,439,115; female 455,960,489) are between 15 and 64 years old.
7.7% (male 48,562,635; female 53,103,902) are over 65 years old.
The population growth rate for 2006 is 0.59%.
The PRC officially recognizes 56 distinct ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Han Chinese, who constitute about 91.9% of the total population.
Large ethnic minorities include the Zhuang (16 million), Manchu (10 million), Hui (9 million), Miao (8 million), Uyghur (7 million), Yi (7 million), Tujia (5.75 million), Mongols (5 million), Tibetans (5 million), Buyei (3 million), and Koreans (2 million).
In the past decade, China's cities expanded at an average rate of 10% annually. The country's urbanization rate increased from 17.4% to 41.8% between 1978 and 2005, a scale unprecedented in human history. 80 to 120 million migrant workers work part-time in the major cities and return home to the countryside periodically with their earnings. Today, the People's Republic of China has dozens of major cities with one million or more long-term residents, including the three global cities of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Severe punishment of people who freely share information bites (1) which are deemed a threat to the functioning of the system (2) by the ruling classes is not only happening in China, you know...
So when is the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) going to offer tools to circumwent our own capitalistic censorship machine? Or do they count censorship as such only if somebody else does it?
(1) aka "files"
(2) aka "intellectual property"
The IOC and the ISPCA are very worried about the Chinese government's plan to shoot down all pigeons as a means to prevent illegal communication to the outside word via carrier birds. Said Li Chung, a government representative- "We thought of putting a giant net over the whole province, but it would just enhance the perception of mass pollution in the area."
The big question is will you be caught circumventing the censorship.
From what I understand, it's not that hard to break through the censorship. But will you leave any tracks behind--however small--for the government to see? That's the big question.
If you just want to read one NYT article, go ahead and chances are nothing would happen to you. But if you plan on doing this day in day out, from your home connection, then a few months down the road you may get a knock on your door in the middle of the night.
Hello,
My antivirus software said the "GIFC Anti-Censorship Tools Bundle" download from the Global Internet Freedom Consortium contained "probably a variant of Win32/Delf trojan."
I am not sure if this is a false positive alarm or a bona-fide infection, but you may want to exercise some caution before installing the software on your computer.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
Introduction to China's Laogai:
Up to 30,000 "Internet Police" monitoring your every move.
"The Laogai institution known as laodong jiaoyang --- commonly abbreviated as
"Laojiao" - also serves as a tool for the Chinese Communist Party in its constant efforts to silence critics and punish political criminals without having to bother with investigations and legal proceedings."
"There is an end to Laogai, but Jiuye (forced job placement) is forever"
" In 1979 and 1980, many jiuye renyuan or âforced-job-placement-personnel" who had completed their sentences but were still forced to labor within the Laogai camps under a policy that denied their release, were finally allowed to return to their homes. Previous to this change in practice, upwards of 90 percent of all Laogai and Laojiao prisoners remained in detention indefinitely under this Jiuye policy even after they had completed their sentences.
"There used to be a saying in the labor camps: "There is an end to Laogai, but Jiuye is forever.""
Laogai:
http://www.laogai.org/hdbook/hb_intro.htm
http://www.laogai.org/news/index.php
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=280233-6
Think "Soviet Gulag".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
Can't happen here?
Ex Machina:
https://tagmeme.com/exmachina/a/002450.html
~hylas
JAP is a free java based anonymizer. It runs as a sort of "proxy" as in you route your internet traffic through a localhost port, but it sends out your data through two or more "mixes" which anonymize your connection. It successfully masks your IP, your location, and most importantly your identity. Its relatively fast for the obvious latency problems that are bound to happen.
JAP
Not that they don't deserve to have access to everything, but it's their regulation and should be somehow respected as the rules and regulations of other countries. The US has a drug policy that the Netherlands would find intolerant, that doesn't give them any rights of providing tools to the people in the US to easily have access to drugs while in the US
Why not? Especially considering that our drug laws may well be unconstitutional, meaning the law is illegal. They had to pass a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw alcohol, why did they not have to amend it to outlaw other drugs?
Whether or not drug laws are constitutional, someone in the Netherlands is not under US law. It might be illegal for me to recieve tools to obtain drugs from someone in the Netherlands, but it would NOT be illegal fro him to provide them. He has every right to supply me with anything his country's laws allow, and I have every right to subvert Chinese law.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Czech dissident writer Zdenek Urbanek once said...
In one respect, we are luckier than you in the free west, because we have learnt to read between the lines, and you believe you have no need; but you do.
George Orwell recognized that western media operates on self-censorship way back in the 40s. He wrote a preface to Animal farm all about it, but the preface itself was censored and never published. Amongst other things, he said...
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. ... [Things are] kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact
For example, if you read the BBC online, you probably know that Hugo Chavez shook the Spanish King's hand recently after their previous spat. Hardly Earth shattering news. Yet you probably won't be aware that Colombian President Alavaro Uribe is under investigation for possible involvement in the planning of a massacre by right wing paramilitaries. The general trend is that bad stories about allies are either ignored or only reported in passing, whereas those about official enemies such as Chavez are accentuated and repeated ad infinitum.
Anyone interested in censorship in the western media should read "Manufacturing Consent" by Hermann and Chomsky, or watch the documentary on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wksCW3ooJ5A