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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
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.
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...
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.
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 park a truck in the tube, so when I receive an internet is takes longer to come through, because there's not enough room for my internet and other internets.
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.
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.
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...
was never even found after he left the street.
Didn't exactly leave the street. Was removed by Chinese police (he put up no struggle), and then was never heard from again.
I'm sure he's fine. They just wanted to take him back to the station for milk and cookies!
Not to trivialize the censorship issues involved, but if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person. There are plenty of sites that offer language lessons basically for free these days. My favorite is Popup Chinese because their hosts speak standard mandarin and they have a great popup dictionary plugin.
I'd really like to speak with one of these people who learned Chinese from a Web site. In Chinese.
If you want to learn Chinese, take a really good Chinese class. For a couple years at least. And while you're doing that, use sites like popup chinese as practice, auxiliary learning and reinforcement.
Although that site and other similar sites can be accessed for free, if you are on one of the paid plans a lot more features are enabled. The problem is that they're not cheap--like $20/month for the first tier.
There are also plenty of fires behind the smoke. In fact, most of the smoke you are referring to exists largely to convince the 'reasonable' people like yourself that there are no fires.
What better way to hide conspiracies than to convince the logical people that all conspiracy theorists are crackpots. Never you mind that dozens of old conspiracy theories are admitted or uncovered every day. How many crazy whispered crackpot CIA conspiracies were confirmed recently by the director when he declassified documents? Despite them, there are morons who actually believed his line that they were doing so because the CIA is on the up and up today.
I can't speak for all governments but the U.S. government has a long and sordid history of lies and abuse where citizens and rights are concerned. If the government were a witness no prosecutor would put him on the stand with his track record and yet people trust the government and its agents again and again.
The largest conspiracies aren't conspiracies at all, they are emergence behavior or rely on emergence behavior. The wealthy do not need a vast conspiracy to maintain a wealthy elite class that is above the law. Using their wealth and influence they are able to support a system that does that automatically with the aid of millions of people who unwittingly participate in the conspiracy.
'- 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'
There are actually a half dozen cancer 'cures' that haven't made it through FDA trials yet.
'- 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.'
Because of those crazy theories existing you are gullible enough to think that there isn't plenty of underhanded, illegal, and unethical practice by the pharma companies. You think they are good guys trying to make an honest buck?
A good conspiracy is perpetrated by completely unwitting co-conspirators. For instance, look to the car/oil/and fuel distribution industries. They have several layers of bullshit piled onto more bullshit. They promote gas and oil to distract you from alternative fuels, but not really, they actually push certain alternative fuels in order.
In order of preference you should be looking at hybrids, natural gas, hydrogen fuel cells, and ethanol. This conspiracy is an emergence effect. There are portions of said big money industries that stand to make boat loads of cash on any of these technologies or at least to lose less cash. As a result there is tons of money pumped into lobbying and PR.
What are they repressing and distracting you from with this emergence conspiracy? For one, compressed air technology. Vehicles that range from passenger cars to the family SUV are ALREADY IN MASS PRODUCTION that are powered by nothing but compressed air. They are about to be rolled out en mass in Mexico.