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Behind the Great Firewall: What It's Really Like To Log On From China
alphadogg (971356) writes China makes headlines every other week for its censorship of the Internet, but few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls, or how to get around them. This IDG News Service writer has lived in China for close to six years and censorship has been a near constant, lurking in the background ready to "harmonize" the Web and throw a wrench in his online viewing. It's been especially evident this month. Google's services, which don't follow the strict censorship rules, are currently blocked. How long that will last is unknown, but it coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests earlier this month — an event the Chinese government wants no one to remember.
Just run a Tor obfuscated bridge.
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
As soon as you talk about how to get around the Great Firewall of China...
...that method suddenly stops working.
(Somewhere in Beijing, a Zman adds "*.astrill.com" to the blocklist.)
Beta is censored away.
So it's like a work or school network that covers an entire country. "Few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls, or how to get around them," is total crap. Many, many people know exactly what it's like. Plenty of people outside China have been fired, expelled, or jailed for getting around access controls. Kids today are spoiled brats who grow up with home Internet and no restrictions as long as mommy pays the Internet bill. They have no comprehension of what it was like to have school or work be the only Internet access available.
It's nice to want things.
Thing about it is, if China's ruling party could hold on to power without committing further abuses then time would probably actually be on their side for forgetting about Tiananmen. After all, my own country committed terrible atrocities throughout its existence and we simply look at those transgressions in a historical context, but between limiting the amount of time that our leaders are in power (at least the President) and peacefully transitioning between those leaders makes it easier to let go. China doesn't have any of that going for them.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I lived in China for 10 years. I don't like their censorship but I have to admit, they are very good at it. And they've developed something that the NSA can only wet dream about. I shudder to think how much computing power is used. They don't simply block content, they also modify it (text and images, particularly). For example, if you're looking at some standard western porn (white man fucking a white woman) they run image filters to shrink the penis size. There are some image artifacts but if you weren't familiar with white cock you'd probably mistake them for jpg compression. Interestingly, they don't shrink black cock.
Before you get your panties in a bunch, i am NOT equating the censorship situation in China to the US.
But here in the west, hundreds of millions fall all over themselves to buy the latest Apple or Android shiny. And what does that mean?
Apple holds an iron grip over what you are permitted to run on your device. So far, they have just used this control to prohibit things that "compete" with other Apple products, or which "violate the harmony of the device", like new launchers, or E-book readers that let you read the Kama Sutra. But it's the same underlying mechanisms of control over computing devices.
Or you buy an Android device, and Google logs everything you ever do with the damn thing. Has all your email. Recordings of your voice. Where you were when.
None of that means we're in the same state as China. But it DOES mean we can get to the same state as China, with but a tiny little step. A small change of government, a public moral panic, a new terrorist attack, whatever the excuse is. We're building all the mechanisms. Then we're buying them like good little sheep.
Maybe we should look to China as a warning for where this goes.
Who is 'they'?
I live in China. Everyone I know hops the GFW with ease. It is a non-issue on laptops and cell phones.
These guys have a storefront in Shanghai:
http://vpninja.net/
You go to the store, you pay in Chinese currency and they give you a log in. It is fast and reliable.
Lots of people I know use Astrill. (astrill.com)
Of course anyone who is actually worried about security will set up their own server abroad and use putty or OpenVPN to access YouTube.
...few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls, or how to get around them...
Well, there are the millions that visit China each year, and anyone who's ever bothered setting up a VPN connection so they could FaceTime with family or whatever.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
"And we'll block any web site that says there is!"
I'd like to be able to VPN into china to poke around on the web and see just how much is blocked. Any open services out there that do that?
They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.
Who is 'they'?
At a personally uncritical time, I remember seeing a clip a few years ago of U.S. President Truman being pissed while storming out of some international game changing economic summit after the second world war (in the late 1940's). Being asked what happened, he responded with "They're trying to set it up so that they'll put all of us, everyone, permanently in debt forever." or something to that effect.
I've been trying to relocate it with no success to see how much of it was misunderstood by my personal opinions that I may have put into his comment. Does anyone recall anything about this? Was it just a specific temporal non-issue or something more on a grander somewhat conspiratorial scale?
He was talking about the US being saddled with paying for the lions share of the post-war recovery efforts.
Strict censorship of the net, check! Suppression of video evidence of the army massacre of unarmed civilians in 2010, check!
Arrests of protestors, check! Missing 300+ people, arrested and never released, check! Setting up their own social network.. and planning to block Facebook.. check!
The place is more like North Korea every day. With it's own tinpot dictator in military uniform.
I'm a chemistry teacher at a private school in Kunming, China. I use a VPN to get around. First of all half the battle is the terrible infrastructure here. I use a VPN to access everything I need to but I am constantly in a battle to stay connected with my 1Mb/s 500ping connection. If you don't have a VPN you are pretty crippled for most common sites like Google and social media. BTW Slashdot works fine without a VPN.
1. Demand democracy.
2. Convince someone else to follow and on and do the same (including convincing someone else.)
I have to say the "Not So Great Firewall" is rather sad and thoroughly ineffective. Not to mention most people in China dont even know that China Telecom offers a non throttled service for overseas content. I have been downloading and uploading at impressive figures for a almost 14 years. As for VPN's , Proxies or SSL tunnels in all honesty they all work and they cant block them all.
Censorship makes me laugh because I can find every censored subject just by searching in a non common language. Swear people only think English and Chinese are the only languages in the world.
Another subject is that Chinese officials even laugh at the firewall and even use tunnels as well. The firewall only exists because old out of touch neanderthals are in charge of the censorship and PR Department. When they die off in a few years we will no longer even have to talk about this.
So a lot of the popular porn sites were blocked when I was there last year, but luckily the new TLDs hadn't made it to their radar yet so a site like porn.xxx wasn't blocked :P
I've spent some time in various parts of China. I simply set up 2 AWS micro instances running SQUID listening only on localhost and then ssh tunneled my laptop into them (I set up several ports for sshd to listen on just in case they blocked one or more). Had no problems. This has been known to work for quite some time reliably. Now and then you'd get a slowdown or your connections would drop, but overall it worked fine. Fire up your SSH client, use the -L option to tunnel a local port over to squid (and the -p option if you need to use an alternate ssh port) and you are all set. I upsed 2 machines just in case they got wise to the first one I'd have a fallback, but they didn't bother it.
Now, a friend of mine that used this technique set up a machine in his basement, and some nice chinese hackers broke into it and rummaged around. So you may find that you COULD get some attention this way, and you probably want to be not-too-foolish about how you utilize your nice little door to the world. In my case I just used it to browse my favorite sites, do some email, and a few things like that.
Its also worth noting that the GFW doesn't seem to do much with non-http protocols. It is known to block most VPN software, but Skype for instance works fine (though again, I wouldn't count on it being safe from prying eyes, and skype is known to leak certain types of information).
Honestly, I think Chinese internet sensorship is intended more to control the information flow INSIDE China and stop people from getting together and DOING anything political. They rarely bother about what people SAY, as long as it isn't "lets get together and club some Communists over the head tomorrow". The other danger is if you talk about specific people, like local officials. Anything that sounds like an actionable complaint is probably unwise. Idle talk OTOH? I don't think they care that much. They might delete it, but basically only a small fraction of Chinese people are stupid enough to bother saying anything like that, or have the time and energy for agitation vs finding gainful employment and some sort of living situation.
A LOT! I don't want your average bozo website running any script on my machine anyway...
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Some set up constant tunnels. Personally I use StrongVPN when not at my office or on office network, so it's sorta like this: Most of my internet use does not involve a proxy OR VPN, and is perfectly fine. When I need YouTube or Hulu or something, I open StrongVPN L2TP through San Fran. When I'm at work I'm typically going thru a proxy for common services we use like google services or whatever and need no configuration on whichever device I am using. My network connection at home is 20mbit fibre, typically when I'm NOT on VPN I can download torrents or stream videos from non-youtube sources fast, when I AM on VPN I can typically stream high quality YouTube/Hulu without buffering issues..gotta have me some Shark Tank! I've been primarily in China since 2003, and can tell you - for anyone slightly technically inclined, the GFW is not an issue, and never really has been.. the occasional biggest problem is when they try to disrupt encrypted traffic and it grinds VPNs to a snailmail pace.
I've lived in Shanghai for three years. Yes - certain sites are blocked, but as other posters have said, there are plenty of VPN solutions that get round it. I use Astril, and there's a little bit of traffic shaping that goes on that means you may need to switch VPN servers once in a while, but other than that the biggest problem is when everybody in my apartment block tries to stream from Netflix at the same time!! And that's not a China problem. We're lucky, we have high bandwidth fibre broadband to our apartment, and assuming we don't have a contention problem I can stream Netflix and BBC iPlayer fron the UK via my VPN. Occasionally we have to give up, but not often. At the moment Google isn't so much blocked as unbearably slow (that's often the symptom, not a real block) - but again the VPN solves that problem. It's a minor irritant, but really nothing more. I suspect that it's far worse in places like Saudi Arabia.
It seems a strange sentiment to express, on a technical site.
I've never been to China, and yet I know EXACTLY what their internet access is like. Anyone here can find out for themselves in 10 minutes flat, by hopping on a proxy located in China, and surfing around.
The only extra bit of knowledge that I gained through my extensive time dealing with it, is how incredibly random, frequently changing, and therefore frustrating and utterly-pointless the IP bans are. Send enough traffic over an IPSec tunnel in a short enough period of time, and expect it to be suddenly blocked one day, only to work again in just a few days.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Another way the Chinese evade censorship is to use oblique terms and references, many of which are quite funny. The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon is a compilation of them. (In Mandarin, "grass-mud horse" sounds very close to "fuck your mother" and is a way of evading and poking fun at censorship of vulgar content.)
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
It's precisely because the middle class sleeps. They are glorified slaves of the great powers and turn a blind eye to injustice, not aware they are the next in line to be eaten alive.
A Google free internet? Sign me up! China is looking better and better every day.
The government isn't blocking Tienanmen square because they want people to forget, they are blocking it because it never happened. It's western propaganda by the united states. So rather than try to avoid the law and be a criminal why don't you be a constructive member of society and not partake in these western provocations.
Please reread his post. If your reply still makes sense, go back to 5th grade to improve reading comprehension skills.