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VPN crackdown ‘unthinkable’ trial by firewall for China’s research world
- smegel 9y ago> will be permitted only to connect to a company’s headquarters abroad And HQs gateway to the wide world web?
- blacktulip 9y agoI think a more efficient way for China to 'block the internet' is to stop teaching English altogether in schools. And I won't be surprised if that actually happens.
- jamescostian 9y agoI know Google Translate and other translation services make loads of mistakes, but they often give you a pretty good idea of what's being said.
- owenversteeg 9y agoFrom English to Spanish things are pretty decent. But from English to other languages it can get pretty horrible. But that doesn't even matter - the main thing is the barrier to reading a lot, not getting the gist from one article. If you can read English, you'll probably encounter Western perspectives all the time on the Internet. But if you're forced to go through a broken Chinese machine translation every time you encounter something in English, you're going to stay on the Chinese parts of the Internet.
- OnlineCourage 9y agoI would be absolutely shocked if this happens. Less than 1% of China's population speaks English beyond learning for business purposes. Making learning English illegal would be impossible to enforce, you would have to build additional infrastructure on the internet just to specifically block english courses. What you are suggesting is actually more complex.
- heroprotagonist 9y agoTo be fair, there is a world of difference between 'stop teaching English in schools' and 'making learning English illegal'.
- kimolas 9y agoMy Chinese friends tell me it's no longer mandatory for students to take English classes, but it'll likely never be banned outright.
- vinceguidry 9y agoI would never want to underestimate the ability of the CCP to scale solutions to political problems. It is, after all, the whole reason the party exists. We once thought the GFW would be impossible and laughed at it.
- gbog 9y agoSome people are happy to shoot themselves in the feet (looking at your brexit) but I don't think Chinese are like that. Stopping right now all English courses in China would be harmful and unproductive. As would be blocking VPNs for real.
- adventured 9y ago> Some people are happy to shoot themselves in the feet (looking at your brexit) but I don't think Chinese are like that. History disagrees with that statement. Communism was China shooting itself in the foot in the first place. The Great Firewall is China shooting itself in the foot. The lack of numerous freedoms the developed world takes for granted, is China shooting itself in the foot. China has a very long history of regularly shooting itself in the foot. They'd be a far more advanced nation economically, scientifically and culturally, were they to end the Communist Party oppression.
- vacri 9y agoBrexit happened after a long period of political stability in a country with a long, mature history at the forefront of international politics. Communism in China came to the fore during the tumult of the second world war, which had foreign troops razing half of China - after a period where China was colonised by a different foreign power which kept the powers in China as ignorant as possible. They're very different things.
- Hasknewbie 9y agoThere is an odd tendency to ascribe some sort of scheming long-term vision to the Chinese government, probably based on memories of dynasties that managed to reign over an empire for centuries. The CCP is nothing like that. As soon as they got into power, they triggered the "great leap forward" (miscalculated "modernization", and famine that killed dozens of millions), followed by the Cultural Revolution that bordered on civil war and spawned a generation of illiterate, starving zombies ("lost generation "). The CCP has a pretty terrible record at avoiding shooting themselves (or China) in the foot. They probably killed more Chinese people than Imperial Japan did.
- zczc 9y agoThere is a lot of Chinese language content to censor coming from Taiwan, Hong Kong and diaspora
- schuke 9y agoThey still want to make money. What they're doing instead is to reduce the percentage of foreign (translated) textbooks in schools, especially in universities.
- cpncrunch 9y agoIn some ways it might be good if they do manage to block VPNs. At least then people won't have any option other than to put real pressure on the government to give up their ridiculous censorship.
- zzzcpan 9y agoIt's the other way around, censorship makes it harder to pressure governments.
- cpncrunch 9y agoThat's not what I'm saying... The censorship is already there, and the government is hard to pressure. What I'm saying is that blocking VPNs will make more people put pressure on the government. Right now there is very little pressure, so they can get away with it. Can they get away with it if a large percentage of highly educated and well connected people are very strongly opposed to it and can't do their jobs properly?
- zzzcpan 9y agoThere will be even less pressure once those highly educated get censored too.
- OnlineCourage 9y ago> Can they get away with it if a large percentage of highly educated and well connected people are very strongly opposed to it and can't do their jobs properly? Well, Mao certainly could during the cultural revolution.
- pmontra 9y agoWhile I was reading the article I thought that this kind of issues don't apply only to China. If people focus on workarounds instead of addressing problems they get burned when the workarounds don't work anymore.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoYes. It's a kind of technical debt. If you are offered a job in china, you can't just assume that you'll be able to work around all the gfw problems; even your work might be forced to give up their unfiltered connection eventually. Any other place that has similar restrictions must be treated the same.
- MachinShinn- 9y agoI live part of the year in a country that regularly filters the internet. I've had no issue so far using VPNs, but I prefer to tunnel directly through the PCs I have running 24/7 in my US office. Would tunneling work in China or does the Great Firewall prevent that too? I'm curious because there may come a day when I need better workarounds myself.
- comex 9y agoIt’s pretty sophisticated at detecting tunnels, but presumably still possible to evade. This post was on HN recently: http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewall-of-china/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...
- rahimnathwani 9y agoIf you're talking about SSH tunneling then, no, it wouldn't work. My experience is that SSH tunnels get throttled (all the way down to zero) pretty soon after you send significant bandwidth through them.
- perlwle 9y agomost of my browsing are done with tunneling and it got filtered 3-4 times in the pass year. No biggie, I just redeploy another vps with a new IP from snapshot and the problem usually goes away. Shadowsocks definitely works too.
- CamperBob2 9y agoFrom the standpoint of international competition, the Great Firewall isn't such a bad thing. Wasn't it Sun Tzu himself who said, "When your enemy is making a mistake, don't interfere?" But research (ideally) benefits us all, so we'd be making a mistake of our own to adopt such a provincial attitude. The Chinese scientific community is not our "enemy." It's a shame the Great Firewall can't be worked around as easily as sci-hub worked around Elsevier and other artificial roadblocks to scientific communication.
- gbog 9y agoIt's very annoying to see such a comment assuming that HN readership is all and only US citizen. Very exclusive of the other people.
- CamperBob2 9y agoIt's very annoying to see such a comment assuming that HN readership is all and only US citizen. Sorry, that wasn't my intention at all. But: Very exclusive of the other people. It's not the US who's running the Great Firewall, remember. I'd like to think we wouldn't tolerate such a thing here. I've been wrong a lot lately, though.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoI don't see anything in that comment that implies a US perspective.
- jstanley 9y agoIt's not just the Chinese scientific community that "isn't our enemy" - it's the entire Chinese population, with the possible exception of those in government.
- AlexCoventry 9y agoIt's very likely this will all lighten up after the National Congress in the Fall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_National_Congress_of_the_Communist_Party_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_National_Congress_of_the_...
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoHow so? I don't know the people or forces involved.
- Hasknewbie 9y agoAuthoritarian-in-chief Xi Jinping will be reelected for a second term during the Congress. Since various factions within the CCP are at war (with Xi having initiated very public takedowns that crossed a few lines), they don't want the slightest chance of a hint of uncontrolled rumors, and all media will be under increased lockdown. Unlike GP I'm not sure the situation will improve all that much post-Congress, though.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoYeah, that doesn't sound promising at all. The guy who instituted this bullshit to cement his power will remain in power, but maybe he'll loosen up? That doesn't sound like any authoritarian ever.
- vidarh 9y agoThe point is that any kind of attempt at weakening his grip on power is more likely to come before the congress. Assuming he comes out of the congress with his people in all key positions, he has very little to fear afterwards. It's very possible he won't lighten up on the control, but it's also very possible that the political cost of people being annoyed at the increased blocks makes it expedient to ease up on it once there's no compelling political reason to keep it this tight. It may not sound like any authoritarian ever, but adapting the level of oppression to what is politically expedient has been common practice for Chinese authorities for decades.
- KaoruAoiShiho 9y agoWhat's the point of this article... the VPN block was fake news anyway.
- mtgx 9y agoOr maybe the OneParty was trying to see just how far they push their censorship, after it already passed a draconian "cybersecurity" law recently.
- xwvvvvwx 9y agoHe now bypasses the firewall with his university’s VPN system. Since researchers could still access legal VPNs through work, he did not think the restrictions were harmful to China’s academia – “at least for now”. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it sounds like this won't affect academics. What seems more interesting is that China is apparently creating a two tier system for access to information.
- greglindahl 9y agoPeople have been commenting for years that westerner-oriented hotels appear to have less filtering than other places in China.
- bonzini 9y agoNot just hotels, it's common for businesses to be able to access Google (though not necessarily Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Interestingly, in one such westerner-oriented hotel it was pretty much impossible to use other (TCP-based) VPNs, presumably because they were already doing some kind of tunneling to Hong Kong and three layers of congestion control were too much...
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoThat seems to only be true in southern Chinese cities. You ain't gonna get around the gfw even in a five star western branded Beijing hotel.
- nayuki 9y agoWhy is China still doing this? What do they have to fear about the outside world and the open Internet?
- laretluval 9y agoAs an example, think of all the nastiness on social networks and the role they played in the most recent US election. Why would you want to invite that into your country?
- duncan_bayne 9y agoThey already have it! The only difference is that the only party legally allowed to be awful and partisan is the Communist Party of China.
- tlrobinson 9y agoWas this sarcasm or are you suggesting censorship is an acceptable solution to fake news, internet trolls, etc?
- laretluval 9y agoMaybe not acceptable, but it seems plausible that it could be effective.
- Asooka 9y agoAnd killing people is a great way to reduce the unemployment rate.
- chimen 9y agoAnd you think that's done by regular VPN users bypassing the gov firewall?
- camdenlock 9y agoThe ruling socialist/communist party fears any discussion of its characteristics and its flaws. It's a way of keeping total control of a society when you can be sure that people won't just naturally find themselves aligned with the ideology the government is trying to push.
- curiousgal 9y agor/titlegore
- orblivion 9y agoI've tended to think that determined people can get full Internet access in China because people can get around the firewall, and the Chinese government wouldn't want the economic hit associated with blocking the Internet altogether. Lately, though, it sounds like the government is making gains on the technical workarounds. So, maybe the most effective sort of activism right now would be to produce something that the Chinese government wants to exist, which can't exist without VPN traffic.
- itcrowd 9y agoHypothetically, if you start a VPN business with a large pool of random ipv6 addresses and assign each customer one of those, could that be a start as a work-around?
- kccqzy 9y agoI think the Chinese government can do deep-packet inspection to detect common VPN protocols like IPSec. Even if you use something like TLS-based VPN, the government uses bandwidth statistics to tell normal browsing apart from VPN.
- 9y ago
- camdenlock 9y ago> "Universities – which fall under the control of Communist Party committees – have repeatedly been told to maintain purity in their socialist ideology, including steering clear of teaching topics such as press freedom and civil rights." This isn't new or anything, but every time I read about it, I find myself really angry. The behavior of the Chinese communist party is shockingly, disgustingly immoral. Blocking information because it might undermine the grip your ideological brainwashing has on a population. It really is a sort of fundamental evil, a primary stain on the history of the human species. I have some anecdotal stories from friends in China. It's actually quite a bit worse for the average academic than we think. The pressure to include communist party propaganda in one's research is incredibly strong – and in some cases mandatory (e.g. if you want funding).
- PeterisP 9y agoThat reminds me of academia in USSR, where all students, no matter what they were studying, had mandatory subjects like scientific communism and marxism-leninism; and your thesis, no matter if it's about literature, agronomy, astronomy or math had better describe its relevance for the proletariat and communism if it's to be defended. Some of these preambles (can't link because that all is pre-internet) are quite funny from the modern context (especially those linking abstract sciences e.g. math to the party propaganda), but were treated as quite serious back then.
- yorwba 9y agoMarxism is still a mandatory subject in China. In one instance the exam date for a course I was taking as an exchange student had to be changed because some of the PhD students might have missed their examination on Marxism otherwise.
- zhemao 9y agoI really wonder how contemporary Chinese students square the information from their Marxism class with what Chinese society is like today. Does the Marxism class teach real Marxism or "Marxism with Chinese characteristics"? Granted, it's doubtful most students pay much attention to it anyway, since they just need to memorize the info and regurgitate it on the exam.
- kccqzy 9y agoAn easy and legal way to circumvent the firewall is to buy a SIM card from a foreign country and use roaming.
- aembleton 9y agoWhy would that work? My internet traffic would be routed through the local cell tower and have to traverse the Great Firewall.
- kccqzy 9y agoI have tried that and doing a whois on my public IP revealed that it belongs to the original ISP, not whatever local ISP I was using. Even visiting Google shows the Google page of the original country. I guess they just have agreements to tunnel traffic in a way that circumvents the Great Firewall. But politically it is much easier to understand. The only people who are likely doing this are tourists, and the government certainly doesn't want to hurt tourism.
- sigmar 9y ago>a whois on my public IP revealed that it belongs to the original ISP, not whatever local ISP I was using did you do other checks to see if your traffic was being censored? a whois of your public ip says nothing about whether your traffic has been manipulated. > Even visiting Google shows the Google page of the original country. I guess they just have agreements to tunnel traffic in a way that circumvents the Great Firewall. google serves pages depending on your public ip
- kccqzy 9y agoThe Great Firewall doesn't in general modify traffic. It either allows traffic to pass though, or blocks it (TCP RST, rate limiting, etc). I was able to visit normally blocked sites like Google at full speed of a typical cellular connection.
- tristanj 9y ago
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoI was curious how SCMP is able to publish an article critical of government policy. Does anyone know the specifics of what is publishable and what isn't? I thought maybe the SCMP might have been out of Beijing's jurisdiction, but it is owned by Alibaba, so I would think it would be under the same scrutiny as any other Chinese news publication.
- arjo1 9y agoI lived in China for many years. Honestly, the government is very clever about how they censor. They don't do things so obviously and they allow a little bit of criticism. there is no hard and fast law as to how they censor. While I lived their they were constantly hopping between VPNs. Some of their censorship is political, some is a also protectionist. Had China not blocked google, Baidu would probably have been dead by now. To start with this article is published in English. They know that 99% of their population will not be able to read it so its no big deal. I have seen articles in Shanghai daily which give minor criticism to the government. But overall they always try to project a good sentiment about the country. Furthermore often what is published in English print written by Chinese is not the same as what is written in Chinese print. Language is ultimately their greatest tool for censorship. Also, 90% of the population remains unaffected by their blockages since they can't understand what the rest of the internet is saying. If you were to try to access youku (Chinese website akin to youtube) within china you would find that the streaming speeds put youtube to shame. So for the average person why would they be interested in youtube? As long as the government provides people with basic infrastructure and safety people are willing to put up with some amount of censorship.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoThat is interesting. Yeah it can be a wise move to allow limited criticism, since (1) I think they realize some criticism can be beneficial to fix faults of the government, and (2) it helps provide the appearance that the people are in control of the government. There is also strategic ambiguity in not having to obey a "hard and fast law as to how they censor", since the government can censor in what it deems the most pragmatic manner. "They know that 99% of their population will not be able to read it". But in my experience in China at summer programs in universities, I found that almost all university students (at least in Beijing & Shanghai) can read English. I suppose they will of course prefer to read Hànzì.
- logicchains 9y agoI live in China and use a Chinese-language product that combines SOCKS proxying with packet obfuscation, and it works flawlessly, unlike anything else I've tried. I can't find an English reference, but Obfsproxy for TOR is similar. So if anyone wonders how they could contribute to bypassing the GFW, working on that kind of packet obfuscation software might be a good way.
- saurik 9y agoI am very curious about this tool you are super happy with and would be totally fine with a reference about this entirely in Chinese ;P.
- posterboy 9y agonice try, agent lau /s
- logicchains 9y agoIf you email me (an email is in my profile), or give me some way to message you, I'll send you a link. I'd rather not post in public.
- felixding 9y agoShadowsocks + obfs?
- logicchains 9y agoPretty much.
- m3nu 9y agoThe last time China isolated itself from the world they fell back so far that a few gun ships brought down their dynasty. Are they looking to repeat this mistake?
- zhemao 9y agoUh. Are you thinking of Japan? The Qing dynasty was brought down by more than just a few gunships. Though the larger point about isolationism is still valid.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoI wouldn't consider China to be isolationist, because China's history is full of foreign interaction. The reason China fell back and lost the Opium Wars was not due to isolationism, but rather because for some other reason(s), they missed out on the industrial revolution. But the exact reasons(s) they missed out on the industrial revolution is a great debate, and is the quadrillion dollar question...
- yogenpro 9y agoAnother bad thing about GFW is that Chinese government can export the filtering infrastructure to other countries who also favor the idea of "cyberspace sovereignty". They might have been doing this already. Also, VPNs are mostly used by academic institutions and corporations. Common netizens often use "Shadowsocks", a protocol that focuses on obfuscation rather than encryption, to make it more difficult for the Wall to recognize its pattern, hence more unlikely to be filtered. It has been working perfectly for 5+ years until recently some people were saying that their Shadowsocks traffic got recognized by the police, then ISP suspended their Internet, they had to visit the police station to sign a commitment of "never use unauthorized means to access Internet" to resume their Internet connection. This could be "fake news" but still worrisome because if GFW will whitelist only registered VPN servers, and now that Shadowsocks is down, there will be no alternatives. That said, this is only a concern of probably less than 1% of people. The others either don't know the existence of the Wall, or don't care about the world outside the Wall. In that sense, GFW is already a success.
- baybal2 9y agoThere is no such thing as a "whitelisted" VPN in China
- subliminalpanda 9y agoFrom this link it looks like Russia is a customer already. [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/putin-china-internet-great-firewall-russia-cybersecurity-pact https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/putin-china-in...
- fooker 9y agoYep, Pakistan has reportedly agreed to be a part of it in the name of CPEC.
- JadeNB 9y agoThe deleted word 'an' from the title (currently "VPN crackdown 'unthinkable' trial by firewall for China's research world"; in the article, "VPN crackdown an 'unthinkable' trial by firewall for China's research world") made it a real garden-path sentence for me—I initially read it as "VPN crackdown 'unthinkable'", and struggled to parse the rest separately. Is it really necessary to chop off the indefinite article?