Split Topic: The Middle Kingdom - Öйú > American Citizen Services

[Rob and WeiLing]

He just seems to fall to victim to he himself pointed out.

 

If they're as sophisticated as he claims, they can look inside proxied messages and get the same information as if it were direct to the site.

 

Access to a particular site (to me) seems to be a LOT more consistent than what he says - it's the load factors which seem the most variable.

 

Of course things may be different where you (and he) are, but for the most part the heaviest principle seems to be, " the PRC has less to do as citizens and sites heavily self-censor, erring on the safe side" - which is to say that I don't concern myself with whether a site (or VPN's) is censored or illegal, but then, I'm not here to research pornography, Tibet, Tiananmen Square or the Falun Gong.

 

If the censorship were anywhere near as sophisticated as he suggests, you can bet there would be MASSIVE bottlenecks at the censor sites.

 

I'm not buying it.

 

I wouldn't say so with the bottlenecks. The transparent proxies they run only cover HTML content, things like images and videos can pass through with <1ms delay even under heavy load. Then, filtering only text is pretty simple. A couple years ago, I setup a Pentium Pro 166mhz to not only share a single internet connection (IP masquerade), but to monitor traffic and bandwidth usage for a personal network. Even with 10~15 computers running over it there was no perceived latency and the processor load was near idle. Most consumer grade WiFi routers have processors with just as much power as that had. Throw together a number of business-grade servers with recent multi-core processors and put them at various ISP sites, and I don't think there'd be much bottleneck. Rerouting traffic takes minimal more computing power than standard routing. And yes, direct connections to proxy servers would get content blocked the same as regular internet-- all that direct proxies will avoid is DNS hijacks and IP blacklisting.

 

What becomes more difficult are VPNs. The very nature of VPNs are to imitate a private network--no snooping from parties outside the network. I've setup both IPSec/L2TP and OpenVPN servers on a machine back in the states. These both work with public/private digital key pairs. Basically, data encrypted with a "private key" can only be decrypted by a matching "public key". To "break" the data, one basically needs a quantum computer with as many qubits as in the key. For my personal VPNs, I use 2048bits; the most qubits in an active working quantum computer is 4, as far as I know. Even if the Chinese government stored the encrypted data, I don't think they'd break it in my lifetime (not that I think they even care to store it). Most VPNs also set the local computer's routing policies to direct all data over the VPN, so internet will act as if you were at the site of the VPN server, plus the latency between you and that server.

 

As stated in that article,

Probably 98 percent of what they're searching for is not going to be blocked.

So 2% is probably blocked. That's after the fact that Chinese search engines don't even display results for sensitive topics. When they do happen upon an inaccessible website, the average computer user doesn't know why. I'd say it's about as common as domain names and websites that expired in the states. I had a classmate that thought Facebook went down entirely--not that it was censored in China, so I expect that's the variability that the article is talking about.

 

One of my friends here is an English teacher like you. He said that on one assignment he encouraged students to write about any topic they wanted, and not to worry about anything. He told me that one of the students came to his office to confirm that he meant "anything". Then, when the paper was submitted, the student gave a USB stick and asked the teacher to disconnect from all networks when reading the paper, and to delete it before connecting to the internet again.

[Randy W]

 

. . .

 

One of my friends here is an English teacher like you. He said that on one assignment he encouraged students to write about any topic they wanted, and not to worry about anything. He told me that one of the students came to his office to confirm that he meant "anything". Then, when the paper was submitted, the student gave a USB stick and asked the teacher to disconnect from all networks when reading the paper, and to delete it before connecting to the internet again.

 

 

Yes, the right amount of paranoia can work wonders by self-censorship. This is a LOT more productive than throwing away computer power and talent by trying to analyze content in real-time.

[Rob and WeiLing]

Yes, the right amount of paranoia can work wonders by self-censorship. This is a LOT more productive than throwing away computer power and talent by trying to analyze content in real-time.

 

But they need to have a system to back the paranoia. Sure, it's not going to be perfect, but it's sophisticated in its efforts to be transparent. Not transparent in the sense that anyone can see its internals and how it works, but transparent in the sense that nobody knows exactly where it is or what catches it. Users know that going to www.google.com and searching for that religion will get the connection dropped, but posting it once in a while on a forum goes through. The actual triggers, in my experience, are pretty simple and don't always fire. Once they reach a certain threshold or pattern, they'll fire. I've had various sites blocked for about 15 minutes at a time when I've tried to post about certain subjects. During that time I VPNed and was fine. So I do have first-hand experience with some of the real-time content blocking and can tell you it's there. I don't have experience with any notifications from the government or knocking on the door from police, but I've heard a few stories. I wouldn't be surprised at all if certain sites get flagged for human review even without direct block. Even that first link I posted wasn't working from Chinese internet earlier today. I had to use my VPN to access it. Working fine now...

[Randy W]

We're at a far cry from the original censored=illegal and VPN=illegal idea, so I'll leave it at that, except to say that I'm far more impressed with their people skills in getting everyone to accept the degree of censorship as being acceptable (or even 'necessary') than I am with their computer skills.