Kindle Allowing Chinese Unfettered Access To Web

jcl-xen0n writes "Apparently, some Chinese Kindle owners have discovered that they are able to access banned sites such as Twitter and Facebook without a problem. The article speculates that Amazon may be operating a local equivalent to Amazon Whispernet with a Chinese 3G provider. Professor Lawrence Yeung Kwan, of the University of Hong Kong's electrical and electronic engineering department, told the paper that mainland internet patrols might have overlooked the gadget (perhaps because they consider it solely a tool to purchase books). How long before Kindle traffic is locked down?"

Now that everyone is talking about it...

[__aagmrb7289]

I'd guess it won't be long. Is there any reason that people needed to publish this information? Is this stuff that people "must know" - to the point where it's worth getting it shut down? This seems pretty dumb to me.

duh!

[Lopton]

so lets blow their chance at accessing the internet freely by advertising it on every site known to man

No time at all

[gbrandt]

Now that you mentioned it here, it probably won't take long at all.

Not long at all

[betterunixthanunix]

It will happen like this:

Chinese Government: If you want to do business in our country, you need to prevent people from accessing certain websites on their Kindles
Amazon: Oh, yes, that is already a feature, we just have not used it yet. Are there any books that we should delete from Kindles in China?

This hole is a good thing

[QuantumBeep]

...So don't make a bloody article about it, ya bastards!

I for one...

[saleenS281]

am glad this professor was so kind as to point out this loophole to the communist rulers. Had he not mentioned the *loophole*, it may have been months, years, or even DECADES before communications of the unfiltered kind could've been shutdown with the outside world!

Re:Now that everyone is talking about it...

[causality]

Tor still exists, Slashdot didn't ruin the interwebs in China. Keep posting on stories you don't understand.

I'm not so sure how secure Tor would be against a state government large and powerful enough to monitor large portions of the Internet at once. Its real-time nature leaves it open to timing attacks among other things like compromised (primarily exit) nodes.

Re:Not long

[causality]

It's almost too bad this information has been released. On the plus side there could be many people that could grab some information, now that it's public, before it gets blocked. On the other hand, if they don't already know about this workaround they might not ever find out since the normal access to the internet is censored.

Censorship is the least of their problems. Information that is blocked because it is censored can also have attempts to access it logged. That's more than feasible with such a powerful state. Then those who attempt to access it can be located, interrogated, "re-educated", "disappeared", etc. A message stating "this has been blocked" or an artificial error accessing a perfectly functional site is pretty damned tame by comparison to what could happen.

Re:Now that everyone is talking about it...

[Neil Boekend]

I have a feeling the people who decide what will be banned in china will only decide what is banned for OTHER Chinese people. They will have all the "Free Tibet" sites available for themselves.

Re:Anyone who cares about free access...

[Anonymous Coward]

I made the same experience while living in China. Most people don't care about not being able to read about Tienanmen or Falungong or what ever. They DO get pissed if things get blocked they like like Youtube or Facebook, but generally "it's good for the nation to protect Chinese from biased western influence".

Fun fact: I'm from Germany and nobody ever complained here not being able to google for right-wing websites like Stormfront*, etc and many people do support the upcoming child-porn firewall which is not really much different from the Chinese version.

* "Aus Rechtsgründen hat Google 3 Ergebnis(se) von dieser Seite entfernt. Weitere Informationen über diese Rechtsgründe finden Sie unter ChillingEffects.org."
    ~"For legal reasons, Google removed 3 result(s) from this page. For more information on these legal reasons, see ChillingEffects.org."

Re:Now that everyone is talking about it...

[xnpu]

Some holes aren't to be closed. Foreign simcards roaming to an uncensored Internet is not a new thing. Neither are VPN services. With the exception of some politically funded organizations who offered these services for free, these routes have _never_ been blocked. (I've been using them in China since 1997.)

The idea of censorship is not to restrict information from everybody. It's to prevent the masses from rebelling against the government. Those are two very different objectives.

The government wants to prevent bad news in Chinese from spreading like wildfire and upsetting a billion people. But they don't care about a few million relatively educated people with money to spend to bypass the GFW. It's the same group of people who can afford to travel abroad, etc. Why bother restricting them.

Re:Anyone who cares about free access...

[tsj5j]

For people who find the Chinese people accepting censorship hard to imagine, just picture the numerous Americans who still think the Patriot Act exists to protect them.

America's on it's "Road to China", albeit in the name of terrorism, copyright and "protecting the children".