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Censorship The Internet Government Politics

First Hand Look At Chinese Internet Censorship 398

Posted by Zonk from the very-little-first-person-shooting dept.
Blanchek writes "Few Internet quotes have had a longer shelf life than John Gilmore's 'the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.' An Ottawa Citizen article from Professor Michael Geist notes that the maxim may be dead. The article reflects on a recent experience with Chinese Internet censorship and the blocking of news, email, and Google searches, while providing a caution that it would be mistake to think that the Internet in Canada, the U.S. and Europe will always remain as free as China's is censored."
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First Hand Look At Chinese Internet Censorship More

First Hand Look At Chinese Internet Censorship

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  • Internet Censorship (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05, 2005 @12:54PM (#12442678)
    The maxim is dead? The Internet is merely just routing around China. The fact that Chinese citizens can't access the information doesn't mean it isn't out there. This professor missed the point of the quote entirely. It's not about censoring what people see, it's about censoring the content itself. In that respect, China can't touch anything outside its own borders.

    Besides, even the Chinese can get around it. Alternatives exist for dissidents to get their polically sensitive information, look no further than excrypted communication via proxy, Freenet, etc. What enables all of this? Oh yeah, it's the Internet.

    • Re:Internet Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SpaceLifeForm ( 228190 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:01PM (#12442807)
      I believe you missed the point.

      it would be mistake to think that the Internet in Canada, the U.S. and Europe will always remain as free as China's is censored.

      As I've said before, keep your copper dry.

      Those who control the pipes can control the content.

      • One Canadian reporter not being able to access articles in the U.S. does not perfect and unalterable censorship make.

        The main thing that makes this possible is the 30,000 people sitting at machines editing 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' content. With unlimited power to block. This is not the Internet as we know it.

        It's also not really that economically feasible in the U.S. or Canada - we'd need to have MACHINES to do this, and we don't yet. Google could build one, probably, but hasn't yet.

        Keepi
        • t's also not really that economically feasible in the U.S. or Canada - we'd need to have MACHINES to do this, and we don't yet. Google could build one, probably, but hasn't yet.

          Are you out of your mind? We don' need no steekin' machines. We'd just outsource it. To China, perhaps...

      • Re:Internet Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cliffiecee ( 136220 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:16PM (#12443002) Homepage Journal
        As I've said before, keep your copper dry.

        Good advice. Let's all keep in mind one thing.

        The Gov't/Phone Companies/ISPs might decide to 'pull the plug' on us, or attempt to censor/monitor us, etc.

        But we can always buy a giant spool of Cat 5 cabling and hook up to each other directly. Oh wait- I forgot about WiFi! We don't even need to run wires. I've seen articles on /. about line of sight infrared connections between buildings. I could connect with my neighbors across the street; they'd connect with the next block over, etc.

        Yes, the reliability would SUCK. latency would be AWFUL. But we'd have our network. They'd have to go breaking down doors to get us- and if we are at that point, uncensored internet is the least of our concerns.

        • Re:Internet Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)

          by GlassHeart ( 579618 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @02:46PM (#12444094) Journal
          But we can always buy a giant spool of Cat 5 cabling and hook up to each other directly. Oh wait- I forgot about WiFi! We don't even need to run wires. [...] Yes, the reliability would SUCK. latency would be AWFUL. But we'd have our network.

          The common purpose of censorship is not so much to prevent you from speaking as it is to prevent the masses from hearing. Unless your home-made network has the same reach as the Internet, the oppressor's objective is achieved.

    • Re:Internet Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:04PM (#12442852)
      When nobody can access it, it might as well not exist. The point is that, if it is possible to filter China's internet access, then it is possible to filter your access too.

      The original maxim meant more than just excluding censored portions of the internet. It meant that you couldn't damage the internet in a way that would make censorship feasible. You can. That's what the article is about.

      The technology to circumvent censorship may exist, but if you use them, you have next to no chance of flying under the radar. A totalitarian society can censor the internet.
      • "The technology to circumvent censorship may exist, but if you use them, you have next to no chance of flying under the radar."

        Not true, at the moment it just requires a bit of tech savvy to do it. Encryption, steganogaphy, watermarking can all make information dissemination virtually unstoppable and virtually undetectable, even in the most totalitarian of states. All it takes is intent. To really f*ck up the authorities all that would be required is someone to combine the three into easy to use packages,
    • Indeed. Having recently travelled through China there are still very strict media controls (I hear that all of the television stations, and hence all the TV news is state controlled) which include blocking some sites such as cnn. However, this doesn't reflect the Chinese perspective as the Chinese actually seek this censored information (with such hacks as routing through Hong Kong servers). Which makes one wonder, if the citizens seem to want access to this information, who is creating all of this censo

      • Re:Internet Censorship (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Gulthek ( 12570 )
        (with such hacks as routing through Hong Kong servers)

        Hong Kong is part of China now. But s/Hong\ Kong/foreign/ and you'd have it.

        Which makes one wonder, if the citizens seem to want access to this information, who is creating all of this censorship?

        Stubborn remnants of the CCP old guard.

        Who are the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of the gentry class who used to be in power until the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Perhaps because there is such a cohesive span of recorded history in China
        • Quick aside - as far as I can tell there is no Internet censorship in place in the Hong Kong or Macau Special Administrative Regions. Both Hong Kong and Macau have their own "Basic Law" (a mini-constitution if you like) and residents enjoy rather greater freedom than in mainland China.

    • Where there's a will and no thought police... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sterno ( 16320 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:10PM (#12442913) Homepage
      Exactly. In the end, somebody in China who really wants to get to that information can find a way to do it. What makes censorship possible in China though isn't the technology, but the people and policies that exist outside the technology. It's not the firewall that makes things difficult for you, but the guys who come bash your skull in if you try to get around the router.

      I was in China about two years ago and there was a big crack down on Internet cafes. So what was happening was that people were routing around the censorship and the government came in to stop it. Without that ability and will to enforce the censorship by those means, it ceases to be.

      Could the US, theoretically set up a bunch of firewalls and restrict what we do? Sure. But it wouldn't matter unless working around those firewalls lead to men with guns showing up at my home. Frankly, if our country was at that point, we have a lot bigger things to worry about than what websites I can get to.

      • Not just a way to do it (Score:5, Informative)

        by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:43PM (#12443363) Homepage Journal
        ... it's ridiculously easy with a "friend on the outside". SSH tunnel or some other sort of VPN to a proxy somewhere outside the firewall and you're done.

        I've used this technique regularly when I need to work with people in China and find their mail and web services too unreliable to be useful. I simply provision them with tunneled services via work. No fuss.

        • Re:Not just a way to do it (Score:5, Insightful)

          by secolactico ( 519805 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @02:13PM (#12443711) Journal
          Quoting Craig Ringer:

          SSH tunnel or some other sort of VPN to a proxy somewhere outside the firewall and you're done.

          Quoting the GP:

          It's not the firewall that makes things difficult for you, but the guys who come bash your skull in if you try to get around the router

          Your solution is a technological one and it can be easily trumped by the "skull bashers". They might not be able to see what's coming thru the tunnel, but they might very well come the endpoint's location and demand to know what's going on and will you please cease and desist.

          I know very little (next to nothing) of China's investigative procedures or judicial system, but maybe they can come knocking on your door on suspicion alone and confiscate/arrest/interrogate/etc (can somebody with more knowledge on the subject enlighten us?).

          Imagine government (not just China's) requiring some form of licensing to operate an ecryption tunnel. Then it would just be a matter of checking all unlicensed tunnels. Or maybe requiring a clipper-chip-like approach (remember those?).
          • I can't tell you about what the rules say in China with regaurd to skull busting on suspection alone, but I did here a radio pice just the other day. They were talking about how a large number of young pople want an independant judiciary. As you can imagine if the executive and judical are the same pleople the laws matter only as much as the executive wants to fallow them or have them followed. So if their equivelent of the D.A. decides to just have you shoot in the street with no trial, its doubtful any

          • They might not be able to see what's coming thru the tunnel

            but the authorities are naturally alert for anything resembling a potential covert channel for communication.

            Which is why there needs to be a means for stego network traffic over innocuous-looking unencrypted port 80 traffic to what appears to be entertainment news, etc. where the photos contain the real information.

        • Two words: onion routing. See also: Tor [eff.org].

      • This is why it's important to make encrypted communication the default in every application that we develop. It then becomes impractical to mandate that only programs using cleartext communication are allowed. It also makes it difficult to determine who's likely a dissident by analyzing their traffic.
    • Actually, you miss that point that for communication to occur, there must be a sender and a receiver. In the case of China, they have crippled the receivers. Sure, the rest of us have unfettered access, but the Chinese do not.

      The other aspect to this is that if China can effectively block access to information for most people, it can also be done here.

      Most of us on this board are savvy enough to get around most restrictions etc, but the general population on the net doesn't have a clue.
    • look no further than excrypted communication via proxy, Freenet, etc.

      Even ssh can be used to create an encrypted tunnel. All anyone needs to get access to this censored info is ssh access to one system outside their firewall or censorship software, like, say, any system in the US or EU.

      Is it illegal to purchase a shell account on a foreign system?

    • Re:Internet Censorship (Score:3, Interesting)

      by coaxial ( 28297 )
      The maxim is dead? The Internet is merely just routing around China. The fact that Chinese citizens can't access the information doesn't mean it isn't out there.

      That's not what the maxim meant and you know that. It meant "censorship isn't effective". I realized that was an absurd meme at 18. You control the network, you control information.

      "The information wants to be free," is also a stupid meme. Information doesn't want to be free. It doesn't want to do anything. If information always moved flo

  • "Nothing for you to see here, move along" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gerad ( 86818 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @12:54PM (#12442686)
    I have to say, that message was oddly frightning in the context of this story.

  • Scary... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PlancksCnst ( 877593 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @12:55PM (#12442701) Homepage
    Scary, but I don't think it could ever happen in the good old US of A

    • Re:Scary... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Koiu Lpoi ( 632570 ) <koiulpoi AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:46PM (#12443399)
      The fact that you were moderated funny makes it that much scarier.

  • The (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The internet will be the freest place in the Universe soon. Right now it seems all our freedoms are being cut down or restricted due to "terrorists". Sooner or later someones got to draw a line and it seems the only way to do this sort of thing would be online and totally AC.

    1984 seems to be 30 years ahead of it's time, but it seems to be on the way nicely.

    • 1984 seems to be 30 years ahead of it's time, but it seems to be on the way nicely.

      Are you sure? It may have been just 20 years ahead of its time: we carry cellphones with us, so the phone companies (and therefore the state) knows exactly our whereabouts. In London, the complete inner city is surveilled by video cameras, and as we now have a complete digital telephone system, monitoring that is also trivial.

      We're already living in a 1984-like world. We're just not seeing it.

    • the source they are quoting from. In 1984 the year did not matter. According to the narrator it had been 1984 for years and he wondered if the year had changed at all. The point of the book (and the title) is that the government, through careful manipulation of language and thought, could even control someone's perception of time.
  • Could you get around it like that...?
    • If you use SSH tunneling, the government takes note of it. Then, one day when they feel like it, they break down your doors, take your hard drive and peek in the cache. So naturally, most Chinese don't try it. For SSH tunneling to be safe, everyone has to use it.
  • I thought, being a free medium anything can be on internet....uh.. wait... where is lokitorrent??

  • Of course it won't stay free here (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    With those lobbying from the left and right to protect us all from spam, scams, porn, and our own desires. And the electorate always gets what it wants and the constitution no longer protects us from the mob rule of unrestrained democracy. Its a wonder the internet in the US has remained as free as it is.

  • I can't RTFA (Score:3, Funny)

    by mathmatt ( 851301 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @12:58PM (#12442751) Homepage
    Could someone summarize, for some reason i get a "Forbidden You do not have permission to access TFA on this server." Boy, I'm glad I don't live in China!

    • Re:I can't RTFA (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Face to face with the great firewall of China

      Michael Geist
      Citizen Special

      Thursday, May 05, 2005

      As the Internet was taking flight in the early 1990s, John Gilmore, one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading online civil liberties group, is credited with having coined the infamous phrase that "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.'' Gilmore's view has since been regularly invoked whenever there are failed attempts to limit the dissemination of infor
    • Attempted joke detected.
      Swing and a miss!

  • Internet Free America (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @12:58PM (#12442760) Journal
    It is only a matter of time before a country puts up a 2-way satellite that censored countries can use for free. Perhaps, over Iran, first.
    • But then they'd probably do you for having equipment that could access the satellite (similar to the way that they used to monitor the direction that people's TV arials were pointing in East Germany to try to stop people viewing Western TV).

  • Free? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Quasar1999 ( 520073 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @12:59PM (#12442762) Journal
    It's not free... I pay $44.95 a month to Rogers for my highspeed internet access in Canada, and I get my bandwidth reduced, and even DNS resolution problems while trying to download stuff off bittorrent... Customer support claims they don't know what I'm talking about... but everything works perfectly fine until I use bittorrent to transfer a large amount of data (>1GB) and then all of a sudden, the DNS servers stop resolving names properly... it takes 4 or 5 attempts for them to return anything... After a few hours of not using bittorrent all returns to normal...

    So as a Canadian, I'm starting to worry when my ISP is going to decide to accidentally stop resolving known bittorrent tracker sites' DNS entries...

    • Re:Free? (Score:2, Informative)

      by JediTrainer ( 314273 )
      I pay $44.95 a month to Rogers for my highspeed internet access in Canada, and I get my bandwidth reduced, and even DNS resolution problems while trying to download stuff off bittorrent

      There might be other culprits besides Rogers. I connect via Rogers as well, and I have the occasional issue, but often it seems the problem is on my end.

      1 - try capping the number of connections BT is using. You might be exhausting the capabilities of your machine (particularly if you're on Windows) and/or your router

      2
    • It's not that difficult to set your own name servers up. I've noticed since the first days of PPP dialup that a lot of ISPs have really crappy name servers. Rather than wait for them, I've just been installing my own since day one, and it really does a great job of increasing your initial response time when connecting to other systems on the net.

  • Public WIFI will lead to more censorship (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rjordan ( 640052 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @12:59PM (#12442764)
    The current approach of many local governments to creating local endorsed monopolies for city-wide WIFI will only increase this as pressure starts to come on the ISP from the people who own their business. The ISP will hide the details due to 'proprietary competitive' reasons. Free municipality owned WIFI at least has the ability for more accountable public citizen monitoring of what censorship is put in place. Just my thought on the creep of censorship here in the US.

    • 100% agree (Score:3, Insightful)

      by blueZ3 ( 744446 )
      This is the #1 reason I'm opposed to government provided WiFi service. If my ISP tries to block content, I can switch providers or find a workaround. If the local government provides WiFi, there won't be any competitors (you can't compete with free) and there won't be any option if the City of Podunk decides that I can't see information about some topic.

      In my opinion, free WiFi is the "hook" that will almost certainly lead to fewer choices, and eventually to only one choice: the government sanctioned and c

      • Re:100% agree (Score:3, Insightful)

        by WaxParadigm ( 311909 )
        I agree with you, but "you can't compete with free" is a misnomer. It should be "you can't compete with someone who has the ability to throw people in jail if they don't pay up, regardless of use."
  • I dont see them surpassing India anytime, if this is the trend... Hardware...maybe.. software ... never!

  • Why technological means for censorship don't work (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wackysootroom ( 243310 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:02PM (#12442815) Homepage
    There's no way to fully censor the internet for those that are tech saavy. People in China already know how to get the information that they seek.

    Blocking sites? Use a proxy.
    Blocking content? Use an encrypted proxy or tunnel.

    Even if (and that's a really big *IF*) laws are passed in the USA and Can that force censorship on us there will be those people who can find a way around it. Huge industries will blossom that will allow people to view "forbidden" content; people will get rich and arrested.

    Censorship will never happen because the porn industry is so huge and they will see to it that our free speech continues on the internet so they can make money.
    • Someone will always be able to get around it, but not everyone, which is the main issue. Your typical chineese computer nerd can probably still get that info (and find a way to profit from the access) but your typical, day to day internet user (and that's a lot of people) is not going to be able to access the whole internet.

      The other issue there is risk- if the punishment for accessing censored data is a $5 fine, people will do it. If the fine suddenly becomes imprisonment, well then, even those peopl

  • Politics is Business as Usual (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fbody98 ( 881072 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:02PM (#12442817)
    Quote "Many noted that the censorship "only" affected political information, but that business could be conducted online unimpeded. "

    It seems a little naive to believe that Business and Politics are not intertwined. I realize that wasn't the intent of that statement but even so...

  • Priorities (Score:5, Funny)

    by spring ( 116537 ) <eric@bitREDHATpuddle.com minus distro> on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:04PM (#12442853) Homepage
    Block Google and news sites, but let hack attempts and spam right through. Thanks a lot, China.

  • It could happen (Score:5, Insightful)

    by digidave ( 259925 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:04PM (#12442856)
    Not only could we in North America find our internet experience censored, but the majority of our peers would support it.

    The government would just say they were censoring child porn and terrorist web sites and everybody would be ok with it. Then they'd say they are censoring hate literature web sites and everybody would be ok with it. Then they'd say they were censoring unAmerican web sites and everybody would go along with it because they don't want to be unAmerican. Then, they'll be living in China.

  • the thing that's scary is... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MattW ( 97290 ) <matt@ender.com> on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:06PM (#12442869) Homepage
    What frightens me is that the Chinese simply don't realize they're being censored. Recently when Zhao Ziyang [wikipedia.org] passed away in China, news of this was muted and response to it suppressed. And that's for something the Chinese clearly wanted a modicum of information to be released for.

    The thing is, the vast majority of the Chinese have no idea they're being censored. It's not as though a huge red screen pops up saying, "THIS INFORMATION IS CENSORED BY YOUR GOVERNMENT". If we were being censored, how would we know?

    We see little things - like Bush using "planted" reporters to rig questioning at the White House. How long before another step is taken?

    Scary stuff. Eternal vigilance is the price.
    • What frightens me is that the Chinese simply don't realize they're being censored.

      What scares me is that many don't even care. The old attitude of, "Eh. It's just politics," and "I can email my friends and get my photos, music, and movies." I can see why they say that, it doesn't effect them.

    • Re:the thing that's scary is... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You don't need the double quotes around "planted", but you do around "reporter". He did plant a "reporter", who daftly enough was also an active male escort. Where's the howls of outrage from the right wing? Murmurs of protest? Whispers of indignity?

      Oh, right, Republican president. Different standard.

    • Re:the thing that's scary is... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nufsaid ( 230318 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:47PM (#12443420)
      Following this thinking a little further:

      People are shocked at how uninformed many americans are despite living in a society that is very open. Suppose China is able to bring it's average citizens up to european/us living standards and still maintain the great firewall. Then you will have a country as powerful and influential as the us and yet even more ignorant of the implications of its own policies than americans currently are.

      That scares me.

  • "Nothing to see here. Move along..." ;P
  • Interesting to note, that many spam mails can be traced back to .cn domains hosted on open relay mailservers in China. Not to mention all the spam that comes in Chinese... What's with that, if they're so "locked down"?

    • Interesting to note, that many spam mails can be traced back to .cn domains

      That's actually a myth. Most spam comes from the US [spamhaus.org]. Just because spammers forge 'From: ' headers doesn't mean they are sending spam from chinese networks.

      In a recent survey, more than 72% of the spam came from the ARIN netblock (the US being the biggest part of it), 16% from RIPE and the puny remaining rest from APNIC (where most .hk and .cn domains belong).

      • "That's actually a myth."

        Tell it to my mailserver... I was running an ISP for a few years so I know a thing or two about accurately tracing mail and ignoring forged headers.

        The "from:" address can, of course, be completely ignored. But you can't ignore the IP of the server that delivered it to yours, extremely difficult to spoof. The highest percentage of these come from open relays, followed by open relays via open proxies, followed by spam friendly hosts (whether they realise/care or not).
        By the time yo

  • If the Chinese Government Doesn't (Score:3, Funny)

    by ubuntu ( 876029 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:11PM (#12442932) Journal
    If the Chinese Government doesn't want the people to see something, just post it as a link on Slashdot.

    Problem solved, no censorship required.

  • Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cca93014 ( 466820 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:12PM (#12442943) Homepage
    I spent a few weeks travelling around China last year, and the only censorship I ever witnessed was the blocking of the BBC website. I could SSH to work machines in the UK (and securely proxy'd off them if I had so wished).

    The BBC News stories were, naturally, all being aggregated by Google News.

    I arrived excited to witness this mass censorship in action, and jubilant that I couldnt really find anything of the sort.

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GutBomb ( 541585 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:25PM (#12443112) Homepage
      you don't find the fact that outside news sources were being censored as "mass censorship"?
      • Not really, no. ONE outside news source being restricted, which could be easily circumvented, is hardly what I would define as mass censorship.

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Funny)

      by northcat ( 827059 )
      OK people, there's a guy here presenting valid observations and facts which will spoil our China-bashing party which is mostly based on biased US media and an anti-communist sentiment. Let's make sure we convince him the truth that what he actually saw is unreal and the reality is what's presented by biased anti-communist media and what the Americans want to believe. Let's mod him down to hell.

      • Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)

        by anaesthetica ( 596507 )
        That's quite true. In fact, since all Chinese people have remote boxes in the UK to ssh into, there really is no effective censorship in China, and the fact that the Chinese government is even trying is more comical than scary. Also, let's forget that China censors some sites totally, but also censors some sites only partially--blocking news items on touchy subjects like Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Tibet. We all know that the Chinese government is benevolent and fuzzy and happy, and the only people who say oth
  • Does anyone know where Taiwan pipes its Internet from?

    • Re:Taiwan (Score:3, Informative)

      by cpghost ( 719344 )

      Why won't you traceroute yourself?

      % traceroute www.via.com.tw
      [...]
      9 p16-7-1-2.r20.londen03.uk.bb.verio.net (129.250.5.64) 79.332 ms 85.510 ms 82.460 ms
      10 p16-0-0-0.r81.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.2.134) 151.867 ms 150.723 ms 152.835 ms
      11 p16-1-1-3.r21.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.5.36) 151.138 ms 151.056 ms 151.000 ms
      12 p16-1-1-3.r21.sttlwa01.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.5.56) 209.680 ms 210.892 ms 210.008 ms
      13 p64-1-3-0.r21.tokyjp01.jp.bb.verio.net (129.250.4.186) 320.698 ms 1091.530 ms 1064.743

  • Bypass the filtering via VPNs (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One easy way to bypass those internet filters in China (or anywhere) is to connect with a US-based VPN service:

    www.witopia.net
    www.publicvpn.com
    www.wiphi.co m

    All of these guys have endpoints in the US. So when you surf, you surf in the US.

    And geez...why the heck would you plug in to the net with a clean connection in a totalitarian regime? Geez, you're just asking The Man to come and take a look.

  • Firewalling the wrong way (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Coward Anonymous ( 110649 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:25PM (#12443105)
    It appears most complaints about the firewall are for accessing foreign, non-Chinese websites while internal communication is unfettered. When anyone with a PC and a semi-permanent broadband link can set up an encrypted and authenticated website, the Chinese government is failing to protect against the real threat to its existence - the free flow of ideas within the Chinese citizenry.

  • geist (Score:2)

    by Fox_1 ( 128616 )
    this guy puts out the articles every 3 weeks, crying about how his freedoms are restricted or the dangers of the Canadian governments latest proposal for regulations. Honestly he would be better off living in china or russia where he could really have something to complain about. I honestly can't stand this guy. Take everything he says with a grain of salt and remember that he is all about the worst case scenarios even if they don't actually come close to the reality.

  • First the censors came... [Martin Niemöller] (Score:5, Insightful)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:35PM (#12443247) Homepage Journal
    First the internet censors came...
    First they came for the smut peddlers, and I did not speak out because I was not a smut peddler.
    Then they came for the gamblers, and I did not speak out because I was not a gambler.
    Then they came for the terrorists, and I did not speak out because I was not a terrorists.
    Then they came for the music pirates, and I did not speak out because I was not a music pirate.
    Then they came for me...
    and there was no one left to speak for me.

    With apologies to Martin Niemöller [wikiquote.org]
  • And keep it in mind. We are the big group of people who choose a small group of people to manage the country FOR US!

    If they get out of line, we fire them.

    VOTE WELL! Don't make important decisions with your emotions, make them with logic.

  • Monthly censorship check (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @01:35PM (#12443261) Homepage
    Here's the monthly censorship check. As long as these sites are up, Internet censorship isn't working.

    Are any of these blocked in your area?

  • Is your content managed? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by t_allardyce ( 48447 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @02:12PM (#12443704) Journal
    Western governments understand that 'censorship' is un-popular and will route around it. censorship is such a nasty word isn't it? Its certainly much better to call it 'filtering' or 'data processing', 'content management', 'vetting', making 'kid safe' etc. Now mandating that content management systems be installed at all ISPs would be a little 'un progressive' but confiscating certain servers is well established practice. In china, political censorship is the name of the game. In the US for example, political censorship would be seen as wrong no matter what your other views were, but an attempt to censor porn for example 'isn't censorship' its 'moral standards'. John Ashcroft wets him self thinking about this.

  • The issue here isn't whether hackers can bypass it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by leereyno ( 32197 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @03:12PM (#12444345) Homepage Journal
    The issue is that effective censorship ensures that truths the chinese cleptocracy finds unpleasant are hidden from the average citizen.

    I'm sure there are ways for those with the requisite technical skills and political activism to get around the censorship, but then censorship has never worked on that segment of the population anyway. Agent of the police state were watching them long before the internet existed.

    The reason this censorship is so damaging to chinese society is because it means the average person doesn't know just how hard they're being screwed by the criminals who run the country. The state gets away with telling plausible lies because 98% of the population lacks the skill and gumption needed to uncover the truth.

    Lee

  • Project Golden Shield (Score:4, Informative)

    by Foobar_Zen ( 774905 ) on Thursday May 05, 2005 @03:47PM (#12444759) Journal
    The Chinese firewall is actually only one part of the large information control that China has forced upon it's people. This project is called "Golden Shield" [stanford.edu]. Most people in China find a way around the firewall.

    However China's information control doesn't stop at just the Internet. During the SARS scare, China tried to keep information about it contained but was unable to do so because they did not consider the use of SMS messaging and similar technologies. This has only given them more determination to control all information through the Golden Shield Project.

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