Unblock Google Cache in China

An anonymous reader writes "A new feature in CustomizeGoogle (Firefox extension) modifies the Google Cache urls so that they are no longer blocked by the Chinese firewall. This feature is only available in CustomizeGoogle zh-CN, found here. This is how it works: All links to Google Cache, from the Google search result, are slightly modified. The Chinese Great Firewall doesn't recognize the new links as Google Cache links, and therefore they are accessible for everyone."

Links....

I keep trying, but all I get is "Nothing to see here please move along"

Re:Links....

Knowing the chinese:

Those responsible have been sacked.

Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

Too bad it's going to be slashdotted

because that will probably give the everpresent "them" the tip the need to block it.
Petyr Rahl

Re:Too bad it's going to be slashdotted

Well Google could always modify the cache to return results that have some auto generated URL that would differ with every hit, thus their firewall would end having to block an impossible number of every changing URL's...

Well, until they just decide to block everything from the google domain...

They will now ...

"The Chinese Great Firewall doesn't recognize the new links as Google Cache links"

After this article, I bet the firewall WILL recognize the
new links.

The cat's out of the bag now...

I give this a few weeks before China figures out what Google is doing and either finds a way to block it or threatens to remove Google entirely from the Chinese web. Is Google willing to risk losing those eyeballs?

Re:The cat's out of the bag now...

Its not google doing this -- but it should be! Is the slogan:

Do no evil.*

*Not available in China.

Do no evil?

Ha! Have you seen their logo [google.com] today? That looks evil to me.

Re:The cat's out of the bag now...

Whereas Microsoft's slogan is:

Do evil.*

*Except in Nebraska.

Fighting against public knowledge

I wonder how big China will have to get before they realize that it's hopeless to control information. I guess the people in power figure that as long as they maintain tight control for enough generations, the lack of information will just feel commonplace to the Chinese people. I don't think human biology will allow for that apathy about the world though. Although I could be wrong [ie. growing US apathy about non-domestic issues].

Re:Fighting against public knowledge

growing US apathy about non-domestic issues

Growing? Do you know how long we ignored various world wars before getting involved? Constant would be a better choice.

Re:Fighting against public knowledge

According to one of my friends who visited China twice for 2-3 months, they REALLY think that Tibet has been well treated by their country, and that no war nor genocide really happened there. They even say that they have to treat 'Tibetans' (read, chinese people now living in Tibet) as special when they visit China...

I think you're right, they're pretty efficient at controlling information :(

Cool, but it will be blocked.

A more useful solution would be one that kills the bastards who ordered and set up the censorship in the first place.

Game of Catch-Up

Isn't this just an elaborate game of Catch-Up? Meaning, now that there is a way around the firewall, the Chinese Government will just find the loophole and block it? And then there will be another loophole, and the same pattern of catch-up will continue?
Also, reporting about this kind of ruins the whole Cloak & Dagger feel.

You could also..

...do the same thing with a proxy.
Cache over proxy..very nice.

Re:You could also..

Proxies work for most blocked sites (Geocities, Tripod, etc), but there are some sites that are 'toxic' and going to them will get a RST sent down the line for all your active connections, and won't allow any new connections to your proxy for 5 minutes or so. BBC News and Google Cache being two of these.

Re:You could also..

Yeah, it's weird. I don't understand it either, but that's what happens. I theorize that the 'toxic' blocking is done by hostname, because I can go to www.bbc.co.uk but not news.bbc.co.uk. Voice of America and .mil sites are some others that will get RST. My simple unencrypted squid proxy in the USA will bypass all the other 'blocked' sites.

The shittiest part of being behind the Great Wall is the horrible connection speeds. I usually get 5-10k/s to slashdot and other sites, with a 300ms ping and 3% PL that makes typing at a unix shell lots of fun. I cry on the rare occasion that I go to Chinese websites, then I get my typical broadband 400k/s.

Thanks, Slashdot, for helping China

Without the front-page attention, this might have slipped by unnoticed. The PRC would like to thank you for bringing this dangerous counter-revolutionary thinking to their attention.

Link Mutation

I think this is a solid move by Google. As others have pointed out though, it is now only a matter of time before the current implementation will also be blocked. What I think is possible and feasible would be to have the URL that is used to bypass the block mutate over certain intervals of time. Since it is embedded in the toolbar, it is entirely resaonable to assume that this could be done. I wonder what the feasibility would be of Google being able to offer cached pages as Torrents and putting some sort of torrent support in the toolbar?

China won't take lightly.

Google should be careful. Even though they aren't responsible for this, it is going to appear that way. China is a HUGE market, and yahoo and msn have a strong start. Its not like it is here in the US, the playing field is far more level, and Google isn't the media darling it is in western media.

If Google isn't careful, China will block them all together. That would be a huge problem for them. This firefox plugin seems pretty cool on the surface, but at the end of the day, it will only hurt firefox and google in the Chinese market. Not because of the people, but because its a communist nation that will squash what it doesn't approve of. This is something that it won't approve of. Don't be surprised if firefox.com gets blocked from their network all together.

is this information available in China?

It's an interesting idea... but is slashdot [slashdot.org] or information the feature itself [customizegoogle.com] blocked by their Cisco-backed filter [opennetinitiative.net]?

Shouldn't it read...

the "Great Firewall of China" instead of "The Chinese Great Firewall"?

Whack-a-mole...

...is exactly what this seems like. This is not a long-term solution - in fact I suspect its life will be measured in days if not hours before these links are recognized as belonging to Googleborg and blocked accordingly.

These quick-fix workarounds are nifty and amusing, but are no substitute for a permanent end to the Great Firewall. I understand that is a bigger problem to solve. Ultimtely I hope the Chinese realize that they cannot block a thousand floods, and realize that as an (emerging?) first-world country, with global trade alliances, seat on the UN Security Council and so on, that worldviews and perspectives and ideas flow across the border as readily as cash and products.

Until then, keep whacking.

But I thought Google built the firewall

This is nutty.

Didn't Google build the "Great Firewall of China"???

Did Mao not pay his filtering bill this month?

Is Google blackmailing China?????

Great Firewall of China

I missed this whole thing...are they trying to keep the Mongolians out of their network?

The Not So Great Wall

FWIW a journalist friend who lives in China assures me that anyone who needs it has already figured out one way or another of bypassing the so-called Great Wall. Usually via proxies from what I'm told.

Go google??

Why are you people praising Google? Google is not bastion of free speech. Google is assisting the Chinese government in censoring it's content. Some third party found a simple "hack" workaround (which will soon be patched), Google will quickly patch it up. Google itself is not at all interested in bringing uncensored content to the Chinese people.

Forget the plug-in for the Chinese...

...I need a plug-in to access the google cache links here at work! Any suggestions to get around my firewall in the States?

I have a problem with this

Because I don't like encouraging people to break the law.

Re:I have a problem with this

Because I don't like encouraging people to break the law.

Legal writ does not equate to morality.

That's a problem for people who ascribe morality to legality. Just because something is legal does not make it moral. Just because something is illegal does not make it immoral. Morality exist apart from law.

Re:I have a problem with this

Well, you said you had a "problem" with it - what kind of problem would that be? Usually, when someone says they have a problem with something philosophical, they are referring to a problem that has to do with right and wrong (i.e. I interpretted what you said to be "I have a moral problem with helping others break the law."). Even assigning a judgement to the action (i.e "I have a problem with helping others break the law because I think it is wrong.") ties it in with morals since a moral system is the only system under which you can determine right and wrong.

In short, I don't think GP was off-base in addressing the disambiguation of morality and legality. Which brings me to the next question:

If the connection between legality and morality is "irrelevant", under what reasoning do you have a problem with helping someone break the law? It can't be moral, because you said the connection was irrelevant, and it can't be legal, since Chinese laws don't apply here (in the United States). If they did, then it might be a practical problem, because you don't want to be arrested. =)

Re:I have a problem with this

A lot of Americans are glad that Rosa Parks was willing to break the law.

A little update on the state of the great Firewall

can be found on this site here:

http://www.ichrdd.ca/english/commdoc/publications/ globalization/goldenShieldEng.html [ichrdd.ca]

this is truly some 1984'esque reading

Future of the great wall

The great wall of China will probably be around for a long time. While trying to filter all that content, the government is ensuring innovation in filtering and firewalling techologies. They won't ever succeed at stopping everything, but watching them try is fascinating. Regardless of your political views, the challenge faced by the engineers implementing the system is an inviting one. I mean, wouldn't it be kinda fun to filter all references to Al Gore and replace them with, for example, the Rocky Horror Picture Show?

Now let's just hope...

... that Google doesn't voluntarily identify users who do this, like Yahoo did [theepochtimes.com].

Unfortunately, many high-tech companies are all to eager to do business with a regime that has killed 80 million people [ninecommentaries.com]. Western companies' equipment, software, and expertise are what allow China's 30,000+ full-time internet censors to block this kind of breakthrough soon after they're discovered. They couldn't have built such a system without our help.

How long will it take?

It probably now should read...

therefore they were accessible for everyone

I wonder how the Chinese ban stuff anyways...

I run a small webserver with a few peoples pages on it. I really don't care if the chinese block access, Actually I'd have no problem with that as most of my serious port scans tend to come from china.

So... If I put up a Pro-Falun-Gong website, or some other material the chinese government finds offensive, will they ban my IP from their community?

It's all about the management...

It's really pretty trivial because although China does use blocking techniques for it's citizens, what it mostly tries to do is sway public opinions by inserting "pro-state" quotes and messages in forums and chat discussions. China knows it can't block everything so it tries to manage content as best as possible. I think they pay their "Pro-China" government posters something like 50 cents for every 10 posts. For that kind of money, I'd be stinking poor in my pro-slashdot fund.

Old news?

It got to last atleast a week, as this has been out for a week already. But now that its on slashdot China will have an easier time finding about it.

Will the Chinese Gov't turn it into a trap?

1. Read /. to notice way around Great Firewall
2. Redo firewall to detect everyone using workaround.
3. Arrest and fine a few high-profile violators and send most of the rest nasty letters hand-delivered by the police saying "don't ever try this again." Make it clear that to conserve resources they didn't try to identify ALL the violators but they will next time. Those who didn't get a letter get the message.
4. Next exploit appears and only real dissidents use it.
5. PROFIT! Er, I mean arrest the dissidents.

The not so obvious point about this

I am sure that plenty of responses are going to be along the lines of 'this is going to get disabled very soon, so why bother?'. However, I feel compelled to point out that the worst thing we all can do is to simply roll over and accept censorship of any kind. It is important that we do whatever possible to allow Internet audiences in more restricted nations to get a glimpse at the full spectrum (bad and good) of all the information that's out there. Yes, it is an armsrace and yes this workaround will probably not stand for very long.

BUT we need to send repeating signals that information should not be restricted. The reason for that is the unfortunate ability of homo sapiens sapiens to adapt to almost any environment. May this be extreme climate, sparse resources, or supressive political regimes. I bet you that a great majority of Internet surfers in China were probably upset when they first learned about those restrictions - but over time they probably accepted this as 'normal' and happily made due with the information that is presented to them. In some ways we are doing the same here in the U.S. and I make it a point to watch news shows from Europe to counter-balance the often one-sided and myopic reporting I mostly witness on most U.S. news stations/channels.

So, if this can shake up some complacency and re-instill the hunger for freedom to all information, then this is a great little work-around. We all need to get a kick in the keester to sometimes not simply seek a position of maximum comfort and non-conflict. Remember the old expression: If working towards freedom, prepare for war. I'm not quoting this expression to be taken literal here - I'm saying that it's always dangerous to accept the status quo.
Sorry for the rant - I'm getting off the soap box now...

Gee Whizz!!

Now I can find stuff in China as well! Really, what do I care? If I want to find stuff on Google I am only really interested in the stuff written in English anyway. When was the last time you said to yourself "Damn! I can't find what I am looking for in Europe or the US, maybe the Chinese have it?"?

It's just another obstructive competition tactic

Everybody whines that posting this loophole to /. means the end of the loophole. What ya'll don't seem to realize is that this is another tactic to make Chinese business less competitive; by forcing the closure of access to as much of the web as possible, western capitalist societies assure their own continued advantage by free access to information while tricking their Chinese competitors into wearing blindfolds.

Tomorrow's news

The google cache loophole in Great Firewall of China has been closed. Additionally, the entire .org TLD has been blocked for distributing misleading, unpatriotic propaganda on the subjects of freedom and democracy.

So...

Now the Chinese can look up Dallas!

Knowing the Chinese...

They have already figured out what this slight modification is and began blocking it too...
come on people this is 1999 opps 2005 :D

Arash

Google is a genius...

wow.. having born and lived in China i know what this means for google.. profit.. you have to understand that it's not impossible for people to get books or other literature restricted by the goverment. before the internet, the CCP would put restriction on a book (a banned book in other words) and the next day there will be millions of people wanting to read that book, regardless of if it's good or not. when CCP put restrictions on the internet, there was no way around that for a normal person. another thing i have to mention is that the Chinese search engine is http://baidu.com/ [baidu.com] everyone in China uses it like us using google. google is not popular there compared to BaiDu. so with this uncensor, there will be millions of chinese flowing to google in order to read uncensored information on the internet. and since google is not a Chinese businese (unlike BaiDu) the CCP can't do anything about it. so google's influence in China will finaly increase... all i can do is applaud google's business tactics... wow... /offtopic/rant as far as the "evil communists" goes, it's not all evil. the person over threw the Qing Dynasty, and made China democracy country, Sun yat-sen, was the leader of china when he wanted to have 2 kinds of goverment parties. one is democracy and one is communism. he believed that people should have freedom but not complete freedom because that would cause alot of problems. thats how the communist party came into power, before that they were a tiny little political party that had no power. when Sun yat-sun died he gave the position of president to Shiang Kai-shek (as you can see China wasn't completly democracy back then, probably because a voting would have caused too much trouble in a already poor country and some people doesn't even know who was their leader and stuff) and Shiang kai-shek hated the Communitst. he ordered secret assasination of communist party members which furthur worsen the relationship of the 2 parties. so the communist party members basicly said "why are we waiting to be assasinated? why dont we just rebel?" so thats how they started the war and then the japanese started attacking china and the rest is history. so as you can see, the communist struggle to power was hard and when they were finaly in power, there were still lots of pro-democracy people around and letting the democracy party people having a taste of their own medicine, they started torturing the democracy party people and murdered lots of innocent people, because they came to power because the KMT gave them power, they learned the lesson of the KMT and never gave any other part in China significant power, just to establish themselves as the official goverment in the people's eyes. Shiang Kai-shek escaped to Taiwan and established his own democracy goverment there (and i should metion that he purged all of his old KMT party members form mainland) , and later died and the presidency to his son (not as democracy as he say he is :P ). if Shiang Kai-shek didn't decide to assasinate the communist party members we might actualy see an example of a democracy goverment AND a communist goverment co-exist and govern on country together. where the people have freedom, but not too much that it endangers the country's existance. /end rant

CustomizeGoogle != Google

CustomizeGoogle (http://www.customizegoogle.com/ [customizegoogle.com]) is a a GPL'd FireFox extension. It wasn't written by Google and Im pretty sure Google doesn't like it too much since it removes advertisements and adds links to competitors sites to name a few things...

And now that you've released this info.....

The Chinese Government will move to block this, won't they?

I'm trying to not troll here, but thanks for letting the cat out of the bag. Here comes one more restriction to their information.

I'm willing to bet that eventually they will move to block our IP addresses and create their own network.

Some of u are partly wrong.

People's eyes is always open, although sometimes somewhere they cannot speak freely. Here's a comment of a Chinese guy in a forum:

I didn't know wikipedia before it was blocked! How good it is! Thank CCP! Proxying...

The Chinese Great Firewall...

Why, that was very Asian of you.

Hehe, bad joke.

Re:I love it!

Well, until Google knuckles under to the tyrants in Beijing and kisses some nice dictatorship of the proletariat ass.

Re:I love it!

Bullets are cheap, and the CCP knows it. Their mantra is that life is expendable for the "greater good" of the party and it's power needed to control China. They might even nuke their own city if need be to keep democrocy from taking root.

You have been reading on on the latest bolsters by the CCP lately, right?

Re:this is good news but,

Agreed