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Architect of China's Great Firewall Embarrassed After Needing To Use VPN (shanghaiist.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Fan Binxing, architect of the China's infamous Great Firewall, was put in the embarrassing position of having to use a VPN in front of a live audience when trying to access a blocked web page. Fang Binxing was giving a speech on internet safety at his alma mater, the Harbin Institute Technology. During the speech, he presented a defense for internet sovereignty and used North Korea's own version of the system as a talking point. Things got awkward really fast, however, when he attempted to access blocked web pages hosted in South Korea to demonstrate his point. From there his speech went from being a defense of the Firewall to a demonstration of its stupidity. Unable to access the websites he needed to continue his speech, Fang somewhat unexpectedly resorted to the same illicit tool which all expats in China are all familiar with: the beloved VPN. This raises one question: Is China's Great Firewall that easy to circumvent, or are members of the government treated differently than normal citizens?
American with a Chinese wife here, I was in China last year. I set up vpn service before I left, installed the android app, and it worked in china just fine. You won't have as much luck with TOR, it will be slow or unavailable a lot of the time (tried that too just for giggles when I was there). A large number of foreign born Chinese that are there for tourism or business use VPNs, usually with exit nodes in hong kong, korea, or japan. Several people there including at least one Chinese born one happily explained to me what apps to install and what vpn service to get if I wanted facebook, twitter and google. I don't know what the theoretical legal ramifications for using these services are, but enforcement is near zero. I assume the CCP is happy enough that the less tech savvy aren't accidentally exposed to what they see as subversive material through western media, Wikipedia, and twitter. Those that are tech savvy enough to seek it out likely have contacts in other countries and travel abroad anyway.
It really is the same psychological trick that the Communist regimes have been using since the beginning. They've never been able to censor information completely, even in the pre-Internet age it was an impossible technical problem to fully solve. So you play a psychological warfare game instead. So long as the citizens think you have the ability, and that if they read a forbidden book or a forbidden website, that somewhere the vast colossus of state security, a light will flash and a klaxon will go off, and very serious men will appear at your doorstep and you won't be seen again. You reinforce that by making the odd citizen disappear here and there, to build up society's paranoia. The whole point is to make people police themselves.
That's why the Great Firewall, and the versions that other countries, even some so-called "liberal" democracies are creating, are as much a form of security theater as an actual control on reading forbidden content. These firewalls are like a polygraph test, they are effective because people believe they are effective, so they don't need to actually get anywhere near 100% success rate in blocking content and recording attempts. Heck, I doubt they even have to approach 50%.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Or his personal computers where he works are outside the GFW, so he didn't realize the pages were blocked.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
In graduate school, I asked a Chinese student about this. He said that anyone can get past the filters in China. He did it all the time. He also said, no one cared. The Chinese government didn't care if you did, but they cared if you talked about it. If you start posting things, blocked links or discussing politics in public forums in China, you can expect a knock on your door, fines, jail or worse. But as long as you don't talk about it, you can view whatever the fuck you want.
Blocking 99% is good enough. China is not trying to totally block outside information. They are just trying to keep a lid on organized dissent. Western news publications are commonly available at newsstands, although an occasional story on Tibet, or Xinjiang, or Xi Jinping's offshore bank accounts, will be torn out. Most urban Chinese are better informed about what is going on in the world than typical Americans. China is actually more worried about social networks, where people can organize outside of party control. So Facebook is blocked, and instead they have WeChat and QQ, which are monitored and controlled.
Also, the Chinese Firewall is not "stupid". It may be evil, but it is not stupid. It is very effective at accomplishing its goals.
China has never even tried to implement a classless society. In fact, they did the opposite, by strengthening feudalism and binding the poor to the land. Everyone in China is issued a Hukou identification card at birth, that has their hereditary class printed on it. If you have the "wrong" class, as 80% of the population does, then you can be deprived of public education, housing, and even food. 99% of the 30 million people that starved to death during the Great Leap Forward had low class (rural) hukous. Today, about half the children in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, have no right to attend public school, or go to a public hospital.
One reason that the Chinese and outsiders see the Tiananmen Square incident very differently, is that the protesters never called for reform of the Hukou system. Outsiders see the protesters as heroes standing against oppression. Many Chinese see them as spoiled offspring of the urban elite trying to preserve their privileges.
Any software designer worth his salt creating a firewall will also keep up to date on methods to bypass that firewall. So I'm not at all surprised he had a VPN all set up and handy.
The real point of the firewall is probably like the driving code in the U.S. With regular law, what you do is legal unless explicitly stated to be illegal. But by loading up the books with thousands of little laws that everyone occasionally violates in the course of their everyday lives, you invert that situation. The government can just ignore enforcement of the law for 99.9% of people, but if you raise their ire they can arrest you and cite you for violating all those little laws that everyone else breaks every day. You are guilty as a byproduct of living, the government just picks and chooses which of the guilty need to be punished.