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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?
I believe that's two questions....however, there is only one answer.
He'll be introduced to "The Great Firing Squad of China"
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
So he just happened to have a VPN and an account all ready and set to go or is this a normal thing? I'm guessing it's the latter. I'm not sure why you'd be embarrassed about it. It's not like he just happened to notice while being shown live. He had one already there, installed, and an account configured.
By the way, I've been to China and, as near as I can tell, everyone that I met had a VPN - usually one of the 'free' ones that you load up in your browser as an extension. And no, they didn't seem embarrassed about it. Then again, they weren't live and the person who configured the firewall.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The answer is in the question.
I would go one step further, the Chinese are supplying 'approved' VPN IP's for their government people, IP's that are probably green listed in the firewall.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Yes and Yes.
Yes it's that easy to circumvent, and yes they are treated differently.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This raises one question: Is China's Great Firewall that easy to circumvent, or are members of the government treated differently than normal citizens?
If only we had a website the covered this sort of stuff ... oh right, we do! New VPN IP addresses probably take a while for them to identify the traffic on and block. But there are plenty of services like HMA that constantly roll out new ip addresses. So as long as you're a mouse willing to play whackamole with your cat overlords ... Annoying, yes, but that's the definition of the internet in China.
In response to the second part, that is always true regardless of the answer to the first part. Not only are members of the government are treated differently but also their families. The "party" class enjoys many many perks. Unmonitored VPN connections would be laughable compared to their insider trading, disregard for the law and instant attack dogs they routinely utilize.
While you're accepting suggestions, why isn't my aforementioned article linked in the "You may like to read:" section of this page? Those stories seem to have nothing to do with China's firewall yet a simple google search shows a whole slew of those stories on Slashdot. I think you could get timothy's family to help you track that stuff if you would return his body to them. They only want closure, it doesn't matter if it has to be a closed casket funeral!
My work here is dung.
Was it a demonstration of the "stupidity" of a firewall doing it's job (why he had to access those sites is not clear from TFS to me, nor what he tried to achieve with it), or the human stupidity of someone not properly preparing a presentation?
Here's perhaps a useful study about circumvention tools and usage, and what are the most common reasons to use them: https://www.openitp.org/pdfs/C... It's from 2013 though. Anyway, from all the bit over 1000 respondents only 2 had never used any tool.
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.
Seriously as engineers we need to have enough balls to say no and stand up to requests from employers to design/implement anything who's ultimate use is to do something immoral, such as suppressing individual freedom.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/cont...
Giiven the indisputable evidence that he actually did circumvent the Chinese firewall, I would love it if the Chinese arrested this joker. If I was Chinese I would have already filed a complaint against him.
as long as you have shell access (doesn't even need to be root level) to an outside unix box running ssh, the great firewall is doomed. Its so easy to use putty to tunnel HTTP traffic, that almost anyone can do it.
http://www.techrepublic.com/bl...
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Coulda just connected to any of the various wifi hot-spots all the hotels etc have over there with built in VPN!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"... but some are more equal than others."
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
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.
How is this "evidence of its stupidity"? How does that even follow? If anything, it is evidence of its effectiveness. The website was deemed harmful to the citizens by the government, and it was blocked. Even the creator couldn't access it. I'd say, job well done.
Are members of the government treated differently from normal citizens? How is this even a question? Of course Communist governments think that intelligent people like Party members should be treated differently from the Great Unwashed and the laws they pass don't apply to them. Hell, that attitude has practically 100% acceptance in Washington DC among Democrats and Republicans alike.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
There is only one answer, and offshore trust funds for China's Ruling Elites are the method to arrive at that answer.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Fang somewhat unexpectedly resorted to the same illicit tool which all expats in China are all familiar with: the beloved VPN.
No he didn't. He just used a VPN. VPNs are not illegal, they are not banned, people don't get in trouble for using them, and every multinational corporation doing business in China inadvertently bypasses the great firewall anyway. What is illegal is to view certain types of content but this does not include things that the wall blanket bans. Likewise China's VPN administrators attempt to counteract circumvention by blocking known VPN providers that exist for the purpose of bypassing the great wall, yet no one to my knowledge has ever been prosecuted for running a VPN. Also it's not just expats that are familiar with VPNs. They are a big part of the internet experience for the common Chinese person too with many providers actually accepting payment services from China and having websites only in Chinese.
This raises one question: Is China's Great Firewall that easy to circumvent, or are members of the government treated differently than normal citizens?
Not a question at all. The firewall captures the uncaring denomination. It is trivial to bypass, though you jump through various hoops depending on if they block your host, also they seem to randomly boot some connections after they are running for an extended period of time but a simple reconnect fixes that. Bypassing the great wall is trivial for the common man and doesn't even require any kind of expert skills.
The fear of the Communist Government is public unrest and subversion of state power. As long as you are being a good citizen and keeping the unwanted Western truth and ideology to yourself then you are really no threat to them. To identify these inciters China mostly relies on the human intelligence gathering capabilities of its vast Security Services. Although lately not even China seems to be able to resist the Big Data cool-aid
"This raises one question: Is China's Great Firewall that easy to circumvent, or are members of the government treated differently than normal citizens?"
Why is this an either/or thing?
Twinstiq, game news
This is like Chevrolet giving a public demonstration to show off how their trucks are better off-road than any other brand, then getting it stuck on live TV, and having to call a Ford truck to pull them out.
Golf clap, China.
For example, you can freely SSH from inside China to anywhere outside, except maybe some completely blocked IP address ranges. Certainly things work fine if you SSH to any of the AWS locations.
So, fire up a nano instance before you go to China, and run a proxy server on it. I think I used squid last time, but there are a billion choices. Then simply port forward localhost port whatever to your proxy, and tell the browser to find the proxy at localhost on that port. My advice is to set your proxy up to listen on 2 or 3 ports, and set up a couple of nano instances with different elastic IPs, just in case one gets blocked (this seems to randomly happen once in a while for a short time period).
I had no problem at all using this setup. It was usually reasonably snappy too, though YMMV depending on where you go, etc.
Obviously you can resort to more elaborate schemes like Tor, but frankly I wasn't interested in being that obtuse. DO remember, the Chinese govt employs many fine hackers. I know for a fact they cotton to these kinds of things and while they may or may not bother to probe your systems, they DO sometimes break in and play various games. This is another reason to use an AWS instance, its utterly disposable. If you use a machine on your own network, you're just inviting in unwelcome guests who can be rather hard to get rid of.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
are members of the government treated differently than normal citizens
Name me country where this is not so?
Or, asked a different way, do you REALLY think Hillary is going to prison? Even if convicted?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
A VPN is a must living in China for technical research. Even Baidu's Chinese language result list is bad. I know they have the same information as google,( I see the bot searching my sites), but the order is terrible. Most of the world advance research in computers is in English. but Baidu English sorting algorithm is very much like the funny Chinglish signs. For an engineer and other professionals to have access to the full internet will be required for China to advance and integrate into today's world, BUT.
I do understand why there is the firewall. From Men in Black, Kay:" A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." Social order is very important. The amount of people in China is unbelievable until you live there. There is a different between rural and city education. A VPN is like a test, If a person is smart enough to setup a a VPN they are smart enough to handle information for the "outside", The 2015 riots in Baltimore caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. The population density in China is many times that of Baltimore. so any large scale social unrest would cause billions of dollar the amount of problems.
Even with Chinese characteristic, I believe knowledge and information is required for making wise decisions and to progress humankind. That is why I rented a Linux Virtual Private Sever(VPS) in Hong Kong and used that as my VPN.
"...or are members of the government treated differently than normal citizens?"
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others
A couple of years ago I spent a couple of years working in China leading a technical team and dealing with the Great Firewall of China. It drove me nuts. Yes you can VPN around it, kind of, for while. I set up private VPNs to servers I ran outside China and I paid for commercial VPN services. They work, but not reliably for any length of time. Every week or two they would stop working and I would have to change my set up. It was just a ongoing PIA. I was so happy to be back home where the Internet just worked.
It grinds you down. A lot of technical people just put up with it and relied on Baidu. Chinese developers are at a significant disadvantage to developers outside China, it feels as if the government just doesn't care how unproductive it makes their developers. I guess they still have too much focus on manufacturing and don't see the value of innovation and development.
Given the size and density of the population in China you can see why the Government wants to control the Internet but the reality of it is depressing when you live with it every day.
I spent four weeks teaching at two Chinese universities in 2014. All of the students were using VPN to circumvent the Great Firewall, and they all were using Facebook and Twitter. They were doing this openly in class. Circumvention is easy, well-known and seems to be fairly well-tolerated. I think it is tolerated with the students because they are using services like Facebook and Twitter for social activities. I expect there are Chinese government monitors watching what they say,and if they said the wrong thing (like how the president is hiding his money overseas) then there would be a crackdown.
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