China's Battle to Police the Web 171
What_the_deuce writes "For the first time in years, internet browsers are able to visit the BBC's website. In turn, the BBC turns a lens on the Chinese web-browsing experience, exploring one of the government's strongest methods of controlling the communication and information accessible to the public. 'China does not block content or web pages in this way. Instead the technology deployed by the Chinese government, called Golden Shield, scans data flowing across its section of the net for banned words or web addresses. There are five gateways which connect China to the internet and the filtering happens as data is passed through those ports. When the filtering system spots a banned term it sends instructions to the source server and destination PC to stop the flow of data.'"
SSL? Freenet? (Score:4, Interesting)
However, if it is only scanning for keywords why aren't people bypassing it with encrypted websites, Freenet, etc?
I think if we were talking to some average Chinese students on the street we would get the real 411 on just how effective this "Golden Shield" really is.
Re:SSL? Freenet? (Score:4, Informative)
I would like to know what else they are using. I might learn a thing or two from it.
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Well, that would be my immediate choice. I do it from work sometimes if I don't their filters catching me.
You need a cooperative machine outside the firewall. Then you ssh to it. SSH can act as a SOCKS proxy if you give it the "-D" option and a port number.
Firefox and IE can both be set to browse using the proxy. Firefox even has a setting (in about:config or whatever it is) to do DNS through the proxy as well. Then everything is encrypted and travelling over a tunnel to the friendly box outside.
Extremel
the US does the same thing (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:SSL? Freenet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SSL? Freenet? (Score:4, Insightful)
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http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_mcmar.htm [religioustolerance.org]
Keep in mind this was cira 1985.
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Mod parent up (Score:2)
Interesting. My friend has been in Beijing for almost ten years now and is in touch with Chinese students. He is presumably reporting what they believe - true or not. Or, perhaps, it depends on who owns the Chinese end of the connection?
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Good old American knowhow always gets you through the day.
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Imagine keeping a worker in a basement turning a wheel that powers your house. If you use the energy he generates to power a lock on the door, and use a portion of that power to keep him from getting any information on how to quit working, the system pays fo
Re:SSL? Freenet? (Score:4, Interesting)
A Chinese colleague of mine explained a simpler way that some Chinese have used to get past the censors. For instance, the character fa [mdbg.net] of "Falun Gong" gets split into two characters. The left part (the three dots) represents water, so shui [mdbg.net] is used instead. Without the three dots, fa becomes qu [mdbg.net]. So rather than write Falun Gong, a message board poster might write Shui-qu-lun Gong. This could be figured out by a person reading it, but wouldn't be found by computer search.
This was a while ago, and I assume that such a simple substitution would get figured out pretty quickly, but I thought it was neat.
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Kind of like saying "Its Five-Oh" and "The Fuzz".
It could be a lot harder to filter "street slang" when that begins to filter out legitimate terms used in everyday circumstances.
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Actually christian missionaries in China use similar methods of communication. If you send an e-mail to someone inside of China (or vice-versa) and include the word "Jesus" it'll show up blank. So you have to use other non-religious words to get your point across. That was a few years ago that I experienced that first hand. At the time I was surprised by the level of filtering. Now I just take it for granted :-/
No way. The thing is that the Chinese reference the words to actual objects representing their meaning to do the filtering. Then they serialize them to string again, at the other side of the tunnel. In the case of any exception, they just catch it silently.
In your case, it's probably a NullPointerException when trying to follow the reference of the word. You should try using "FSM" instead of that word.
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How dare they destroy Chinese culture!
Re:SSL? Freenet? (Score:4, Interesting)
The "golden shield," like Beijing's attempt to control anything that goes on in China is completely ineffective. Westerners (who believe society is synonymous with government and law) look at China's authoritarian policies and believe that all Chinese people live under repression.
That simply isn't the case. When Chinese people completely ignore international copyright law they aren't being selective; that's their attitude toward all laws. As the saying goes: heaven is high, and the emperor is far away. If authority can't see you or get to you, then it may as well not exist.
If the government decides to go after you you can consider yourself proper fucked, but they only do that very rarely, and it's always against individuals or groups that really irritate them. If you keep your head low and don't do anything to inconvenience or embarrass the government they don't care what you do. 99.99% of people have never had to deal with the police, ever. Not even parking tickets. Even fewer have any kind of criminal record.
That's how it is with internet censorship. The golden shield leaks like a sieve and everyone knows it. Since it's keyword activated you can get away with saying anything you want about the government so long as you abbreviate zhongguo zhengfu (Chinese government) to zgzf, and so on. The system is really only there as a passive (sometimes active) reminder from Beijing that a Chinese government really does exist and they really are in charge, goddammit.
bbc copied article? (Score:2, Interesting)
Censorship (Score:3, Insightful)
(I'm just tired of people complaining about this place becoming a police state)
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Re:Censorship (Score:4, Interesting)
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One form is not allowing people access to content by blocking it. That's what China does.
Another way to censor is to fine people who display unwanted content. The US uses this to keep "bad language", images of a sexual nature, etc. off of non-premium television stations.
Another form of censorship involves controlling the media. The current administration does this primarily by blacklisting reporters who don't play nicely. A
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Banning demonstrations are also a form of censorship, and another form that the US engages in. Search for "free speech zones" for a better understanding.
Last time I looked, people could stand in front of the US capital and spew all the crap they want. No one runs them over with tanks [wikipedia.org].
Free speech zones != banning a demonstration. It's keeping the demonstrators from disrupting the rights of others who attend whatever convention is being protested. It keeps attendees safe from physical harm. Too many time
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Check mate.
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09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0
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It's a decryption key for HD-DVD. There was quite a fuss about it last year when some hackers derived and published it. That hexadecimal number is an illegal circumvention device, and telling you about it is a violation of the DMCA. That, of course, is censorship. Incredibly ineffective censorship, but censorship nonetheless. Censorship which is also why, having first installed an OS distribution, you have to download additional libraries from free countries before you
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For the US most are blissfully unaware....
I don't disagree with you. Certainly the US has the capacity to censor as much as they want but thus far the main culprit has been self-censorship of various forms.
Most Americans never reach beyond news.yahoo.com or time.com. Clicking on a link that takes them to The Register may be as far afield as they are likely to get. As distilled as these news sources already are, they are getting worse as the economics of the news business forces newspapers and press
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Re:Censorship (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.cnn.com/ [cnn.com]
http://edition.cnn.com/ [cnn.com]
But who would think to put "edition" at the beginning of a URL?
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Too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Some things may not be *as bad* in America as they are in China, but they can still be *bad*.
In fact, we are seeing a slow but stead erosion of various civil liberties.
Yes, things could be worse, but that is no reason to avoid making them better now.
Can get out with VPN (Score:2, Informative)
Freedom! (Score:2, Insightful)
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Way to go BBC (Score:2)
China sucks. (Score:1)
How to frustrate the censors: a simple proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the censors are rapidly going to discover that the firewall isn't working, because suddenly it's blocking all the stuff they want their people to be able to get to!
A practical example (Score:2)
There is some site about Things White People Like on wordpress - and the whole site is blocked. Now using a proxy like StupidCensorship I can access the site - but somehow even through that there is something written on the TWPL: Asian Girls page that still gets blocked even through a proxy here!
That and wikipedia is always blocked but answers.com (which 99% of the time HAS the wiki article within) is not blocke
Re:How to frustrate the censors: a simple proposal (Score:4, Interesting)
Remind me again, why does China have MFN status? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Remind me again, why does China have MFN status (Score:4, Insightful)
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More than just corporations selling us out, also (Score:2)
What's needed is someone who doesnt mind screwing over the (globalization happy)business community. We came close to having someone like that with Spitzer, and Strickland of Ohio fills that role here quite nicely. We already had the means and the know-how to do it quite well in-house. Bringing it back does not mean raking workers over the coals.
We do not need them, f
Re:More than just corporations selling us out, als (Score:3, Interesting)
Producing your own quality products in the US with US workers(or even a worker-friendly country) are 2 cardinal sins according to them.
Well...duh. The US has much stricter environmental laws than China, so any industrial plants are going to have problems over here. They're going to be more expensive, if they're even feasible, meaning the costs of producing the goods goes up, and the prices that they must sell for in order to make a profit also go up. That computer you're typing on? You probably couldn't afford it if all of the parts had been made in the USA.
Then there's the workers. In China, a person working in a factory for a full
Re:30 years+ of junk and continuing (Score:2)
Re:Remind me again, why does China have MFN status (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they hold over $1.4 trillion dollars in US debt? Because they could crush our economy by unloading that paper [telegraph.co.uk] and their dollar reserves on the open market? Because the US is still going to China to beg for handouts because we can't balance our budget? Because their population of men available for military service exceeds that of the entire United States? And possibly, because our leadership, world famous as staunch defenders of civil rights themselves, really doesn't give a shit about Chinese human rights abuses?
But what do I know? I'm just guessing here...
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I don't get why China gets as many breaks as they do
Because they hold over $1.4 trillion dollars in US debt? Because they could crush our economy by unloading that paper [telegraph.co.uk] and their dollar reserves on the open market? Because the US is still going to China to beg for handouts because we can't balance our budget? Because their population of men available for military service exceeds that of the entire United States? And possibly, because our leadership, world famous as staunch defenders of civil rights themselves, really doesn't give a shit about Chinese human rights abuses?
But what do I know? I'm just guessing here...
Ah we have yet another person who does not understand M.A.D. Mutually Assured Destruction. If China destroyed our economy, they would also be destroying their own, we are after all by far their largest market. If China stops giving us loans, we will be forced to stop spending so much, which would destroy their economy (but would only be a temporary setback for ours). If China was to militarily attack the United State and was caught doing so, the entire country would be black ash within 2 hours, unfortun
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Sorry but Europe took over as their largest market a while ago. M.A.D doesn't work in this scenario (I'd argue that it doesn't work at all) as china is more than able to lose over 50% of its luxury economy (the goods they export, China is a primary producer just not an exporting primary producer) and
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The goal of such an act is not for china to get the upper hand over the United States, the goal of such an act would be to destroy the United States by a war attrition as opposed to a shooting war. In this game survival is the only requirement to victory so losing 50% or 90% of the economy is more than OK so long as China wins. The US is more reliant on luxuries than the Chinese people, they can easi
Re:Remind me again, why does China have MFN status (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you guess which team is doing the Nazi salute? It's the England team.
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Both teams are saluting - and indeed why should they not? In 1938, the war was still a year off, and Hitler, though decidedly unpleasant, was not yet the genocidal monster history records.
Nonetheless, legend has it that one of the England players has in fact rotated his hand 180 degrees, curled up most but not all of his fingers, and is giving Hitler the salute he deserves ;-)
Comcast??? (Score:5, Funny)
Comcast has service in China???
Borrowed Time (Score:4, Interesting)
More than ever, information is becoming the lifeblood of a people. Without access to the full volume of information freely available to the rest of the world, China will fall behind in crucial ways. The filtering solution won't block out everything important, but it will block out some. Maybe someone mentions Tibet in his chemistry thesis and it's filtered for China, or whatever. There's a piece of information the rest of the world gets for free that a researcher in China might well miss.
Ultimately I think China will decide it's in its best interest to allow the free flow of information into the country, and that in turn will help drive their country ever more towards modern democracy.
Of course, I could be completely wrong. Maybe the future will end up like Red Dawn.
Let's speed up this process (Score:2, Redundant)
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only 5 gateways? (Score:2)
"Great Firewall of China" (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely pathetic come to think about it.
Re:"Great Firewall of China" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a bit like when you are at work and you see some headline about the recent security problem at Facebook. You see Paris Hilton mentioned, so you stay clear from the link because you are not sure the article will be purely technical and not embarassing.
No need for a 100% efficient filtering system to frighten people and cause them to self-censor.
Government not entirely to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7313998.stm [bbc.co.uk]
They don't think that their media is at all biased. They believe "western" media is biased and has an anti-Chinese agenda.
Too much fucking national pride is what it is. When I talk to Chinese people, in China, I often get this weird apologetic "our country is crappy in a socio-economic way", but "our morals and cultural values are superior to your hedonistic, non-family oriented foreign ways".
It's creepy. Take a look at the China-daily forum if you have morbid interest. It's full of the craziest ranting racists I have ever seen...and I visited 4chan once.
Bottom line is, I don't think the government oppressing the people with censorship should be looked at in such a simplistic way. There seems to be a need for the censorship for many people on some level. Like they can't take a single bit of criticism of their precious middle kingdom and it's 5000 (actually 50) year great history.
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From government sponsored schools and press releases.
They are victims of sweet sweet propaganda, so yes, you can blame the government. This is how totalitarianism works. China wants to block the internet to prevent it's people from finding the logical holes in their education.
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It's about shame (Score:3, Insightful)
They can't take criticism, because they are suppressing so much shame. It's the natural human condition - when you feel that pain inside of you, you reach for pleasant dreams and feelings of superiority to make it go away. The louder the racist/nationalist, the bigger the mental image they are attached to. People create that mental image for a reason.
If I had my way (Score:2)
It is so easy for people to forget how fragile their rights and freedoms are. Unless you're willing to fight for them, to the death if necessary, then they are little more than indulgences on the part of the powerful.
R&D on spam and brute force attacks (Score:2)
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Because China's economy grows when the Chinese make money, which reinforces the current power structure -- even if they're just stealing it from westerners in elaborate (or not-so-elaborate) wire fraud scams. However, when the Chinese people are made aware of the current power's abuses, they are more likely to rebel; this undermines the current power structure.
The powers that be don't care about justice; they just want to remain in power.
Having China stop its own spam... (Score:3, Interesting)
Who wrote the software? Supplied the hardware? (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you be capable of filtering all of China's net access using off the shelf boxes and some custom software, or would it need some specialised network hardware?
Are Cisco for (an obvious) example, supporting this censorship through hardware and/or software?
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http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e&id=50A38A55EB758C0C80256C72004773CD [amnestyusa.org]
Ob. (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, sorry! Did I offend anyone ? I didn't say fuck the Chinese. As wrong as it feels to my libertarian gut, a part of me wants to reach in there and shake people until they revolt against their abusive government. How many gazillion chinese people are there ? Surely enough to overthrow the system and actually enjoy all the money they've earned by producing the rest of the world's retail goods. Freedom, competition, tolerance for all.
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"No war of independence in your neck of the woods? No prying oneself from the tyranny of monarchy or the invasion of foreign expansionists?"
Not since the advent of the .50 caliber machine gun. You either, I bet.
Slashdot (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:encryption? (Score:5, Funny)
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