Slashdot Mirror
Explore the Web From China
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Download.com:
"It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. It doesn't even offer you any xiao long bao or pu'er tea for your troubles. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there."
Does this plugin actually proxy your web browsing through a Chinese host? Or does it just randomly mess with your requests?
Kind of reminds me of apt-gentoo.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Can it recreate the fear that making the wrong post on a blog will get you arrested?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I hear there is an update coming soon that simulates what its like to disagree with the government in China. It's pretty cool. You install the plugin and a tank will instantly appear and run you over.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I just found in TFA where it says that the plugin routes you through a Chinese proxy.
I can't imagine this open proxy will last long.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
We should make a system that loads every page you visit from 3~4 countries. Then have a notification if any differences are found, and what they are. It'd be interesting to see who's blocking what. Curious about Australia recently, I like hearing about the supposed good guys doing bad things. It makes the 'i hate commies' people uncomfortable, atleast enough to shut it.
Or you could wait a bit, and just surf from Australia. Yay.
That's nothing. I made a plugin to simulate internet experience from North Korea. I will release it if I can get on the slashdot front page.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
When I was using the internet in various cafes in Beijing, I didn't notice any blocks from sites I wanted to visit. I could update my livejournal, and ssh to my computer in America, so I'm not really sure what the great firewall really could accomplish. I mean, I could feasibly tunnel all of my connection through the ssh link, after all.
That said, while I was ssh-ed into my home computer, a Beijing police officer came in and started walking around looking at people's computers...
Do you feel your internet viewing is a little too free? Do you run out of things to say when the conversation turns to "the suppression of speech?" Are you feeling left out of this whole government oppression kick?
Well, don't be! Come joy in the fun: you too can experience all the joys of censorship. In no time you'll see this whole freedom of information thing is overrated. Act now!
I was on there for like five minutes when I landed on Chairman Mao's old GeoCities page. Man, how time flies! If you haven't seen it before there's a cool animated .gif of "Mao's Corner" being written in Mao-style calligraphy. The last update indicated that his urine output was down to 290cc a day. We'll miss ya, big guy. Drink more fluids on the other side.
A ghastly article that is shoddy on details. It barely mentioned it was a proxy (as I was also wondering if this was a simulation). The article describes that the toolbar will display your new IP, but the screenshots do not show it.
Also, in regards to the extension:
I do, however, respect the point of showing the rest of the world how the web "feels" inside of China.
On a related note, does anyone have a list of proxies organized by country? As a web developer, I would love to test various web sites that geo-code the IP and dynamically display different content.
Anyone knows of a simple way to temporarily slow down your internet connection on Mac OS X?
It would be nice to be able to test various connection speeds for websites. I need to test multiple browsers, so a Firefox plug-in won't do.
Many ISPs outside of China, ban entire blocks of addresses that originate inside China.
If you happen to be browsing from a computer that has an IP address corresponding to a range that has been banned in North America, as an example, you will find it hard to reach various sources that people in NA can reach without issue. Example: GoDaddy hosted sites.
This has nothing to do with anything related to 'The Great Firewall'...
I for one look forward to being able to bypass my draconian Australian censorship by proxying into China!
Thank you, my benevolent Chinese overlords! BTW, what's the real story behind Tian
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Also, I wonder who runs this Chinese proxy? Is it the Chinese government's? Is there any reason to trust the proxy for any purpose except testing?
No joke one time I searched for a banned chinese phrase on baidu.com, and I was banned from all Google domains for 24 hours. Blocked at the IP address level. Either Google or Comcast are extending the Chinese firewall to the US. Other sites worked and I could access Google from a proxy server. I emphasize that I live in the United States.
And for any avid linux users out there, the community could really benefit from some updated documentation on how to properly use tc mostly the only documentation is the source, which is great for completeness and accuracy but not helpful at all if you want to get something done in less than 3 days.
You mean like this one?
If you want to have more "interesting" test you should try Vietnam, it also has the same censorship as China, if not worse, because they don't have a system like the great firewall so they decided to block everything, for example a few months ago the whole wordpress and blogspot got blocked (lucky for my, they just unblocked it lately), and the internet connection quality is just plain suck.
And realised it was blocking sites that are actually open through my ISP (I'm in Beijing).
Anyway it's not the blocking of sites that's a worry, it's the moderation of forums for sensitive issues. Check out www.chinasmack.com for some nice tidbits. Sometimes they get posts translated before they're removed.
Almost no one in China cares about the firewall. The only sites the Chinese want access to are already on their side - the majority of them can't read anything but Chinese anyway.
It's really only foreigners that care.
Max.
explore the web from china!
practice christianity in saudi arabia!
be an outspoken journalist in russia!
be a part of the world tour of persecution!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The net there did tend to be slow, and a decent amount of sites were blocked. Porn is hard to get (not that I looked, haha) and some news sites were blocked. CNN would not work, but Fox, MSN and the BBC would. Google worked, but Google image search would not. Very hit and miss. And a couple times sites would work for a couple days, then disappear. The thing that surprised me is that it is very hard to get English versions of popular webpages. Site you are used to seeing are suddenly totally different when you log on from a Chinese IP. Not really censorship, just audience targeting. I would recommend a trip to China though. My main take-away is that the people are just about like all the others. Most are decent, some suck, some are great. Very homogenized though, in nine days in Dalian (6 million people) I saw about 10 westerners and they were all from Europe. I saw one group of black people in Beijing. I have never had so many people stare at me in my life, it was like one of those dreams when you suddenly discover everyone in staring because you are naked.
"It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason."
heh, I thought, Comcast was only in Americas.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
With all the hardware and manpower they have available to operate the great Chinese Firewall(tm), I wonder why are not offering it as a internet service.
:-)
;-)
They could make options oriented to different customers. For example, other authoritarian countries with different censorship requirements, but also children access from schools, public institutions or companies where access to "certain" pages have/must/should be restricted.
They can also offer services through their "Internet commentators," or so-called Fifty Cent Party, to sway public opinion online, much like viral marketing works in the private sector around the world. They could rent that service too. Useful for PR, political campaigns, marketing or anything that has something to do with influencing(manipulating) public opinion in most different directions
They could even offer a free option, with adds, so people can try first. Adds could be used to promote China's world-view/companies/products and tourism
If China wants to make inroads in the service market, it is a good idea to use something already in place that no one else has. I think they really have a hidden unused asset in that "Great China Firewall". They also have a catchy brand name! I hope they have already registered it!
Use "The Great China Firewall! Milliards of satisfied customers already enjoy it! great and reliable service guaranteed"
As someone who lives in China and travels extensively within the country, I can tell you that everything depends on the city. Internet is slow generally, but sites that work in Shanghai or Wuhan or don't necessarily work in Beijing or Nanjing. Most every site that I've ever wanted to visit and is not something that would be obviously banned (not hard to guess what these topics might be) has been available. One site I haven't been able to get for whatever reason is the Huffington Post, though I can access cached copies and referenced articles...
Did you check that your computer had the right key when you ssh'ed into your home computer?
I understand that they do a Man In The Middle Attack on every ssh connection!
I ran Firefox under another, limited user, and installed the Firefox add on.
I noticed that after entering any censored item, all my connections further are disconnected.
Anyway, after some playing, and while being under using a Chinese address, Firefox noticed me that there's an add-on update.
I stupidly updated, thinking "great! maybe it'll solve some problems". But the thing is that the add-on updated under the Chinese address! It might have been a fake, tampered update.
I had a paranoia attack and erased the other limited user.
hemi
Well, considering both Obama and McCain are left-wing...
FAIL
here we go with the weekly China bashing article. It's such a shame /. has jumped on the China bashing bandwagon and keeps on publishing ONLY negative articles about China. Shame, shame.
I read this and thought, let's Slashdot China!
I've just got back from four months living in Shanghai for work. I got to the point where I installed a proxy on a machine in California and used it over the VPN. I'd be sitting at home using Facebook, and after 15 minutes it would get slower and slower, and then start timing out. I'd clear the DNS cache on my Mac, take Firefox off and online, and then it would start working again, for a while. Or maybe not. Websites that were fast at home, could't be accessed from the office in Shanghai, but could be from our office in Hangzhou, and websites I couldn't access at home, I could at work. Sometimes I couldn't access MSDN from work, and contemplated going home to work (until I setup the proxy). I visited Australia and found the internet blazingly fast, even though it was even further away. The internet was totally random and unreliable. It's so good to be back somewhere where the internet works.
How did they figure the china firewall is the cause for slow browsing? Or maybe it's the fact you and all people using this plugin are funnelling their traffic through a single proxy accross the globe...
... because it feels so good when I stop.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Hi all , just want to tell my experience in FRANCE... well internet is damn blocked/censored. usually not on ethical topics or such(but who knows), but more on the commercial side of things... try go any corporate website outside France... it's unable to connect/timeout all the time... but when you switch to .fr version it magically works... (ebay for example....totally unusable)
it looks like some form of protectionism...but who knows the extent of the censoring....
Information internet should be detached and uncontrolled from the the 'services' internet, this
way our governments wont lay their filthy hands on it.
my2cnts
mrn
Welcome to the newest in FUD technology! Which just happens to be the same as the old version, but stated more emphatically - again, again, again, ... [echoes fading into to the background] - This time from samzenpus; well, who would have thought it?
As others have noted, if you were to actually go to China and try the internet, you would find that it works pretty much the same as elsewhere. And just as elsewhere you will sometimes have trouble with your connection - last I was in Beijing (~1 month ago) I found that I couldn't connect to Wikipedia. So I waited half an hour and could. The same thing can happen in UK; and my daughter, in Denmark, can't connect to RyanAir for some reason - don't ask why I don't know and I don't care. But I don't automatically assume that this is because the government is trying to block anything.
But they do have censorship - not unlike what several ISPs in the West do, I hear. Not many years ago certain ISPs wouldn't let you access certain websites because they had naughty words on them; one of the funnier ones was a BBS for birdwatchers, where they used filthy language such "A magnificent cock robin" and "the lovely tits outside my window". In China, we are told, you are not allowed to discuss "democracy" or "Tibet"; it may even be true. I can certainly see their point - one thing is that words like "democracy" and "freedom" come cheap, but is American style democracy and/or freedom the only or even the best there is? Perhaps they just want to figure out the right way for themselves; I would think that is their right.
And the same goes for religion - if they just open the doors, they know very well that the country will be flooded with America peddlers trying to push their McJesus, the fast-food version of Christian faith. As far as I can see, the world would be a better place if there were less mind-benders around. Apart from that, I don't think the Chinese people will tolerate being flooded with foreign religions any more than we in West generally do; if we care about the freedom of the Chinese people, shouldn't we respect their freedom to say no?
Then, of course, there is the security aspect of the thing - I think all Americans can understand that one, considering that muslims and anybody who looks vaguely Middle-Eastern is automatically considered suspect by a major section of Americans. Having a large percentage of your population influenced by American fundamentalist Christians, who openly declare that they are enemies of the Chinese state, is not something they see as attractive, I imagine.
Wow, now I can get a feel what it will be like here when the government implements its thinkofthechildrenâ filter!
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
No you stupid moderator! This is not flamebait! Try connecting to an ssh server through China, and you'll see that the server ssh key changes every time, which means: Man In The Middle.
(And no, I'm not talking about the Middle Spoon here. It's not a good thing)
It's never mentioned where the extension comes from (it's apparently from http://chinachannel.hk). Why wouldn't you link back to the original project page, or even mention who created the extension that you are posting about? What, you trying to pass of this piece of software as Download.com's/your own, because that's kinda what it looks like from the post! I gleamed this information from opening up and extracting the XPI myself (well, I guess a google search might have sufficed, too) to see how this thing worked. From chinachannel.hk's about us (http://chinachannel.hk/#about_us):
"The add-on is based on Jeremy Gillick's Switch Proxy add-on, for which we are very thanksful [sic] (and if you are looking for a more functional proxy tool his project is what you're looking for)."
, but on a more realistic scale of political parties worldwide, the GOP would be a very conservative nationalist party, and the dems a center-right party.
We DO have genuinely left-wing parties here in the states, but they aren't allowed into the debates (which are controlled by the 2 major parties) so most folks never hear about them. I'm talking about the Green Party, Socialist Party USA, Socialist Worker's party, Revolutionary Communist Party, Worker's World Party, etc.
Anyone who thinks Obama or the Dems represent any kind of "left" or progressive ideology really need to wake up.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
This is old news as I heard about it a whole three days ago but anyway... I haven't seen anyone mention of the alternate use of using this plugin which is to go on Baidu and download music/videos/etc. because about ten days ago I believe Baidu was closed off to foreign countries due to external pressure.
I often go to a local Chinese supermarket (I live in Europe) and the owners there are always watching some downloaded Chinese TV series so this must be great for people like them as well as language learners like me that download Chinese music and lyrics to learn new words.
Once they implement the Freedom Proof Fence.
1. the idea of a democracy is to elect a representative of the people OF THAT COUNTRY ONLY. consideration of ideology outside that country is baseless, pointless, and undemocratic. in that respect, the democrats are a full representation of the left, and the republicans a full representation of the right, for the country of the united states, which is the only morally and intellectually valid geographical region you can use to determine ideological center
2. you choose to choose the median for determining right versus left on the world. not only is this wrong for the reason mentioned above, but your ideological sample is way off. if instead you were grouping the usa in with european countries, you would be correct (note that europe and canada is trending right nowadays though, and in fact in europe the far right is resurgent)
furthermore, a true world sampling of ideologies would also include countries like iran, saudi arabia, egypt, malaysia... countries that make the usa look like the far left. in which case, you can honestly say that considering a location for the ideological center of the united states puts that country at the center of the world. to the ideological left of the usa: plenty of countries. to the ideological right of the usa: plenty of countries
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The result is surprisingly positive: Many of these sites were unblocked, especially the Chinese wikipedia was almost unblocked; only a few pages still didn't load.
What still failed were sourceforge downloads from Taiwan, and Chinese language sites dealing explicitly with Tibet.
I didn't find any English site blocked.
All this corresponds to a much more friendly tone in Chinese media. Taiwan is called a "friend" and a "partner" now. Tibetian Buddhism is honoured quite openly. Even Japan is getting compliments, which were hard to find last year because of the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre.
Of course, I made only a small snapshot, YMMV.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
Actually, it seems to me like there is plenty of smoke for which no fire has ever been found, and for which it's been even proven that a fire never existed. And increasingly more there are agencies (e.g., PR agencies) _paid_ to create fake smoke to convince you to buy someone's snake oil. Astroturfing, buzz marketing campaigns, PR campaigns, think-tanks, fake news, FUD campaigns, etc, you name it. There's a whole industry whose job is to make lots of smoke, and hope you're stupid enough to believe that there might be a fire there after all.
In fact, I'd propose that as the mark of the modern-day gullible guy. That innocent belief that there must be some truth in it, or those guys wouldn't say it. Sometimes even to the extent that if it were a lie, surely nobody would be _allowed_ to write it on a web page. Ignoring all the evidence that some people earn their living with selling you lies, half-truths, and stuff that would technically be true except it's handpicked out of context and arranged into pointing in whatever direction they want to point.
What makes something news is the evidence that it indeed happened, not the amount of second-hand smoke that tries to point at a non-existent fire.
Otherwise, if you just go by "there is no smoke without fire", you might as well go help that nigerian widdow get her millions already, since there's plenty of "smoke" by now. There's millions of people who've received emails about it after all. With that much smoke there must be some fire there.
And just for the sake of annoying the local crackpots, there's plenty of smoke about:
- spiritism / magic / paranormal stuff, in spite of a still unclaimed 1 million dollars Randi prize for anyone who can prove having such powers (not to mention Houdini and many others before Randi)
- that some miracle pill having been invented in Russia / China / whatever-far-and-exotic-place that cures all diseases, regardless of whether they're bacterial, fungal, viral, DNA-damage or auto-immune (hint: they're massively different things), and will apparently even grow back your destroyed pancreas, because it cures auto-immune diabetes too! Only some nebulous pharma conspiracy keeps them from talking about it.
- that while millions of doctors and nurses and pharma investors and managers die of cancer every year, all would rather die in horrible pain than admit there's a cure for cancer and use it to save themselves
- spooky mind-probe rays. Where do you think "tin foil hat" came from?
Etc.
All of those exist, and some even make millions for the snake-oil peddlers, because, basically, some people are gullible enough to think there must be a fire there if there's so much smoke.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
While studying abroad in Shanghai, I was given the task of writing a report on the Tiananmen Square massacre. Finding my efforts stymied at every turn, I sought the advice of a compatriot. He then expounded upon the merits of an ISP which is oft maligned by nerds of every nationality....AOL. All I had to do was sign on and not only was my thirst for knowledge quenched, but all of my deepest carnal desires satisfied. And to cyberon, you foolishly speak of learning Chinese as if it is but an overnight endeavor. But what I find even more surprising is that a linguistic scholar of your caliber is not even aware of ChinesePod.com!