Explore the Web From China 165
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Download.com:
"It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. It doesn't even offer you any xiao long bao or pu'er tea for your troubles. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there."
Proxy or simulation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this plugin actually proxy your web browsing through a Chinese host? Or does it just randomly mess with your requests?
Kind of reminds me of apt-gentoo [livejournal.com].
Hm (Score:5, Interesting)
We should make a system that loads every page you visit from 3~4 countries. Then have a notification if any differences are found, and what they are. It'd be interesting to see who's blocking what. Curious about Australia recently, I like hearing about the supposed good guys doing bad things. It makes the 'i hate commies' people uncomfortable, atleast enough to shut it.
Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was using the internet in various cafes in Beijing, I didn't notice any blocks from sites I wanted to visit. I could update my livejournal, and ssh to my computer in America, so I'm not really sure what the great firewall really could accomplish. I mean, I could feasibly tunnel all of my connection through the ssh link, after all.
That said, while I was ssh-ed into my home computer, a Beijing police officer came in and started walking around looking at people's computers...
TFA is terrible (Score:5, Interesting)
A ghastly article that is shoddy on details. It barely mentioned it was a proxy (as I was also wondering if this was a simulation). The article describes that the toolbar will display your new IP, but the screenshots do not show it.
Also, in regards to the extension:
I do, however, respect the point of showing the rest of the world how the web "feels" inside of China.
On a related note, does anyone have a list of proxies organized by country? As a web developer, I would love to test various web sites that geo-code the IP and dynamically display different content.
Keep one thng in mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you happen to be browsing from a computer that has an IP address corresponding to a range that has been banned in North America, as an example, you will find it hard to reach various sources that people in NA can reach without issue. Example: GoDaddy hosted sites.
This has nothing to do with anything related to 'The Great Firewall'...
Re:A bit off-topic, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
I park a truck in the tube, so when I receive an internet is takes longer to come through, because there's not enough room for my internet and other internets.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
I have never had to show my passport to use an internet cafe in P.R. China. It is pretty obvious that I am a foreigner. However, my friend has a special card that she uses to use an internet cafe.
I have posted on this in the past, but always get modded down for it. The Chinese students have positive feelings about the "real ID" used to access the internet. There a tremendous amount of cheating and scamming in Chinese daily life, much more so than in America, and they feel that the "real ID" decreases the possibility that they will be cheated.
This is particularly true in social chat rooms and on QQ (a popular chat program in China).
Chinese firewall in USA. (Score:1, Interesting)
No joke one time I searched for a banned chinese phrase on baidu.com, and I was banned from all Google domains for 24 hours. Blocked at the IP address level. Either Google or Comcast are extending the Chinese firewall to the US. Other sites worked and I could access Google from a proxy server. I emphasize that I live in the United States.
Avid linux users? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hm (Score:3, Interesting)
As an Australian I was considering setting something like this up through a webhost in the USA. Basically have the given url side by side through an Aus proxy and also directly out through the US host to determine whether a site is being filtered. If and when this internet filter comes online but also to see if you are unwittingly part of a trial for it.
Any thoughts on issues with this? My main concern would be the fact that as any url can be entered you are potentially opening yourself up for trouble in that you are going to and serving up content from any dark corner of the net that the user wants to test. So both the US webhost and the AUS proxy could come asking questions about why your hosted site is going to questionable sites.
Obviously would need some kind of limit on number of requests as well, but that is fairly easy fixed.
I Just installed it (Score:2, Interesting)
And realised it was blocking sites that are actually open through my ISP (I'm in Beijing).
Anyway it's not the blocking of sites that's a worry, it's the moderation of forums for sensitive issues. Check out www.chinasmack.com for some nice tidbits. Sometimes they get posts translated before they're removed.
Only foreigners care (Score:4, Interesting)
Almost no one in China cares about the firewall. The only sites the Chinese want access to are already on their side - the majority of them can't read anything but Chinese anyway.
It's really only foreigners that care.
Depends... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Forthcoming Update (Score:1, Interesting)
was never even found after he left the street.
Didn't exactly leave the street. Was removed by Chinese police (he put up no struggle), and then was never heard from again.
I'm sure he's fine. They just wanted to take him back to the station for milk and cookies!
Re:Only foreigners care (Score:3, Interesting)
Excellent. Then the Chinese Government are victorious.
It's one thing to oppress the people. But it's always going to make a lot of people very unhappy and will widely be regarded as a bad move.
If you can oppress the people and they don't care, then you're a 5 star tyrant government!
Re:Meh (Score:2, Interesting)
I lived in China for about 2 years and belive me stuff is blocked. At first it dosn't feel like it but as time goes on it is noticable. Wikipedia fluctuated between blocked and unblocked, the BBC was always blocked, CNN would go down from time to time, any home resolver DNS was blocked. Interestingly the Chinese guys I worked with used to complain quite a lot about blocked stuff.
So while you might not have experienced it in the short term belive me it happens. What was interesting was the censorship of the news there. I was watching CNN discuss how Google was going to filter the internet and then... tv went blank. At the time I was thinking this was an imprompture time for the tv to die. Checked another channel and it was working fine. CNN came back long after the feature was over. It was at that point I was reminded that I was in a Communist country, because honestly after being there for a while you really forget about it.
Re:Answer: Proxy (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to trivialize the censorship issues involved, but if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person. There are plenty of sites that offer language lessons basically for free these days. My favorite is Popup Chinese [popupchinese.com] because their hosts speak standard mandarin and they have a great popup dictionary plugin.
I'd really like to speak with one of these people who learned Chinese from a Web site. In Chinese.
If you want to learn Chinese, take a really good Chinese class. For a couple years at least. And while you're doing that, use sites like popup chinese as practice, auxiliary learning and reinforcement.
Although that site and other similar sites can be accessed for free, if you are on one of the paid plans a lot more features are enabled. The problem is that they're not cheap--like $20/month for the first tier.
Re:Lots of smoke without fires (Score:3, Interesting)
There are also plenty of fires behind the smoke. In fact, most of the smoke you are referring to exists largely to convince the 'reasonable' people like yourself that there are no fires.
What better way to hide conspiracies than to convince the logical people that all conspiracy theorists are crackpots. Never you mind that dozens of old conspiracy theories are admitted or uncovered every day. How many crazy whispered crackpot CIA conspiracies were confirmed recently by the director when he declassified documents? Despite them, there are morons who actually believed his line that they were doing so because the CIA is on the up and up today.
I can't speak for all governments but the U.S. government has a long and sordid history of lies and abuse where citizens and rights are concerned. If the government were a witness no prosecutor would put him on the stand with his track record and yet people trust the government and its agents again and again.
The largest conspiracies aren't conspiracies at all, they are emergence behavior or rely on emergence behavior. The wealthy do not need a vast conspiracy to maintain a wealthy elite class that is above the law. Using their wealth and influence they are able to support a system that does that automatically with the aid of millions of people who unwittingly participate in the conspiracy.
'- that while millions of doctors and nurses and pharma investors and managers die of cancer every year, all would rather die in horrible pain than admit there's a cure for cancer and use it to save themselves'
There are actually a half dozen cancer 'cures' that haven't made it through FDA trials yet.
'- that some miracle pill having been invented in Russia / China / whatever-far-and-exotic-place that cures all diseases, regardless of whether they're bacterial, fungal, viral, DNA-damage or auto-immune (hint: they're massively different things), and will apparently even grow back your destroyed pancreas, because it cures auto-immune diabetes too! Only some nebulous pharma conspiracy keeps them from talking about it.'
Because of those crazy theories existing you are gullible enough to think that there isn't plenty of underhanded, illegal, and unethical practice by the pharma companies. You think they are good guys trying to make an honest buck?
A good conspiracy is perpetrated by completely unwitting co-conspirators. For instance, look to the car/oil/and fuel distribution industries. They have several layers of bullshit piled onto more bullshit. They promote gas and oil to distract you from alternative fuels, but not really, they actually push certain alternative fuels in order.
In order of preference you should be looking at hybrids, natural gas, hydrogen fuel cells, and ethanol. This conspiracy is an emergence effect. There are portions of said big money industries that stand to make boat loads of cash on any of these technologies or at least to lose less cash. As a result there is tons of money pumped into lobbying and PR.
What are they repressing and distracting you from with this emergence conspiracy? For one, compressed air technology. Vehicles that range from passenger cars to the family SUV are ALREADY IN MASS PRODUCTION that are powered by nothing but compressed air. They are about to be rolled out en mass in Mexico.