The Great(!) fireWall of China
At the moment I'm in China visiting the in-laws: typing this entry over a normal Chinese home connection. This mean that everything I can access from my laptop has been filtered through "The Great FireWall" - TGFW to you and me.
For those of you who haven't heard of TGFW it's basically the tool the Chinese Government use to filter out the following from citizens' internet connections;
If you try to go to such a site, typing a URL or clicking a hyperlink, you get the usual "Problem Loading Page: Connection has timed out". The sort of thing you get if you type an invalid URL in a UK browser. So basically nothing tells you the site is banned, apart from the fact I can't access it now, whereas a week ago I could.
What is really hacking me off about it isn't the fact the Chinese government are censoring what people read. It's not like that's a secret(!) It's the fact that these rules are being so inconsistently applied that's got me wound up. A few examples to illustrate my point.
Banned: BBC
Not Banned: The Guardian
WTF?! BBC, mostly objective reporting, worldwide reputation for fairness. The Guardian, A Left-wing tree-hugging newspaper for teachers. I even looked up the latest Tibet protests on the Guardian website and showed them to my (Chinese) father-in-law. His response - "Meh"
FYI - Also not banned: The Times newspaper, The Sun and Yahoo's UK news - All of which, to differing standards, report news freely
Banned: Wikipedia
Come on! The only reason I get through my working day is looking up pointless articles of wiki. Recent examples include: Hong Kong football league, the proof 0.999999=1 and UK Road-numbering system. (The last one is a personal favourite, check it out). Probably banned due to being an objective source of information.
Banned: Football365
My second most visited site when at work. Unique in that it combines humour with quality reporting. Why is that banned? Come on! This meant that on Saturday night I resorted to reading the Guardian's painfully slow / prententious live football commentary due to F365 and bbc football both being banned.
Not Banned: Cracked!
...which suprised me. But then not much of the website's bile is aimed East.
In conclusion TGFW is so poorly applied that it is useless in stopping negative news. However, instead of taking the subversion out of the internet instead it has taken most of my pleasure.
Anyhow that's all for now. Will try to post later when the in-laws are gabbling away to MrsLurker. Plently of other local things have annoyed me in the past week.
Note: This website isn't banned.... yet.
|
Can't imagine a global blocking system being all that great...
Seriously... how is this even remotely maintainable or managable in the slightest? Without banning the whole World Wide Web and whitelisting websites rather than vice-versa it can't be done, and even if you did, I can't see how you do anything other than making your nations
dictatorshipleadership look like Draconian Iron Fist and cause civil uproar...Anyone with half a brain in computing would just use SSH tunnel to The Real World in any case..
Oh, and Free Tibet! That should get us banned in China... ;)
Crazy
Good article, oh and Del....Ugh, I just made the mistake of Googling "SSH Tunnel". Think I'll stick to my chosen vocation of flipping beef patties.
Keep your Dirty tunnels to yourself.
Geekcore...
Yeah, SSH is a bit more Geekcore than using a VPN in Windows but either could be used to circumvent Chinas glorious net blocking.
On a serious note, if you're wanting access to those websites I can set you up as a remote teleworker on one of the routers we have on UK sites and you can route your internet traffic through that... drop me an email and I'll explain in more details to delmorpha (at) delmorpha dot cock
Thanks, but no thanks
That's an interesting idea. I quite like the idea of the challenge of getting something like that working but I'll politely decline your offer since I'm leaving on Monday so it probably wouldn't be worth the effort.
(nice email address btw)
Quite easy
It is actually reasonably easy to sort out an SSH tunnel. Just a bit of extra text on the command line and wahey. If you do set up an SSH tunnel make sure your default port for the SSH server is different from 22. I had to quickly turn on an SSH server to my PC for a job interview in a hurry and left port 22 for it. After about 6 hours (job in Manchester) I had several people try to brute force their way into my PC.
There's also the minor problem
of being woken up in the night by the state police and getting a good beating! Which in all fairness is unlikely to happen unless I got seriously political - Tibet, workers unions, Myanmar etc. Very unlikely to happen to a Westerner.
That sounds like a pretty gruesome job interview. Then again I suppose you like that sort of stuff - Wierdo.
Not the meanest firewall though
This site is banned at work, but not in China.
Therefore in terms of liberty;
UK >>>> China >>>> One of the 'big-four' banks
Same at my place of work
Yeah same at my place of work
Though the prices of
Though the prices of Christian Louboutin is not cheap, you christian louboutin uk can find high-minded Louboutin boots louboutin uk and other incorruptible Louboutin shoes from online christian louboutin shoes uk stores.cyh04-28
it will not price you
it will not price you something Karen Millen much more than $250 for purchasing a gun cover. Just such as the artist handbags type the significant add-ons of various women, for males ideal gun include gets an crucial accessory.Again you have various types and manufacturers whenever you are purchasing for gun cases. You can assess the costs of various manufacturers and pick the extremely best choice available. several of you may perhaps get baffled which may be the Karen Millen dress proper model. There is no this sort of point from the gun include as beneficial or poor brand. Most in the stores will give the gun together with gun cover. It is beneficial to purchase an high-Karen Millen Spain priced manufacturer considering that it could occur to make use of for prolonged years. shop the gun away from accomplish of your youngsters whenever you are at home. be sure to lock it in risk-free vault considering that you are Karen Millen outlet answerable if it obtains lost.