China's Battle to Police the Web

What_the_deuce writes "For the first time in years, internet browsers are able to visit the BBC's website. In turn, the BBC turns a lens on the Chinese web-browsing experience, exploring one of the government's strongest methods of controlling the communication and information accessible to the public. 'China does not block content or web pages in this way. Instead the technology deployed by the Chinese government, called Golden Shield, scans data flowing across its section of the net for banned words or web addresses. There are five gateways which connect China to the internet and the filtering happens as data is passed through those ports. When the filtering system spots a banned term it sends instructions to the source server and destination PC to stop the flow of data.'"

SSL? Freenet?

I'm pretty impressed that they have the ability to scan the data in the first place. That must not be cheap, or easy.

However, if it is only scanning for keywords why aren't people bypassing it with encrypted websites, Freenet, etc?

I think if we were talking to some average Chinese students on the street we would get the real 411 on just how effective this "Golden Shield" really is.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

Did you not read the full article? They already are.

But there have been well-documented ways to by-pass China's firewall. One method involves connecting to a friendly computer outside China and using it as a proxy, to access websites that are banned.
China cannot block every computer outside its borders so this method has proved popular with citizens wanting unfettered access to the net.

I would like to know what else they are using. I might learn a thing or two from it.

the US does the same thing

on much more data, they just don't block people.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

However, if it is only scanning for keywords why aren't people bypassing it with encrypted websites, Freenet, etc?

The expats I've met in China use Firefox with the Tor extension. It slows things down, so they just normally browse, and then active Tor when they want to go to a banned site.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

Well,yes, you can do that. But I have a friend who lives in Beijing and he tells me that if you use a vpn and have too much traffic across it they will shut it down. So the firewall is aware of the presence of the vpn and can measure the traffic. Furthermore, too much use of a vpn may cast suspicion on you.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

And in many places in the world, suspicion can be all it takes to ruin your life ( or even end it ), even if you are innocent.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

A Chinese colleague of mine explained a simpler way that some Chinese have used to get past the censors. For instance, the character fa [mdbg.net] of "Falun Gong" gets split into two characters. The left part (the three dots) represents water, so shui [mdbg.net] is used instead. Without the three dots, fa becomes qu [mdbg.net]. So rather than write Falun Gong, a message board poster might write Shui-qu-lun Gong. This could be figured out by a person reading it, but wouldn't be found by computer search.

This was a while ago, and I assume that such a simple substitution would get figured out pretty quickly, but I thought it was neat.

Re:SSL? Freenet?

If we were to compare governments to operating systems, the US would be Microsoft, Japan would be Apple and China would be Slackware. It really is the bazaar of societies.

The "golden shield," like Beijing's attempt to control anything that goes on in China is completely ineffective. Westerners (who believe society is synonymous with government and law) look at China's authoritarian policies and believe that all Chinese people live under repression.

That simply isn't the case. When Chinese people completely ignore international copyright law they aren't being selective; that's their attitude toward all laws. As the saying goes: heaven is high, and the emperor is far away. If authority can't see you or get to you, then it may as well not exist.

If the government decides to go after you you can consider yourself proper fucked, but they only do that very rarely, and it's always against individuals or groups that really irritate them. If you keep your head low and don't do anything to inconvenience or embarrass the government they don't care what you do. 99.99% of people have never had to deal with the police, ever. Not even parking tickets. Even fewer have any kind of criminal record.

That's how it is with internet censorship. The golden shield leaks like a sieve and everyone knows it. Since it's keyword activated you can get away with saying anything you want about the government so long as you abbreviate zhongguo zhengfu (Chinese government) to zgzf, and so on. The system is really only there as a passive (sometimes active) reminder from Beijing that a Chinese government really does exist and they really are in charge, goddammit.

Censorship

But of course, that's nothing compared to the terrible censorship we endure in America!!

(I'm just tired of people complaining about this place becoming a police state)

Re:

I know you are sarcastic, but really although China has a ton of censorship, the US though says it doesn't have censorship and for the most part people believe that, China on the other hand most people know that it censors and will find ways around it. For

Re:Censorship

I'm gonna have to say you are blissfully full of crap. What is censored in the US that you can access outside of it?

Re:Censorship

Being a Brit, I love comparing US news sources to others around the world, including those of our "enemies", and I regularly find that news sources from the USA are very introverted compared not only to the BBC [bbc.co.uk], but even Al Jazeera [aljazeera.net] and Chineese State news [cctv.com] are more outward looking (even if somewhat biased). It's not just the news of our enemies either I look at other allies [france24.com] news, they too are less introverted than their US [foxnews.com] equivilents [msn.com]. And it's not that you can't produce quality news from around the world, compare the versions of CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/ [cnn.com]
http://edition.cnn.com/ [cnn.com]

But who would think to put "edition" at the beginning of a URL?

Too bad

(I'm just tired of people complaining about this place becoming a police state)

Some things may not be *as bad* in America as they are in China, but they can still be *bad*.

In fact, we are seeing a slow but stead erosion of various civil liberties.

Yes, things could be worse, but that is no reason to avoid making them better now.

How to frustrate the censors: a simple proposal

The Chinese censorship works by picking out key terms. So here's a simple way for you webmasters to really frustrate the censors. Everybody who's a webmaster for scientific and engineering and technical sites-- the ones that the Chinese really want their people to access-- here's what you need to do. Drop a couple of the forbidden terms in-- say "Free Tibet" and "Dalai Lama" and "Falun Gong" and "June 4 1989"-- at the end of your site. It can even be in white text on white screen; it doesn't matter if the humans can read it, as long as the robots can.

Now the censors are rapidly going to discover that the firewall isn't working, because suddenly it's blocking all the stuff they want their people to be able to get to!

Re:How to frustrate the censors: a simple proposal

An interesting idea. This might seem a sily question, bu humor me... Is there anything on the internet the Chinese government WANTS their people to be able to get to or or anything that they would be worried about that people might not being able to get to? In other words, who would actually get hurt by this?

Remind me again, why does China have MFN status?

I don't get why China gets as many breaks as they do, including Most Favored Nation status (permanently!). The 2008 Olympics are looking more and more like the 1936 edition.

Re:Remind me again, why does China have MFN status

I don't get why China gets as many breaks as they do

Because they hold over $1.4 trillion dollars in US debt? Because they could crush our economy by unloading that paper [telegraph.co.uk] and their dollar reserves on the open market? Because the US is still going to China to beg for handouts because we can't balance our budget? Because their population of men available for military service exceeds that of the entire United States? And possibly, because our leadership, world famous as staunch defenders of civil rights themselves, really doesn't give a shit about Chinese human rights abuses?

But what do I know? I'm just guessing here...

Re:Remind me again, why does China have MFN status

Or this football match between England and Germany in Berlin in 1938. http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/03/magazine_enl_1064218142/img/1.jpg [bbc.co.uk]

Can you guess which team is doing the Nazi salute? It's the England team.

Re:Remind me again, why does China have MFN status

It's time to sever that tie. Chinese products even for consumer electronics are typically low quality, full of lead, and made by slave (by US standards) labor. Why companies get away with exporting all of their manufacturing over there when they get crap (literaly) in return is beyond comprehension. I don't mind stuff manufactured in Taiwan. At least that stuff doesn't break in a week. I'd like it even better if high tech manufacturing was done in the US but with equipment effecient enought to make it economical even when compared to China. I know it can be done. We just need some forward looking companies to jump on the bandwagon.

Comcast???

When the filtering system spots a banned term it sends instructions to the source server and destination PC to stop the flow of data.'

Comcast has service in China???

Borrowed Time

I believe (perhaps naively) that this 'Golden Shield' will ultimately prove to be a failure, current methods to circumvent it notwithstanding.

More than ever, information is becoming the lifeblood of a people. Without access to the full volume of information freely available to the rest of the world, China will fall behind in crucial ways. The filtering solution won't block out everything important, but it will block out some. Maybe someone mentions Tibet in his chemistry thesis and it's filtered for China, or whatever. There's a piece of information the rest of the world gets for free that a researcher in China might well miss.

Ultimately I think China will decide it's in its best interest to allow the free flow of information into the country, and that in turn will help drive their country ever more towards modern democracy.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. Maybe the future will end up like Red Dawn.

"Great Firewall of China"

Such a system is inherently weak in that even crude encryption techniques render it worthless. Imagine, if you will, a basic anonymizer service using a 128-bit key system. Almost immediately, the robots and spiders would find your communications gibberish. Even the url visited would be garbled and useless. And to attempt to shut down the anonymizing service would be problematic should such a service be switched to a P2P setup, rendering it next to impossible to break.

Absolutely pathetic come to think about it.

Re:"Great Firewall of China"

You are looking at it from a technical standpoint. There is also a human standpoint: people in China know that they are being watched, so they self censor the websites they go to in order to be sure that they stay out of trouble.
It's a bit like when you are at work and you see some headline about the recent security problem at Facebook. You see Paris Hilton mentioned, so you stay clear from the link because you are not sure the article will be purely technical and not embarassing.

No need for a 100% efficient filtering system to frighten people and cause them to self-censor.

Government not entirely to blame

Read the comments by Chinese net users

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7313998.stm [bbc.co.uk]

They don't think that their media is at all biased. They believe "western" media is biased and has an anti-Chinese agenda.
Too much fucking national pride is what it is. When I talk to Chinese people, in China, I often get this weird apologetic "our country is crappy in a socio-economic way", but "our morals and cultural values are superior to your hedonistic, non-family oriented foreign ways".

It's creepy. Take a look at the China-daily forum if you have morbid interest. It's full of the craziest ranting racists I have ever seen...and I visited 4chan once.

Bottom line is, I don't think the government oppressing the people with censorship should be looked at in such a simplistic way. There seems to be a need for the censorship for many people on some level. Like they can't take a single bit of criticism of their precious middle kingdom and it's 5000 (actually 50) year great history.

Re:encryption?

Unfortunately there are a few orders of magnitude in the difference of power between the Chinese government and the RIAA.

That may be true at the moment, but the Chinese are catching up pretty quickly.