China's Battle to Police the Web

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?

[EdIII]

I'm pretty impressed that they have the ability to scan the data in the first place. That must not be cheap, or easy.

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.

bbc copied article?

[ionix5891]

That article looks awfully familiar to the one that floated to on Digg few days ago, see http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall [theatlantic.com] @ http://digg.com/tech_news/Why_Internet_Censorship_in_China_is_So_Incredibly_Effective [digg.com]

the US does the same thing

[sentientbrendan]

on much more data, they just don't block people.

How to frustrate the censors: a simple proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese censorship works by picking out key terms. So here's a simple way for you webmasters to really frustrate the censors. Everybody who's a webmaster for scientific and engineering and technical sites-- the ones that the Chinese really want their people to access-- here's what you need to do. Drop a couple of the forbidden terms in-- say "Free Tibet" and "Dalai Lama" and "Falun Gong" and "June 4 1989"-- at the end of your site. It can even be in white text on white screen; it doesn't matter if the humans can read it, as long as the robots can.

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!

Borrowed Time

[Mongoose Disciple]

I believe (perhaps naively) that this 'Golden Shield' will ultimately prove to be a failure, current methods to circumvent it notwithstanding.

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.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

[wbean]

Well,yes, you can do that. But I have a friend who lives in Beijing and he tells me that if you use a vpn and have too much traffic across it they will shut it down. So the firewall is aware of the presence of the vpn and can measure the traffic. Furthermore, too much use of a vpn may cast suspicion on you.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

[Kalriath]

Well, they could get a server in a datacentre in the US and either RDP or VNC to it. Since the only thing being transmitted then becomes images, the Shield wouldn't be able to do anything useful with it.

Re:Censorship

[Bryansix]

I'm gonna have to say you are blissfully full of crap. What is censored in the US that you can access outside of it?

Re:Government not entirely to blame

[Hatta]

That sounds a lot like the attitude of most Americans towards their media.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

[Jekler]

Oppressing an entire population is never cheap. However, when that same population is scoured for the resources to oppress them the method pays for itself. Keeping the Chinese population ignorant of their government's workings keeps the wheels turning.

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 for itself.

The Chinese people make incredible innovations, their labors lead to powerful technological developments. Those technologies are then used to keep the Chinese people from escaping their societal prison.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

[Sigismundo]

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.

Re:Remind me again, why does China have MFN status

[MrSteveSD]

Or this football match between England and Germany in Berlin in 1938. http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/03/magazine_enl_1064218142/img/1.jpg [bbc.co.uk]

Can you guess which team is doing the Nazi salute? It's the England team.

Having China stop its own spam...

[WoodstockJeff]

Hmm... a list of these banned words and phrases would make a good source of text to use in response to the HELO/EHLO dialog on an SMTP server... Have China block a compromised computer from accessing your server automatically!

Re:Censorship

[VJ42]

Being a Brit, I love comparing US news sources to others around the world, including those of our "enemies", and I regularly find that news sources from the USA are very introverted compared not only to the BBC [bbc.co.uk], but even Al Jazeera [aljazeera.net] and Chineese State news [cctv.com] are more outward looking (even if somewhat biased). It's not just the news of our enemies either I look at other allies [france24.com] news, they too are less introverted than their US [foxnews.com] equivilents [msn.com]. And it's not that you can't produce quality news from around the world, compare the versions of CNN:
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?

Re:More than just corporations selling us out, als

[Sancho]

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 day will make less than an American working on American soil does in one hour (given minimum wage plus benefits mandated by law.) Now that money that they make goes a lot further over there, so even if they're being underpaid, it's not by the margin that most people reading this would immediately expect. Nonetheless, it's another cost of doing business that would skyrocket if it was handled over here.

Who wrote the software? Supplied the hardware?

[NotZed]

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?

Re:How to frustrate the censors: a simple proposal

[popmaker]

An interesting idea. This might seem a sily question, bu humor me... Is there anything on the internet the Chinese government WANTS their people to be able to get to or or anything that they would be worried about that people might not being able to get to? In other words, who would actually get hurt by this?

Ob.

[billcopc]

Fuck China.

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.

Slashdot

[invisiblerhino]

Does anyone know if they get Slashdot there? In fact, if there's anyone in China reading this it would be great to hear what you think.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

[Squeeze Truck]

If we were to compare governments to operating systems, the US would be Microsoft, Japan would be Apple and China would be Slackware. It really is the bazaar of societies.

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.