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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?
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."
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.
When I was there, it was definitely not easy to circumvent. I tried multiple VPNs, dns tricks, all kinds of things, but my internet coverage was spotty at best. If I tried to go to any western news site for any reason, I'd find my phone either throttled to nothing or completely offline for hours or days.
They seemed to be cracking down on VPN usage via deep packet inspection and/or whack-a-mole with overseas endpoints.
I was there in November of 2014, so I can't imagine things have gotten much better.
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.
"... 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.
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.
I just got back from Beijing last week and used a VPN on my phone without much trouble. Mobile data was quite fast and reliable there. Combined with the VPN, it worked just fine. It was so easy to bypass, it almost makes me wonder why they bother.