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>"the answer is already known: traffic which sufficiently disagrees with the current government of China is blocked." "Sufficiently disagrees" is not an exact

>"the answer is already known: traffic which sufficiently disagrees with the current government of China is blocked." "Sufficiently disagrees" is not an exact understanding of exactly when/where/why and how the Chinese (or more broadly, any other Nation-State's) government blocks connections, or even if they indeed block connections (I have not personally tested Internet connectivity to the world at large from within China, so I'm going by secondhand information, western news reports -- that make the general claim that at least some aspects of China's Internet are censored and/or blocked: https://www.google.com/search?q=great+firewall+of+china https://www.google.com/search?q=great+firewall+of+china ) >I have never seen anyone (other than you) claim that China blocks all outgoing connections. I did not claim that... Did I not say in the first message in this chain: "And let's suppose for the purposes of discussion that what the western Mainstream Media says about China's Internet is completely true -- that outgoing connections to the West from China -- are blocked." ? The purpose of this message chain was not about China nor western mainstream media! The purpose of this message chain was to discuss the following: >"what happens if a TCP/IP connection is initiated from another country to a TCP/IP address inside of an outwardly blocked country?" ? ??? China, in this context, was only used as an arbitrary choice for the purposes of a philosophical discussion... We could substitute China with any other country for the purposes of this same discussion, if it pleases you! Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_traversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_traversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_punching_(networking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_punching_(networking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_hole_punching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_hole_punching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICMP_hole_punching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICMP_hole_punching

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
> >"the answer is already known: traffic which sufficiently disagrees with the current government of China is blocked." >"Sufficiently disagrees" is not an exact understanding of exactly when/where/why and how the Chinese...government blocks connections An exact understanding isn't necessary to determine whether it happens (it does). Nonetheless, it seems like an interesting topic: how exactly do Chinese government decisions on what to block, flow through their government system, before getting to the technical level where they actually do the blocking? I look forward to the results of your research on this, as you have good questions to ask the Chinese government. >or even if they indeed block connections They do. It's in the lede of the article you linked: > The Great Firewall (GFW; simplified Chinese: 防火长城; traditional Chinese: 防火長城; pinyin: Fánghuǒ Chángchéng) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China... to block access to selected foreign websites [0] I know it sounds obvious, but to avoid confusion, it's worth being absolutely clear here: blocking access to foreign websites means blocking connections to them. Honestly, it's quite confusing to me how someone can doubt the very existence of China's connection-blocking Great Firewall. Is this some attempted jedi mind trick? Of course it exists. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall
- peter_d_sherman 3y ago
  >Nonetheless, it seems like an interesting topic: how exactly do Chinese [or more broadly, any] government [make] decisions on what to block, flow through their government system, before getting to the technical level where they actually do the blocking? Indeed, that is an excellent question, applied to any Nation-State that blocks connections for any reason! Now, this brings up a highly interesting question, which looks something like this: How could someone in Nation-State X know exactly what is blocked by a different Nation-State, Nation-State Y -- without physically being there to perform tests on their Internet as if they were a Citizen/National/Resident/Physically Located -- in Nation-State Y? ? There's no easy answer for that question... at least not without going to Nation-State Y and physically testing their Internet... But if I were to guess at a hypothetical way to do it -- if someone had a Google-size cache snapshot of all websites and their contents on the global Internet, then if that someone also had a Google-style multi-threaded multi-computer web spider like the Googlebot -- then if one could somehow get VPN connections to outgoing IP addresses in Nation-State Y, then one could attempt running that, the effect being similar to being physically in Nation-State Y... From that, one could compare ALL of the results of those connection requests and corresponding web pages -- to see what connections and web pages worked and which ones didn't... For the connections and pages which didn't work, those might have been caused by a website being updated, being taken offline, random Internet failure, etc., etc., that is, one couldn't immediately ascribe responsibility to Nation-State Y intentionally blocking the site or connection without additional debugging/fact-finding/triangulation of the root cause... So, that wouldn't solve the problem... but it might be a good starting point... Something like that, if it would exist, if it could exist (Google + a VPN provider in Nation-State Y would have all of the necessary infrastructure, incidentally!) -- would be a good first step in that direction... In fact, a smaller, one-site-at-a-time version of it could be implemented by remote P2P nodes... In fact, here's an even weirder idea(!), now that I think about it -- use Javascript running on remote P2P nodes (with permission of the node owners!) in other countries to test Internet connectivity to Web Sites (or more broadly, any kind of Internet connectivity, since the Internet is not only the web!): In other words, use something like the following (in conjunction with custom JavaScript code which would test websites/Internet connectivity): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373960 https://pears.com/news/holepunch-unveils-groundbreaking-open-source-peer-to-peer-app-development-platform-pear-runtime/ https://pears.com/news/holepunch-unveils-groundbreaking-open... Anyway, some excellent questions! Thank you for them! You made me think!

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago

> >"the answer is already known: traffic which sufficiently disagrees with the current government of China is blocked." >"Sufficiently disagrees" is not an exact understanding of exactly when/where/why and how the Chinese...government blocks connections An exact understanding isn't necessary to determine whether it happens (it does). Nonetheless, it seems like an interesting topic: how exactly do Chinese government decisions on what to block, flow through their government system, before getting to the technical level where they actually do the blocking? I look forward to the results of your research on this, as you have good questions to ask the Chinese government. >or even if they indeed block connections They do. It's in the lede of the article you linked: > The Great Firewall (GFW; simplified Chinese: 防火长城; traditional Chinese: 防火長城; pinyin: Fánghuǒ Chángchéng) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China... to block access to selected foreign websites [0] I know it sounds obvious, but to avoid confusion, it's worth being absolutely clear here: blocking access to foreign websites means blocking connections to them. Honestly, it's quite confusing to me how someone can doubt the very existence of China's connection-blocking Great Firewall. Is this some attempted jedi mind trick? Of course it exists. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall

peter_d_sherman 3y ago
>Nonetheless, it seems like an interesting topic: how exactly do Chinese [or more broadly, any] government [make] decisions on what to block, flow through their government system, before getting to the technical level where they actually do the blocking? Indeed, that is an excellent question, applied to any Nation-State that blocks connections for any reason! Now, this brings up a highly interesting question, which looks something like this: How could someone in Nation-State X know exactly what is blocked by a different Nation-State, Nation-State Y -- without physically being there to perform tests on their Internet as if they were a Citizen/National/Resident/Physically Located -- in Nation-State Y? ? There's no easy answer for that question... at least not without going to Nation-State Y and physically testing their Internet... But if I were to guess at a hypothetical way to do it -- if someone had a Google-size cache snapshot of all websites and their contents on the global Internet, then if that someone also had a Google-style multi-threaded multi-computer web spider like the Googlebot -- then if one could somehow get VPN connections to outgoing IP addresses in Nation-State Y, then one could attempt running that, the effect being similar to being physically in Nation-State Y... From that, one could compare ALL of the results of those connection requests and corresponding web pages -- to see what connections and web pages worked and which ones didn't... For the connections and pages which didn't work, those might have been caused by a website being updated, being taken offline, random Internet failure, etc., etc., that is, one couldn't immediately ascribe responsibility to Nation-State Y intentionally blocking the site or connection without additional debugging/fact-finding/triangulation of the root cause... So, that wouldn't solve the problem... but it might be a good starting point... Something like that, if it would exist, if it could exist (Google + a VPN provider in Nation-State Y would have all of the necessary infrastructure, incidentally!) -- would be a good first step in that direction... In fact, a smaller, one-site-at-a-time version of it could be implemented by remote P2P nodes... In fact, here's an even weirder idea(!), now that I think about it -- use Javascript running on remote P2P nodes (with permission of the node owners!) in other countries to test Internet connectivity to Web Sites (or more broadly, any kind of Internet connectivity, since the Internet is not only the web!): In other words, use something like the following (in conjunction with custom JavaScript code which would test websites/Internet connectivity): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373960 https://pears.com/news/holepunch-unveils-groundbreaking-open-source-peer-to-peer-app-development-platform-pear-runtime/ https://pears.com/news/holepunch-unveils-groundbreaking-open... Anyway, some excellent questions! Thank you for them! You made me think!