Great Firewall of China Blocks Edgecast CDN, Thousands of Websites Affected 128
An anonymous reader writes: Starting about a week ago, The Great Firewall of China began blocking the Edgecast CDN. This was spurred by Great Fire's Collateral Freedom project, which used CDNs to get around censorship of individual domains. It left China with either letting go of censorship, or breaking significant chunks of the Internet for their population. China chose to do the latter, and now many websites are no longer functional for Chinese users. I just helped a friend diagnose this problem with his company's site, so it's likely many people are still just starting to discover what's happened and the economic impact is yet to be fully realized. Hopefully pressure on China will reverse the decision.
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Only true pressure would be if companies having their manufacturing in China moves elsewhere.
The Chinese government do whatever they like.
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Only true pressure would be if companies having their manufacturing in China moves elsewhere.
Already happening quite a few moving from china to SE-Asia, and even a couple popping up in Africa.
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but how can you move your sub contractor's, their sub contractor's etc. production out of China?
Either by investing in new companies in region xyz, or by making your own start-up contractors and then selling them off as "unprofitable" that has happened in China quite a bit.
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And quite a few to Vietnam. Not due to ideological conflict, but because Vietnam is like China but more so: Unions are illegal, worker's rights basically nonexistant, no environmental protection laws, ridiculously low tax rate. It's even cheaper than China!
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It's like Mississippi, but with lots of honeymooners.
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That will eventually happen anyways once China's economy matures a bit more. The same thing has happened to a lot of other formerly developing countries, such as Japan.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
It just amazes me to think that anyone would believe that the same China that is currently blocking Google, Youtube and Facebook would hesitate for a second before blocking Edgecast.
As far as they are concerned, there is no economic damage, in fact there is an economic incentive since anyone wanting their website to be usable in China would now be best hiring a CDN within China.
This is similar to what happened when Facebook was blocked and it allowed buggy local clones, notably Renren and Kaixinwang which were previously maligned by users to surge in popularity. Similar also when Google was mostly blocked, allowing Baidu to fill up the void. The thing is, they have every economic reason to block large foreign online services that compete with domestic ones, it's just they cannot block them on economic grounds, since that would be in violation to the free trade principles they espouse and would lead to retaliatory import sanctions. They can however block whatever they like on political grounds.
I do not disagree with Google's pride and principles in not continuing in their previous manner of following Chinese censorship guidelines. However, the net result to the present date is that users have been forced from a service that follows the guidelines only as far as they must and was allowed a fair bit of leeway in their implementation, to others that take the initiative to censor what _might_ be required to be censored for fear of greater pressure if they don't go far enough. The users are also getting exposed to less worldwide ideas. The feeling amongst former users is that Google has abandoned them because of their pride and they are afforded less and less respect by Chinese netizens.
It seems that this whole project was simply going to isolate Chinese netizens further and push China further towards its own separate Internet. This edgecast block will be faced with far less uproar than the ones that came before it, and those caused very little uproar.
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anyone wanting their website to be usable in China would now be best hiring a CDN within China.
There is a catch with this. Your origin servers must reside inside China or be connected to the Internet via Chinese ISP that will move your data first to China.
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Oh yes. The company I work for provide computer and information security solutions. We help people fight for digital freedom. We educate how to detect and remove spyware from PCs. We provide ways to reach information that is otherwise censored. Check it out - https://f-secure.com/freedome [f-secure.com]. We're blocked in China.
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Similar also when Google was mostly blocked, allowing Baidu to fill up the void.
Even at its best, before it closed google.cn and started redirecting people to google.com.hk, Google only had half the number of users as Baidu in China [china.cn]. It never had the dominance we're used to in the USA and most of Europe, and it's not certain that it would have come to dominate in China anyway, considering the stable dominance of other search engines in other large countries [returnonnow.com]. Your statement made it sound like Baidu only caught on once google was out of the picture.
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Google's decision to pull out had nothing to do with "pride and principles", that's just how they sold it to Western audience.
The actual reason was the fact that as long as they had hardware running their code in China, they were under severe cloning and hacking threat. The straw that broke camel's back came when someone in China (intelligence agencies? competitors? random hackers?) grabbed a large portion of their holiest of of holy - search engine's source code.
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Indeed. The ongoing international outcry over Tienanmen Square haunts the Chinese government to this day.
Except for Mozilla and Colts (Score:2)
I never heard of any of those sites listed in TFA. And since it's doubtful anyone in China cares about the Colts, that leaves Mozilla.
it's likely many people are still just starting to discover what's happened and the economic impact is yet to be fully realized
Economic impact would be probably close to zero.
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Really? The problem is what you know, and what you are told. That screenshot is just the customer showcase from Edgecast's site.
Just looking at some of the list in the order which caught my eye:
Mozilla - Self explanatory for the Slashdot reader.
EMI - The music publishing arm of the EMI currently owned by UMG. Of note is that EMI has a Chinese subsidiary.
Break Media - A humor video site, quite a popular one at that. You'll probably find their logo slapped around videos played on youtube.
The Atlantic - A news
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That's a lot of popular websites, sure, but how many of these websites are commonly used in China? How many of these websites even have a Chinese version? After all, not everybody speaks English.
LinkedIn has entered the Chinese market, but it's not as well-known as local sites such as 51job, Pokemon games still aren't available in Chinese [kotaku.com], and wordpress.org is only of interest to people who self-host blogs (wordpress.com has been blocked for a couple of years). The rest, few have even heard of.
China has its
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In the older generation yes you would be right. Their internet is a completely different beast to ours.
The younger generation on the other hand is quite a bit different and very much like the western version of the internet. On my last trip over visiting friends, for every person I saw on baidu I saw another on Google. The kids read reddit, and 4chan, watch western programming via Netflix and have Facebook accounts.
Mind you these people also subscribed to paid VPN services so maybe you're right and this blo
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Not sure what you're talking about, but overwhelming majority of people do not in fact use VPNs in China. As a result, none of the sites you mention are available to them. Instead, China has its own circle of web sites that do the same things.
Notably same is true for Korea, Japan and Russia at the very least. Basically, any large country with distinctly different cultural base from Western one and sufficiently large market to sustain those sites.
Your story sounds like a bit of you having been in a bubble of
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Do you think I just fell off a yùtóu [google.se] wagon?
I've been to China numerous times, have many friends from and in China, am married to a Chinese, and you are so full of it I'm looking for my waders.
This is *all* about maintaining order, under control of the CCP, by blocking (or at least slowing down) the ingress of as many "disruptive" ideas as possible.
Meanwhile, within China, it's common knowledge that many of the country's current social ills stem from the Cultural Revolution and its attempts at er
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It depends on who blinks first. If the site that's broken is highly reliant on Chinese traffic (and it ISN'T hosted in China), then likely they'll cave and use another CDN. The economic impact to the site owners is probably greater than trying to ride it out hoping China would change its policies. (And many other countries - why is it China is singled out for its firewall, when most countries have similar setups?)
If the site has little Chinese traffic, they l
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"why is it China is singled out for its firewall, when most countries have similar setups?"
Biggest population. Biggest global economic role. Also arguably the most sophisticated censorship system, in terms of both technology and administration.
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Economic impact would be probably close to zero.
A story on the same blog posted 4 days ago [greatfire.org] shows that HSBC's [wikipedia.org] corporate banking site was jsut blocked because the CDN Akamai [wikipedia.org] got blocked. Apparently, "HSBC uses Akamai as part of the secure login system for clients".
What the blog doesn't say however is that many corporations in China are already paying for proxies outside of China that they access through VPNs, so as to circumvent China's great firewall. And that HSBC probably scrambled to remove the login dependency on Akamai as soon as it received customer
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A far more likely scenario is that Akamai will do anything and everything in their power to find which users were against Chinese rules and purge them from their network, or at the very least block them from being accessed from China.
Akamai is huge, probably world's biggest in terms of content delivery. As a result, they likely don't want to lose customers that need to do business in the world's most populous country.
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Whats the big deal ? (Score:2)
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Just because you don't have an interest in dealing with 1/7th of the world's population does not make it a good business move.
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Wrong.
The United States is the worst spammer [spamhaus.org] and Indonesia is the worst cyber-attacker [pcmag.com].
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Mail.ru is the Russian free webmail site. Problem is that they allowed POP3 access to their systems even before google did, so a lot of spammers used them.
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Both. It allowed POP3 mail retrieval and SMTP mail sending. On a free account. Back in early 2000s.
It basically meant that I could use my mail client instead of awful webmail interface for mail. But it also meant that spammers could use it for spamming with throwaway accounts.
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Which is the opposite of what happened in this case where a company with business in China suddenly found themselves unable to get access.
That was my point. Just because the GP didn't want to deal with China doesn't mean there aren't many people who do, and that those dealings outweigh the risk of his perceived open attack surface.
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" And the actual metric you attempt to generally cite is bogusmips."
Here is a citation for you:
"This week the International Monetary Fund updated its data on the world economy. For the first time it ranks China’s economy as the world’s biggest in purchasing-power-parity terms. Historians, though, point out that China is merely regaining a title that it has held for much of recorded history. In 1820 it probably produced one-third of global economic output. The brief interlude in which America ove
totally happens all the time (Score:1)
pressure from the West normally gets China to do things differently. Unfortunately, I can't think of ANY examples right now where it has worked in that direct of a manner.
Pressure from the *West* (Score:1)
It used to be that the entire world was very scared of the Pressure from the *West* because it would be a crushing blow to whoever the West decided to punish
It used to be, no more
The West is getting weaker by the day - as their technological / military / moral advantage get plummeted - nowadays even the banana republics in Africa / Latin America / Asia do not care so much about what the *West* wants anymore
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So what you're saying is that governments in the world used to be coerced into behaving differently. Now, governments in those countries now have a greater say over their own future.
FTFY. People rarely, if ever, have a say over anything. They are coerced by their own governments, which in turn can be or not coerced by other governments. In any case however, they are and remain coerced.
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whoosh.
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A lot of your complaints would disappear if you did as well.
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It usually doesn't work that way. Typically thos old men are willing to kill and oppress for those ideals. Blood will run in the streets before they loose their jobs.
China's internet will become a smaller intranet (Score:3)
As most websites are no longer self contained, but require numerous dependencies to other websites for data, content, analytics and js libraries, China's gated internet will become more isolated from the rest of the world.
Perhaps Hong Kong may face similar issues with regards to net access and online freedom in the near future? There has been talks about that recently.
Maybe web developers will need to write a "China mode" for front end sites, in addition to "Desktop" or "Mobile" mode that will only use old school 1990's style HTML look and feel. Bring back the frames :)
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Firstly, China isn't blocking everything in the world. They are blocking undesirable content into their own country that a majority of the Chinese public agrees should be blocked because their government tells them it should be, and they don't get to hear any opposing views on the matter.
TFTFY.
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You, of course, have ceritified polls to back up this statement.
As an additional point, this is not a case of China blocking undesireable content. They are blocking a major portion of the Internet wholesale, regardless of what the content is.
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Is your post in reference to China or the US?
You mention "prison pit" so you must be referring to the US which has a far higher incarceration rate:
US prisoners per 100,000 = 707
China prisoners per 100,000 = 124 or 172
At least if you want to post negative comments and call people a "shill" check your facts first.
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The reason CDN wants China is money. So, if China wants to block that, it's their country. Painting "freedom" on a capitalistic venture is not fooling the Chinese government.
Hell, Verizon [verizon.com] is riding on edgecast.
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Why would you link to libraries on a remote web server? I this time and again, and have never understood the reasoning.
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Because of the many advantages it offers. Linking to jquery on a CDN, for example, not only reduces the load on your server, and the number of connections, there is also a really good chance the visitor already has it cached because many sites do it and thus share a URL. And even if not, at least that part of your site will come from a localized node.
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I suppose I hadn't thought the CDN content already being cached. Granted, for high volume sites, 100KB will add up, and it's one less (possible more) file for the client to download, but I'm still not massively keen on the idea of the possibility that the library I'm using may have been altered.
I'm aware that I haven't audited the library I downloaded from jQuery, but we've often seen malware being served unwittingly by 3rd parties*. However, I'd also hope that jQuery regularly verify that files served from
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Nice trolling. Sadly, you haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about.
I want my old /. back, where people were not always easy, but at least not idiots.
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China's gated internet will become more isolated from the rest of the world.
And you think they care very much?
What we in the west fail to understand is how isolated non-western countries already are. I know some inside views from Russia through personal contacts. Russia has its own Facebook (vk), it's own Google (yandex) and so on. For pretty much every popular service, it has its own version, usually much more popular than the western variant.
I can imagine it's the same for China. They could be isolated and for most people not much would change.
Mistaken Western-centric thinking about China (Score:1, Insightful)
"It left China with either letting go of censorship, or breaking significant chunks of the Internet for their population."
I love the tiny minds at work here. People who cannot see outside of themselves, nor consider any perspective but their own Western one. As if there were any choice involved! China doesn't block websites because they're evil, they block websites because they are damaging to China's body politic. These overseas actors want to harm China, and like antibodies reacting to bacteria, Chi
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I remind everyone that the Chinese Communist Party is made up of the smartest people in China.
I remind everyone that the CCP is also made up of people who happen to have the right connections, or be born into the right families.
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China had gone from third-world mudhole to industrial superpower in fifty years, and is now capable of taking on Europe and the mighty US even in science and advanced engineering. Whatever their qualifications, they seem to know what they are doing.
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It's easy to win "most improved" when starting from a third-world mudhole. It's also easy to become "a powerhouse" when you've got a billion people to work with.
Let's also not forget that, while China had stagnated for hundreds of years prior to the early 20th century, it has a very long history as an advanced civilization. The "cultural infrastructure" if you will was there.
I don't think the Communist Party has been entirely incompetent with China, but, compare China's success to the democratic governmen
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Geez man ... defensive much? Also, you write like a 10 year old. Might want to work on that.
I can completely defeat both your contentions with just one word: India.
India's HDI lags behind China, yes, but its growth rate has been matching China's as of late. Not sure what you mean by "superpower" ... both India and China have nukes and neither has enough to destroy the world, so ... yeah.
The same cannot be said of ...oh Taiwan, Japan, UK, Germany, France...you know, much of the developed world.
Well, considering each of those countries has less than a tenth of the population of China, I'm not sure why you'd expect their GDPs to match. A fairer comparison, I guess, would be China an
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Preface: Said as a person who lived in China full-time for 6 years, and has spent the majority of the last 3 years in China. And married to a Chinese national...
China has a lot of really, really smart people. However, innovation does not exist culturally within the vast majority of Chinese - and seems to be even less present in those with university degrees. There is still a lot of the old Maoist "follow orders only/don't speak up" culture well set within China.
If you want to execute on an idea, China ca
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but the fact remains that it's for China's own good that these actions are taken.
Bullshit to that. It's for the good of those in positions of power. Nothing more, nothing less.
I remind everyone that the Chinese Communist Party is made up of the smartest people in China. It is full of scientists and engineers, people with analytical minds, and people who are qualified to make decisions for others.
My god we could do with more politicians here qualified in something other than politics, but those qualificatio
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I remind everyone that the Chinese Communist Party is made up of the smartest people in China. It is full of scientists and engineers, people with analytical minds
No, it is full of politicians who struggle for power, at least where it counts.
, and people who are qualified to make decisions for others.
No, the government should _not_ decide what is appropriate and what is not appropriate to read.
If Slashdot were based in China, the most thoughtful constantly-modded-up users would be mostly CCP members.
Strangely enough Slashdot is _not_ based in China. Wonder why that is...
Getting healthcare for millions of uninsured is the same as China's blocking these harmful websites.
No.
A little harm is done, mostly to people who intend harm in the first place, and much good is done to people who badly need it. It is a Faustian bargain, but it is worth it.
No, a huge damage to society is done, because there is no free exchange of ideas, and the "good" is not done to the people, it's "good" for the ruling party, which is afraid of information and ideas that might breach through the fear they use to stay in power.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
No,
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Why be scared of external opinions? You do not see that as censorship? Suppressing history is censorship.
You are basically calling the Chinese populace a bunch of idiots who would not know how to make decisions for themselves.
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I was in China last month, our hotel had CNN. As soon as it reached the segment about Hong Kong, the channel just blacked out. About 10 minutes later it came back on as if nothing happened.
Why be scared of external opinions? You do not see that as censorship? Suppressing history is censorship.
You are basically calling the Chinese populace a bunch of idiots who would not know how to make decisions for themselves.
This is why
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/... [theguardian.com]
the rioters in other cities also got the idea from news media.
News media and social networking blackout on the riots when they started would likely have stopped the riots happening in the other cities. Because the democratic UK had little taste for such media control the situation got very out of hand. Thats part and parcel of being a democracy eh.
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I remind everyone that the Chinese Communist Party is made up of the smartest people in China. It is full of scientists and engineers, people with analytical minds, and people who are qualified to make decisions for others. If Slashdot were based in China, the most thoughtful constantly-modded-up users would be mostly CCP members.
WHAT? Hi there, I've lived in China the vast majority (like 80%+) of the last 10 years, and am married to a Chinese national. Most of the CCP members inherited their positions from their parents. They also tend to be the ones who inherited the biggest companies in China as well (banks, telecoms, heavy industries). Capability/intelligence is NOT the reason you're in the CCP - relationships/political gamesmanship/familial relations are what keep the CCP members in the CCP.
Think of John Gruber, the MIT economist who helped get the badly needed Affordable Care Act passed despite opposition from lesser minds.
Badly needed ACA? The biggest f
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The Western mindset that censorship is automatically bad is outdated and unsuitable for 2014 and beyond. We need to just relax and let the smart people do their thing.
last time we tried that we got eugenics, and a world war. Just letting the "smart" people run things is terrible, because how can you objectively define "smart". It might work in the short run, but by no means is it sustainable.
Sooner or later you have "smart" defined as "self intrests of the ruling class", and "intellectual, and scientific" backing is niether intellectual or scientific, simply a means of oppression, and just rubber stamping the status quo. When something becomes a means of status, the i
Re: Mistaken Western-centric thinking about China (Score:1)
Third option coming (Score:2)
It left China with either letting go of censorship, or breaking significant chunks of the Internet for their population.
DMCA-style takedown or GEO-Lockdown of CDN content upon an e-mail request of the Chinese government.