Googling Behind China's Great Firewall
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Sep 01, 2004 01:35 PM
from the wot's-all-this-then dept.
from the wot's-all-this-then dept.
xcham writes "The OpenNet Initiative, a joint project of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, and the Advanced Network Research Group at Cambridge, have released a bulletin regarding the type of filtering applied to Google by the Chinese government. Most notably, certain keywords are filtered, as well as Google's 'cache' function. More information on how the keyword filtering is implemented is available in a previous bulletin."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Googling Behind China's Great Firewall
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 344 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I'm behind the (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm behind the (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.networkmirror.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 05, @04:34PM)
Re:I'm behind the (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.networkmirror.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 05, @04:34PM)
Re:I'm behind the (Score:5, Informative)
(http://communistposters.com/)
As an aside, I set up a simple unencrypted squid proxy on a box in the USA, and whenever I encounter "the block", I just hit F12-x in Opera, and reload the site. The simplest of proxies will defeat the Great Firewall.
Re:I'm behind the (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.intelligentblogger.com/ | Last Journal: Monday August 27, @11:47AM)
"I no you! Understand?"
They'll never even see this?! (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.lazylightning.org/)
Triangle Man beats Firewall man!
tunneling (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:tunneling (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday March 27 2002, @09:26PM)
Re:tunneling by the authorities (Score:4, Interesting)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Re:tunneling (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://david.djsiska.cz/)
BUT! They're not bothered. If a few geeks read forbidden stuff, that won't change much. I'm sure there's already dissident minority. What they don't want is some critical mass of people getting the wrong idea. Which won't happen for a while, because most Chineese haven't seen a PC. On the other the peasants never really mattered in China, so maybe they (Chineese government) have a good reason to be paranoid.
And the /. effect... (Score:5, Funny)
We're next (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't help but wonder how long until this begins to happen in the US, all in the name of fighting terrorism
Re:We're next (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.lazylightning.org/)
And that something is the freedom to view porn. Once the US government decides that it is acceptable to expand their reaches to cover the indecency of porn on the net people WILL get pissed off enough to end that bullshit.
Re:We're next (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We're next (Score:5, Insightful)
The right to due process of law as granted in the 5th Amendment.
Want more to be listed, smart guy?
Re:We're next (Score:5, Informative)
Re:We're next (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 14, @10:49PM)
Corps paying for the convention and all the closed door parties at it is OK but if normal people spend their personal money it's a crime.
Tell me how that makes sense.
missing the whole point (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://circletimessquare.com/)
i would have thought that this slashdot story would have served as an object lesson of something to be thankful for in the west: a tradition of adherence to free expression not found in other areas of the world
this is of course a right we must always be vigilant of encroachment upon and something we must always fight for
but how you can still find reason to attack the west is laughable to me in the context of this censorship by the chinese government, a lesson in how rights of free expression don't exist in other places, and must be fought for in those places
silly me, the real lesson here is for me, not you: some people are just hell bent on attacking the west for whatever it does, whether it is an intelligent criticism or not, simply because, apparently, that is all they know how to do
how about you fight the real fight for free expression: not on hypersensitive esoteric issues like security patches for software, but instead on real, fundamental issues like some of the words you find in the censorship list on the link in the story
i will of course get angry replies to this diatribe of mine if this gets modded up
proof that those who obsess over molehills, while missing the mountains, need a heated rhetorical approach to maintain their pov
always attacking the west is simplistic and navel gazing
there are great fights, much more important fights, going on outside the borders of the western democracies for rights most of us take for granted, and that is a shame, as real good can be done if the children of the western democracies took up ideological and rhetorical arms in that fight, rather than obsessing over comparatively much more minor issues in their home countries
This is insane (Score:5, Interesting)
Talk about censorship going out of control.
Well, atleast they can search for 'cthulhu'
Re:This is insane (Score:5, Insightful)
(https://addons.mozil...&application=firefox)
I used to work in intelligence for the US Army. The first thing you do is filter out the crap (e.g. random losers saying "bearded middle east man") so you don't waste limited resources chasing dead ends. Believe it or not, intelligence professionals look at context. In fact, context often gives produces better intelligence than the initial flag. Contrary to the beliefs evinced by their paranoid rantings, most people will never warrant a second look, no matter what they say in email, on the phone, etc. Like most of us, they're not that fuckin' important because they're just another random slob. The best defense against government poking its nose into your business is to be boring and lame. Fortunately, most of us here already qualify in that regard.
Re:This is insane (Score:4, Informative)
Talk about censorship going out of control.
Triangle Boy is/was a anonymous, encrypted proxy system that had a distributed structure. Anyone could run one, and publish it's IP. I think you can understand why the Chinese gov't would want to block people from finding it.
I don't know if it still exists, but Google [google.com] brings up lots of (old) links.
Personally, I use SSH to tunnel to a remove private Squid proxy to get around evil corporate firewalls/filtering. I don't know if SSH would work from within China or not though. It would probably be dreadfully slow though.
Did you know? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Did you know? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Did you know? (Score:5, Informative)
"Can You See The Great Wall of China from The Moon?
For some reason, some urban legends tend to get stated and never disappear. This legend even appears as a erroneous Trivial Pursuit question. The legend? Many are familiar with the claim that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from space or from the moon with the naked eye. This is simply not true. From a low orbit of the earth, many artificial objects are visible on the earth, such as highways, ships in the sea, railroads, cities, fields of crops, and even some individual buildings. While at a low orbit, the Great Wall of China can certainly be seen from space but it is not unique in that regard. However, when leaving the earth's orbit and acquiring an altitude of more than a few thousand miles, no man-made objects are visible at all. NASA says, "The Great Wall can barely be seen from the Shuttle, so it would not be possible to see it from the Moon with the naked eye." Thus, it'd be tough to spot the Great Wall of China or any other object from the moon. Furthermore, from the moon, even the continents are barely visible."
Incest banned, Pedophilia OK? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.networkmirror.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 05, @04:34PM)
A sample list (Score:4, Funny)
- DVD license
- Human Rights
- Tibet
- Taiwan
- "fall of communism"
- "Cuba" and "Fidel Castro"
- "funky cold medina"
- "Fragglerock"
Re:s.e.x is filtered out... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.networkmirror.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 05, @04:34PM)
Brutal! (Score:5, Funny)
I work behind my company's firewall.
I live off of Google's cache.
Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.texxelle.com/)
I think you can draw your own conclusions.
easy to get around? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://nizo.deviantart.com/gallery/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 17, @11:02PM)
Forbidden Chinese sentence (Score:3, Funny)
Pig Latin (Score:4, Interesting)
Insofar as instant/SMS messaging in English is also concerned (also discussed in the article), surely nothing more advanced than Pig Latin [snowcrest.net] (known to confuse many poor parents... for a while) would be necessary to circumvent this.
(I'd thought this was a novel idea, but I understand from a quick Google [google.com] that it's been done for similar reasons...)
What they're gonna do with Gmail? (Score:3, Interesting)
If they can block those from HTML content (shouldn't be too hard to eliminate contents of that table cell with ads), perhaps they can commercialize the technology
On the other hand it's going to be fun to see how Google reacts to this type of control - if it weren't for their don't be evil stuff, they'd still want to protect revenue from ads - even now, if only 3% of searches time out, they lose some advertising money. And the visitors get the idea that "Google sucks".
The list of blocked words is really funny - "naive" is considered dangerous, but "biatch" is not on the list...
I wonder if it makes any sense - it's only 1000 words...
elgooG (Score:5, Informative)
(http://theanalogkid.net/)
wiki (Score:5, Informative)
(http://theanalogkid.net/)
My Own Experience (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.doxpara.com/)
After I first presented this hack, I had these three Chinese guys walk up to me, and start asking quite literally the most detailed questions about my architecture that I had ever heard. It quickly became clear that, for the rest of the world, censorship avoidance is a sort of "first step" that anyone who's serious about network access learns to master. The whole line about censorship being damage that the Internet routes around is astonishingly true; the level to which complete non-geeks participate in proxy bouncing, encrypted tunnelling, and whatever else it takes to get out is quite astonishing.
--Dan
Re:My Own Experience (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://iantri.ath.cx/)
What diffrence does it make? (Score:4, Informative)
People will notice in the course of daily conversation that certain words when typed won't go through and they will improvise. Soon a whole sub-language will develop and the goverment will be back at square 1.
I'd ask my housemate from China about it, but i can't articulate this sort of topics very well in Chinese.
Man-searchian Candidate (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.commaecho.com/)
The "banned" mathematics problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
How do I calculate the GCD of the sides of a simple triangle that is drawn out on a sheet of paper?
I can't resist (Score:4, Funny)
If only they turned that blocking . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, the people at Yahoo and Cisco that helped them implement this filtering regime (custom firmware for routers and consulting services), along with the executvies, should be tried for crimes against humanity and hanged. Slowly (the hanging, not the trial).