12 ms·

China Just Blocked Thousands of Websites

173 points by wyclif 12y ago

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Inevitable. As people start using other services to get around the wall, those services will be blocked no matter how popular they are. Given what we've seen of Xi so far, I guess Chinese internet will probably be mostly cutoff from the rest of the world by the end of his term.
- LiweiZ 12y ago
  Yes. But I think it could be way sooner than most of Chinese can be aware of. Consensus among average people in China seems in favor of Xi now. Someone is just picking up the organization's old-fashion tricks and copying them and hoping all of them work as expected since those are all that they know. When the energy begins to loose, everything could turn up-side-down shortly. It has not started yet. Everybody needs a huge stable market now. Perhaps leader can get what he wants in the end.
  - edwinyzh 12y ago
    Too me it'll be the end of the world...
wmeredith 12y ago
"We have acknowledged all along that our method of unblocking websites using “collateral freedom” hinges on the gamble that the Chinese authorities will not block access to global CDNs because they understand the value of China being integrated with the global internet." If they "understood the value" of that, these shenanigans wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.
- 13 12y ago
  If you think about it from a purely practical standpoint, it would make sense for all countries to block the any CDN that isn't on their soil. Local companies make more money hosting websites, less traffic on the pipes coming into the country, and better control over what is censored.
  - mvc 12y ago
    ...and higher prices for consumers in those countries.
    - bottled_poe 12y ago
      Sending money overseas only benefits the single buyer in the short term. Keeping it within the country increases the wealth of that society leading to better services for all citizens.
      - meric 12y ago
        Here's a counter example: A island nation with highly accessible fisheries populated by 100 people in the middle of the ocean could spend their labor on building a CDN or fishing. If they use other's CDNs, the money they sent would be used by foreigners to buy their fish, which could be produced very cheaply. Building their CDN means forgoing their fishing opportunity. Building a CDN means they can now sell their CDN services cheaper than it would have cost them to run a website to sell their fish, but the benefit is marginal compared to the income they would have received by focusing their labor in an industry where they have comparative advantage. They must choose only one because they have limited labor. ...Land, labor, capital and technology is wealth, and money only represent a claim on that wealth.
        mp8 12y ago
        I'm not sure if this really addresses your argument, but China certainly doesn't have a limited labor supply... Quite the opposite
        SixSigma 12y ago
        The comment being replied to specifies that blocking and building would be a beneficial activity for all countries to participate in.
      - thomasahle 12y ago
est 12y ago
tl;dr Greatfire.org hosted content mirrors on edgecastcdn.net , China bans *.edgecastcdn.net altogether.
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  How helpful of them. Maybe they can throw a mirror up on Akamai and CloudFlare next.
  - est 12y ago
    They already did. See their wiki https://github.com/greatfire/wiki https://github.com/greatfire/wiki They are hosting mirrors on Akamai, Azure, Cloudfront. They previously hosted on Amazon S3 and Cloudflare, they were blocked in China already
    - jacktang 12y ago
      Github will be blocked sooner or later? God bless it!
    - fatman13gg 12y ago
      oh god, Greatfire.org, stop trying to make every cdn service being blocked!
      - wmt 12y ago
        China is trying to make every CDN blocked, not Greatfire.org. Stop blaming the victims.
  - 4684499 12y ago
    I'm sorry for using the word, but they PEE everywhere, then they blame who's trying to clean up and the way of cleaning. Yes, the way of cleaning is absolutely blamable, since the government doesn't own the place where they pee and yet some Chinese do love the pee. But I think whoever is peeing is more to blame. If you could read Chinese, you can see large amounts of content they are providing are hateful, violent and disturbing which against the ToS of many hosting providers (not all of the content are bad tbf, there is good information as well, additionally if you couldn't read Chinese, you can visit Freeweibo, there are lots of pics that express my view). Well, greatfire.org sure don't think they were peeing anyway, on the contrary, "It's an honor", under the name of freedom of speech, the collateral damage is much more like a weapon against the government, if a website cleans those contents up on its own, the website will be tagged as "the enemy of freedom of speech", "self-censorship" as they call it. The mess keeps going on. I don't know who is winning here. What I do know is users are the losers.
riverain 12y ago
Yes, and this article itself has been blocked too.
- voltagex_ 12y ago
  Is there any way I can buy a Chinese VPS to see the impacts of the blocks myself?
  - mappu 12y ago
    There's a bunch of providers listed on https://www.exoticvps.com/ https://www.exoticvps.com/ .
  - jobin 12y ago
    Try vpngate:http://www.vpngate.net http://www.vpngate.net , Hope you join vpngate network too :)
- zhte415 12y ago
  Actully, it isn't. Better not to tempt fate.
  - riverain 12y ago
    I can't visit the link. (https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/nov/china-just-blocked-thousands-websites https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/nov/china-just-blocked-th...) And I'm in mainland China. What can I suppose?
- ryenus 12y ago
  It worries me that this thread could get our beloved Hacker News blocked. I cross my fingers, as you might see, I'm from inside the w@ll.
est 12y ago
Apparently Greatfire.org think this caused "significant economic loss as many businesses will be impacted". I think this only cause problems for edgecast customers, and China doesn't give the slightest fuck. And for those people who does want to see those "collateral freedom" mirrored content, they already have their own private circumventing methods.
- tempestn 12y ago
  Edgecast customers include some very popular websites, which are certainly used by consumers and businesses in China. So it's definitely a problem for China. Now, whether the Chinese government gives a fuck is indeed another matter. I'm sure they can browse whatever they want.
  - geekingfrog 12y ago
    After living in China for a few years, I understood something: the only thing chinese government cares about is its longevity. The whole system is designed to keep the party in the control seat. Economic growth was a way, now that's is slowing down, the party is finding other ways, but it would be a mistake to think chinese economy is more important than power for the party.
- wmt 12y ago
  I don't think anyone is desperate enough to rely on VPN to access the websites of technology giants already blocked or soon to be blocked by China, as greatfire.org is also mirrored Akamai and CloudFlare. What will more likely happen is that those large technology companies will just realize not to invest too much money into countries hostile towards them, like China.
tiatia 12y ago
China does a good job in what it intends to do. Most non-Chinese IP websites are not blocked but traffic gets slowed down by factor 40. I have an offshore webserver. A ping suggests a 50% packet loss. Often you can access foreign websites. At least sometimes. Some days even gmail does work. Everything works sometimes or a little bit and or is unbelievable slow. What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it. Facebook and Google were most of the time not working, even with the proxy. Maybe the 50% packet loss makes their websites non functional. I just bought Astill VPN and for now I must say they are doing a tremendous job.
- 13 12y ago
  > What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it. There's two possibilities that I can see; you were letting your DNS requests leak and they were being poisoned, or they were doing a direct MITM hijack of your SSH session. Neither is particularly comforting, but it's fairly easy to work out which if either is going on.
  - tiatia 12y ago
    How do I figure this out? I resolve my DNS through my proxy. ##Preference Name Status Type Value network.proxy.socks_remote_dns user set boolean true
    - 13 12y ago
      The SSH one is probably easiest to detect. When you first connect to a session the public key fingerprint of the server is saved in your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. If you can verify this out of band somehow actually is the correct fingerprint (call a friend and ask them to connect and get it), then chances are it's not being tampered with. Essentially it would have had to have happened the first time you connected to the server, and every single time afterwards else OpenSSH makes it very, very clear you've been hijacked. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY! Yeah. So if you don't remember seeing that and the fingerprint is correct, probably nobody has been tampering with the connection. Which would imply that they've either cracked the cipher and are tampering with it anyway (unlikely as hell), that your DNS requests are somehow leaking (somewhat likely) or maybe it's some sort of nocebo effect. Hard to say for certain, wireshark might be the place to go in order to find out some more about your outgoing DNS requests though.
tbenst 12y ago
I'm currently in China. VPNs are very common and popular here. Many work very poorly unfortunately (Private Internet Access included). Astrill appears to be the most popular and best performing. A few high-end hotels that I've stayed at route all traffic through a VPN to cater to their Western audience. Many, many people with little technical ability use a VPN, especially in businesses dealing with the West.
- greyone 12y ago
  There are better VPNs for China: http://www.greycoder.com/openvpn-china/ http://www.greycoder.com/openvpn-china/
- biesnecker 12y ago
  The vast, vast majority, though, of the Chinese internet population do not use VPNs, nor will they when most of what they want/need is available on domestic sites. The slice of the population that deals with the West is tiny, and comparatively unlikely to cause problems. The chilling effect that just needing a VPN has on exploration of accurate foreign information about China and what's happening in the country is substantial and intended.
eob 12y ago
Speaking entirely divorced from my opinion on China politically (as someone with strong US and TW ties, FWIW), I think the Great Firewall has been a brilliant economic move in retrospect. While it may have been an accidental side-effect, blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen unless I'm mistaken. And for a "middle class" of blocked sites, while not technically blocked, the packet delay is so great most people (except a dedicated few) will just shrug and figure that cross-continent internet connections must be too slow to be practical. Accessible, but only if you're willing to wait a minute. A brilliant political play, because it's hard to pin a charge oppression on anyone, since the information is technically there, but so slow nobody will access it.
- mahranch 12y ago
  > blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen I'm not sure I follow. It's not like there's a huge demand to do business with local Chinese nationals. There's opportunity, sure, there's always opportunity, but don't confuse that with demand. Unfortunately, very few businesses outside of China could even compete with domestic companies anyways. They're literally working for pennies on the dollar. That's also ignoring the cultural and language barriers, not to mention governmental red-tape you would have to go through. It would be like me trying to set up an customer service business here in Maine and trying to sell my services to a lower-middle sized company in India. I wouldn't be able to compete with local Indian companies since their overhead and costs are significantly less than mine. Obviously there are exceptions depending on the industry, but they are just that, exceptions.
  - dummyfellow 12y ago
    All biz are not labour intensive, in India GMail, Facebook and Twitter rule, in China the local counterparts.
  - landryraccoon 12y ago
    Facebook wouldn't incur any additional costs operating in China except for the cost of additional server infrastructure, which would be the same for a Chinese company. Their engineering costs are sunk costs. They wouldn't be competing against Chinese engineers for pennies on the dollar (if you could even find Chinese engineers of the same skill set).
bnomis 12y ago
I've often thought one could make an economic argument against filtering. But for that to work, those in charge need to care about the losses. I think of it like those Mastercard ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GofscoXnpDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GofscoXnpDw "Losses due to filtering: X yuan. The illusion of control: Priceless. Some sites we like, for everything else there's the GFW."
- jackvalentine 12y ago
  You could also make an economic argument for filtering: the infant industry argument. Protection from the west by the great firewall has made Chinese services flourish. Compare this to say, Japan, where the native social network Mixi has been practically destroyed by foreign competitors.
  - ninjin 12y ago
    > Compare this to say, Japan, where the native social network Mixi has been practically destroyed by foreign competitors. Or, maybe it was that Mixi had been lagging behind for ages and deservingly died off. You might also want to add that Line [1], a domestic company (well, subsidiary of a South Korean company, but still...), is now pretty much dominating the market. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(application) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(application)
    - precisioncoder 12y ago
      In fact it's so good that it's now making inroads in Europe and North America. If you play internet games many of the guilds require members to use LINE. I picked it up to chat with friends in Japan and love it, I'm now trying to get my friends to switch over.
    - jackvalentine 12y ago
      > Or, maybe it was that Mixi had been lagging behind for ages and deservingly died off. Lagging behind who? ...foreign competitors. I'm not saying Mixi was great, but if it didn't have to deal with facebook/twitter/instagram/naver LINE then it would have had a much greater chance of remaining relevant.
known 12y ago
I think websites should be re-developed as torrents
- treffolk 12y ago
  Then you should a) start re-developing, or b) open up your wallet and pay someone else to do it, while c) accepting greatly decreased web reliability and bandwidth and d) preparing for enormous legal and polictical shenanigans of upsetting the status quo of traffic monitoring and the shape of telecommunications bandwidth.
- altcognito 12y ago
  I think Freenet is the closest thing to a distributed, encrypted network like the one you speak of. https://freenetproject.org/whatis.html https://freenetproject.org/whatis.html
dbz 12y ago
Does anyone know if Cache Databases are blocked? I made a chrome extension called WebCache that views the cached version of a webpage which would be helpful if Google Cache, Wayback Machine, or Coral CDN isn't blocked. Here is the source: https://github.com/Dbz/WebCache https://github.com/Dbz/WebCache
- stoooooooooop 12y ago
  The first two are definitely blocked (without the Greatfire mirrors). I'm not sure about Coral CDN.
lbenes 12y ago
There are a number of ways to help people in China gain access to the open Internet. One easy way to help is to setup an obfsproxy bridge to alleviate the shortage.[1] The quickest and easiest way is to setup your free Amazon EC2 account with the Instructions at the Tor Cloud Project page[2]. It took me just a couple of minutes to install my free EC2 account. Another option is to donate money to pay for the bandwidth that Tor relay and exit nodes require.[3] NOTE: A bridge is not the same as an exit node. Only exit nodes could possibly attract attention from authorities. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people circumvent government firewalls to join the Tor network. The default EC2 Tor Cloud images only run as a bridge. [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-calls-for-help-as-its-supply-of-bridges-falters/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-ca... [2] https://cloud.torproject.org/ https://cloud.torproject.org/ [3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-donate-exit-node-providers https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-donate-...
Kiro 12y ago
My former room mates were from China and I was really surprised to learn that they supported the Great Firewall. They didn't seem to have any issues with it and even thought it was for the greater good.
- wmt 12y ago
  Foreign students from China know they'll have a very good chance at becoming one the oligarchs ruling the country, and as such likely think any tool as keeping the people subservient is a good thing. I find it unlikely that Chinese rulers would want to send abroad anyone but its loyal opposers of democracy.
  - 1stop 12y ago
    Are you seriously suggesting that Chinese students are all vetted by the government to make sure they are Pro-Communist and Anti-Democratic? AND they are all from the "ruling class". wow. I don't even...
    - tokenadult 12y ago
      Chinese students who study abroad are "oriented" in official programs before they go abroad. Some may be more influenced by those orientations than others, but that's a much more comprehensive program in China than anything like that elsewhere. When I left the United States to study abroad, I had no government-sponsored program to get me ready for that experience at all.
      - raitorm 12y ago
        I have no idea where you got that impression, but based on my personal experience as an International student from China, most of the Chinese undergrad students get financial aids from relatives and post-graduate degree students live on university funding. It is extremely rare to have students who are "sent" by the Chinese government and few people actually have strong preference of returning to China after they complete their study over getting a job abroad.
spdustin 12y ago
I legitimately want to know why the "Great Firewall" doesn't block spamming botnets that post to wp-comment.php hundreds of times per hour.
- junto 12y ago
  I think that the firewall is predominantly one way. Restricting access to external information rather than prevention of hackers going out. But, I agree. I'd also like to see them stop. I now use a geo-IP filter and whitelist the few countries that actually don't appear to spam that much. Needless to say, China is not on that list. Out of interest Brazil, Ukraine and Russia are also banned for this reason. Does anyone else have loads of comment spam originating from Brazil?
canadev 12y ago
I was about to ask, "Anyone know the significance of the part-way filled red-links?" Did an inspect element/hover over the links and it shows the percentage that the site is blocked, which seems to be the same as the proportion of the link background that is red. Pretty neat use of styling.
tomelders 12y ago
I think the easiest way to undermine China right now is to trick them into further limiting it's own connectivity with the global internet by banking on their zeal for censorship and their itchy trigger finger. Not that I'm advocating this as a strategy, it's more of a warning. China has enemies, and those enemies can do a lot of damage feeding the fire that drives it's governments oppressive policies. And they can do it practically for free.
roylez 12y ago
Personally I have to thank the great firewall for blocking Facebook and Twitter so that I would not waste my time on these nonsenses. For serious problems I do not mind find a way to access google, but I would not do it to try to access Facebook especially when none of my friends are there.
- pherocity_ 12y ago
  There are other methods like discipline, that don't obliterate your personal freedoms.
apli 12y ago
When I was living in Beijing some month ago the bad Internet really upset me. Almost every international connection was quite slow. A lot of pages took minutes to load because so many sites use Google hosted fonts, js libraries or API. These requests took about a minute to timeout and finally the browser could start to render the page (e.g using a default font). Most vpns are like described often slow, so also no solution. I then wrote a chrome plugin to filter all requests to Google hosted libraries and rerouted them to a Chinese service which mirrors Google hosted libraries. This really improved my surfing experience.
askinakhan 12y ago
May sound opportunistic but there are some great opportunities here to create domestic companies that mimic those companies that have been blocked.
Timucin 12y ago
China should block itself from the internet instead. I am running several servers and getting the most useless/annoying bot/malware traffic from China. Even that I had to block everything that comes from them.
- nomercy400 12y ago
  You mean we should filter our connection based on what IP it is coming from. Yeah, that's a good idea...
sorpaas 12y ago
I'm really surprised that so many people are still just talking about it in an economic prospective. I'm not talking about Human Rights or Freedom because the government don't event accept them. I just want to surf the Internet. Currently it works well because we get more and more tools to deal with GFW, but do you know how frustrating it is in the early days of the Internet in China that you spent nearly half of your life just to solve "networking issues"? Put yourself in others' shoes for a moment please.

173 points by wyclif 12y ago

Inevitable. As people start using other services to get around the wall, those services will be blocked no matter how popular they are. Given what we've seen of Xi so far, I guess Chinese internet will probably be mostly cutoff from the rest of the world by the end of his term.

LiweiZ 12y ago
Yes. But I think it could be way sooner than most of Chinese can be aware of. Consensus among average people in China seems in favor of Xi now. Someone is just picking up the organization's old-fashion tricks and copying them and hoping all of them work as expected since those are all that they know. When the energy begins to loose, everything could turn up-side-down shortly. It has not started yet. Everybody needs a huge stable market now. Perhaps leader can get what he wants in the end.
- edwinyzh 12y ago
  Too me it'll be the end of the world...

wmeredith 12y ago

"We have acknowledged all along that our method of unblocking websites using “collateral freedom” hinges on the gamble that the Chinese authorities will not block access to global CDNs because they understand the value of China being integrated with the global internet." If they "understood the value" of that, these shenanigans wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

13 12y ago
If you think about it from a purely practical standpoint, it would make sense for all countries to block the any CDN that isn't on their soil. Local companies make more money hosting websites, less traffic on the pipes coming into the country, and better control over what is censored.
- mvc 12y ago
  ...and higher prices for consumers in those countries.
  - bottled_poe 12y ago
    Sending money overseas only benefits the single buyer in the short term. Keeping it within the country increases the wealth of that society leading to better services for all citizens.
    - meric 12y ago
      Here's a counter example: A island nation with highly accessible fisheries populated by 100 people in the middle of the ocean could spend their labor on building a CDN or fishing. If they use other's CDNs, the money they sent would be used by foreigners to buy their fish, which could be produced very cheaply. Building their CDN means forgoing their fishing opportunity. Building a CDN means they can now sell their CDN services cheaper than it would have cost them to run a website to sell their fish, but the benefit is marginal compared to the income they would have received by focusing their labor in an industry where they have comparative advantage. They must choose only one because they have limited labor. ...Land, labor, capital and technology is wealth, and money only represent a claim on that wealth.
      - mp8 12y ago
        I'm not sure if this really addresses your argument, but China certainly doesn't have a limited labor supply... Quite the opposite
        SixSigma 12y ago
        The comment being replied to specifies that blocking and building would be a beneficial activity for all countries to participate in.
    - thomasahle 12y ago

est 12y ago

tl;dr Greatfire.org hosted content mirrors on edgecastcdn.net , China bans *.edgecastcdn.net altogether.

jsmthrowaway 12y ago
How helpful of them. Maybe they can throw a mirror up on Akamai and CloudFlare next.
- est 12y ago
  They already did. See their wiki https://github.com/greatfire/wiki https://github.com/greatfire/wiki They are hosting mirrors on Akamai, Azure, Cloudfront. They previously hosted on Amazon S3 and Cloudflare, they were blocked in China already
  - jacktang 12y ago
    Github will be blocked sooner or later? God bless it!
  - fatman13gg 12y ago
    oh god, Greatfire.org, stop trying to make every cdn service being blocked!
    - wmt 12y ago
      China is trying to make every CDN blocked, not Greatfire.org. Stop blaming the victims.
- 4684499 12y ago
  I'm sorry for using the word, but they PEE everywhere, then they blame who's trying to clean up and the way of cleaning. Yes, the way of cleaning is absolutely blamable, since the government doesn't own the place where they pee and yet some Chinese do love the pee. But I think whoever is peeing is more to blame. If you could read Chinese, you can see large amounts of content they are providing are hateful, violent and disturbing which against the ToS of many hosting providers (not all of the content are bad tbf, there is good information as well, additionally if you couldn't read Chinese, you can visit Freeweibo, there are lots of pics that express my view). Well, greatfire.org sure don't think they were peeing anyway, on the contrary, "It's an honor", under the name of freedom of speech, the collateral damage is much more like a weapon against the government, if a website cleans those contents up on its own, the website will be tagged as "the enemy of freedom of speech", "self-censorship" as they call it. The mess keeps going on. I don't know who is winning here. What I do know is users are the losers.

riverain 12y ago

Yes, and this article itself has been blocked too.

voltagex_ 12y ago
Is there any way I can buy a Chinese VPS to see the impacts of the blocks myself?
- mappu 12y ago
  There's a bunch of providers listed on https://www.exoticvps.com/ https://www.exoticvps.com/ .
- jobin 12y ago
  Try vpngate:http://www.vpngate.net http://www.vpngate.net , Hope you join vpngate network too :)
zhte415 12y ago
Actully, it isn't. Better not to tempt fate.
- riverain 12y ago
  I can't visit the link. (https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/nov/china-just-blocked-thousands-websites https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/nov/china-just-blocked-th...) And I'm in mainland China. What can I suppose?
ryenus 12y ago
It worries me that this thread could get our beloved Hacker News blocked. I cross my fingers, as you might see, I'm from inside the w@ll.

est 12y ago

Apparently Greatfire.org think this caused "significant economic loss as many businesses will be impacted". I think this only cause problems for edgecast customers, and China doesn't give the slightest fuck. And for those people who does want to see those "collateral freedom" mirrored content, they already have their own private circumventing methods.

tempestn 12y ago
Edgecast customers include some very popular websites, which are certainly used by consumers and businesses in China. So it's definitely a problem for China. Now, whether the Chinese government gives a fuck is indeed another matter. I'm sure they can browse whatever they want.
- geekingfrog 12y ago
  After living in China for a few years, I understood something: the only thing chinese government cares about is its longevity. The whole system is designed to keep the party in the control seat. Economic growth was a way, now that's is slowing down, the party is finding other ways, but it would be a mistake to think chinese economy is more important than power for the party.
wmt 12y ago
I don't think anyone is desperate enough to rely on VPN to access the websites of technology giants already blocked or soon to be blocked by China, as greatfire.org is also mirrored Akamai and CloudFlare. What will more likely happen is that those large technology companies will just realize not to invest too much money into countries hostile towards them, like China.

tiatia 12y ago

China does a good job in what it intends to do. Most non-Chinese IP websites are not blocked but traffic gets slowed down by factor 40. I have an offshore webserver. A ping suggests a 50% packet loss. Often you can access foreign websites. At least sometimes. Some days even gmail does work. Everything works sometimes or a little bit and or is unbelievable slow. What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it. Facebook and Google were most of the time not working, even with the proxy. Maybe the 50% packet loss makes their websites non functional. I just bought Astill VPN and for now I must say they are doing a tremendous job.

13 12y ago
> What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it. There's two possibilities that I can see; you were letting your DNS requests leak and they were being poisoned, or they were doing a direct MITM hijack of your SSH session. Neither is particularly comforting, but it's fairly easy to work out which if either is going on.
- tiatia 12y ago
  How do I figure this out? I resolve my DNS through my proxy. ##Preference Name Status Type Value network.proxy.socks_remote_dns user set boolean true
  - 13 12y ago
    The SSH one is probably easiest to detect. When you first connect to a session the public key fingerprint of the server is saved in your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. If you can verify this out of band somehow actually is the correct fingerprint (call a friend and ask them to connect and get it), then chances are it's not being tampered with. Essentially it would have had to have happened the first time you connected to the server, and every single time afterwards else OpenSSH makes it very, very clear you've been hijacked. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY! Yeah. So if you don't remember seeing that and the fingerprint is correct, probably nobody has been tampering with the connection. Which would imply that they've either cracked the cipher and are tampering with it anyway (unlikely as hell), that your DNS requests are somehow leaking (somewhat likely) or maybe it's some sort of nocebo effect. Hard to say for certain, wireshark might be the place to go in order to find out some more about your outgoing DNS requests though.

tbenst 12y ago

I'm currently in China. VPNs are very common and popular here. Many work very poorly unfortunately (Private Internet Access included). Astrill appears to be the most popular and best performing. A few high-end hotels that I've stayed at route all traffic through a VPN to cater to their Western audience. Many, many people with little technical ability use a VPN, especially in businesses dealing with the West.

greyone 12y ago
There are better VPNs for China: http://www.greycoder.com/openvpn-china/ http://www.greycoder.com/openvpn-china/
biesnecker 12y ago
The vast, vast majority, though, of the Chinese internet population do not use VPNs, nor will they when most of what they want/need is available on domestic sites. The slice of the population that deals with the West is tiny, and comparatively unlikely to cause problems. The chilling effect that just needing a VPN has on exploration of accurate foreign information about China and what's happening in the country is substantial and intended.

eob 12y ago

Speaking entirely divorced from my opinion on China politically (as someone with strong US and TW ties, FWIW), I think the Great Firewall has been a brilliant economic move in retrospect. While it may have been an accidental side-effect, blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen unless I'm mistaken. And for a "middle class" of blocked sites, while not technically blocked, the packet delay is so great most people (except a dedicated few) will just shrug and figure that cross-continent internet connections must be too slow to be practical. Accessible, but only if you're willing to wait a minute. A brilliant political play, because it's hard to pin a charge oppression on anyone, since the information is technically there, but so slow nobody will access it.

mahranch 12y ago
> blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen I'm not sure I follow. It's not like there's a huge demand to do business with local Chinese nationals. There's opportunity, sure, there's always opportunity, but don't confuse that with demand. Unfortunately, very few businesses outside of China could even compete with domestic companies anyways. They're literally working for pennies on the dollar. That's also ignoring the cultural and language barriers, not to mention governmental red-tape you would have to go through. It would be like me trying to set up an customer service business here in Maine and trying to sell my services to a lower-middle sized company in India. I wouldn't be able to compete with local Indian companies since their overhead and costs are significantly less than mine. Obviously there are exceptions depending on the industry, but they are just that, exceptions.
- dummyfellow 12y ago
  All biz are not labour intensive, in India GMail, Facebook and Twitter rule, in China the local counterparts.
- landryraccoon 12y ago
  Facebook wouldn't incur any additional costs operating in China except for the cost of additional server infrastructure, which would be the same for a Chinese company. Their engineering costs are sunk costs. They wouldn't be competing against Chinese engineers for pennies on the dollar (if you could even find Chinese engineers of the same skill set).

bnomis 12y ago

I've often thought one could make an economic argument against filtering. But for that to work, those in charge need to care about the losses. I think of it like those Mastercard ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GofscoXnpDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GofscoXnpDw "Losses due to filtering: X yuan. The illusion of control: Priceless. Some sites we like, for everything else there's the GFW."

jackvalentine 12y ago
You could also make an economic argument for filtering: the infant industry argument. Protection from the west by the great firewall has made Chinese services flourish. Compare this to say, Japan, where the native social network Mixi has been practically destroyed by foreign competitors.
- ninjin 12y ago
  > Compare this to say, Japan, where the native social network Mixi has been practically destroyed by foreign competitors. Or, maybe it was that Mixi had been lagging behind for ages and deservingly died off. You might also want to add that Line [1], a domestic company (well, subsidiary of a South Korean company, but still...), is now pretty much dominating the market. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(application) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(application)
  - precisioncoder 12y ago
    In fact it's so good that it's now making inroads in Europe and North America. If you play internet games many of the guilds require members to use LINE. I picked it up to chat with friends in Japan and love it, I'm now trying to get my friends to switch over.
  - jackvalentine 12y ago
    > Or, maybe it was that Mixi had been lagging behind for ages and deservingly died off. Lagging behind who? ...foreign competitors. I'm not saying Mixi was great, but if it didn't have to deal with facebook/twitter/instagram/naver LINE then it would have had a much greater chance of remaining relevant.

known 12y ago

I think websites should be re-developed as torrents

treffolk 12y ago
Then you should a) start re-developing, or b) open up your wallet and pay someone else to do it, while c) accepting greatly decreased web reliability and bandwidth and d) preparing for enormous legal and polictical shenanigans of upsetting the status quo of traffic monitoring and the shape of telecommunications bandwidth.
altcognito 12y ago
I think Freenet is the closest thing to a distributed, encrypted network like the one you speak of. https://freenetproject.org/whatis.html https://freenetproject.org/whatis.html

dbz 12y ago

Does anyone know if Cache Databases are blocked? I made a chrome extension called WebCache that views the cached version of a webpage which would be helpful if Google Cache, Wayback Machine, or Coral CDN isn't blocked. Here is the source: https://github.com/Dbz/WebCache https://github.com/Dbz/WebCache

stoooooooooop 12y ago
The first two are definitely blocked (without the Greatfire mirrors). I'm not sure about Coral CDN.

lbenes 12y ago

There are a number of ways to help people in China gain access to the open Internet. One easy way to help is to setup an obfsproxy bridge to alleviate the shortage.[1] The quickest and easiest way is to setup your free Amazon EC2 account with the Instructions at the Tor Cloud Project page[2]. It took me just a couple of minutes to install my free EC2 account. Another option is to donate money to pay for the bandwidth that Tor relay and exit nodes require.[3] NOTE: A bridge is not the same as an exit node. Only exit nodes could possibly attract attention from authorities. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people circumvent government firewalls to join the Tor network. The default EC2 Tor Cloud images only run as a bridge. [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-calls-for-help-as-its-supply-of-bridges-falters/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-ca... [2] https://cloud.torproject.org/ https://cloud.torproject.org/ [3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-donate-exit-node-providers https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-donate-...

Kiro 12y ago

My former room mates were from China and I was really surprised to learn that they supported the Great Firewall. They didn't seem to have any issues with it and even thought it was for the greater good.

wmt 12y ago
Foreign students from China know they'll have a very good chance at becoming one the oligarchs ruling the country, and as such likely think any tool as keeping the people subservient is a good thing. I find it unlikely that Chinese rulers would want to send abroad anyone but its loyal opposers of democracy.
- 1stop 12y ago
  Are you seriously suggesting that Chinese students are all vetted by the government to make sure they are Pro-Communist and Anti-Democratic? AND they are all from the "ruling class". wow. I don't even...
  - tokenadult 12y ago
    Chinese students who study abroad are "oriented" in official programs before they go abroad. Some may be more influenced by those orientations than others, but that's a much more comprehensive program in China than anything like that elsewhere. When I left the United States to study abroad, I had no government-sponsored program to get me ready for that experience at all.
    - raitorm 12y ago
      I have no idea where you got that impression, but based on my personal experience as an International student from China, most of the Chinese undergrad students get financial aids from relatives and post-graduate degree students live on university funding. It is extremely rare to have students who are "sent" by the Chinese government and few people actually have strong preference of returning to China after they complete their study over getting a job abroad.

spdustin 12y ago

I legitimately want to know why the "Great Firewall" doesn't block spamming botnets that post to wp-comment.php hundreds of times per hour.

junto 12y ago
I think that the firewall is predominantly one way. Restricting access to external information rather than prevention of hackers going out. But, I agree. I'd also like to see them stop. I now use a geo-IP filter and whitelist the few countries that actually don't appear to spam that much. Needless to say, China is not on that list. Out of interest Brazil, Ukraine and Russia are also banned for this reason. Does anyone else have loads of comment spam originating from Brazil?

canadev 12y ago

I was about to ask, "Anyone know the significance of the part-way filled red-links?" Did an inspect element/hover over the links and it shows the percentage that the site is blocked, which seems to be the same as the proportion of the link background that is red. Pretty neat use of styling.

tomelders 12y ago

I think the easiest way to undermine China right now is to trick them into further limiting it's own connectivity with the global internet by banking on their zeal for censorship and their itchy trigger finger. Not that I'm advocating this as a strategy, it's more of a warning. China has enemies, and those enemies can do a lot of damage feeding the fire that drives it's governments oppressive policies. And they can do it practically for free.

roylez 12y ago

Personally I have to thank the great firewall for blocking Facebook and Twitter so that I would not waste my time on these nonsenses. For serious problems I do not mind find a way to access google, but I would not do it to try to access Facebook especially when none of my friends are there.

pherocity_ 12y ago
There are other methods like discipline, that don't obliterate your personal freedoms.

apli 12y ago

When I was living in Beijing some month ago the bad Internet really upset me. Almost every international connection was quite slow. A lot of pages took minutes to load because so many sites use Google hosted fonts, js libraries or API. These requests took about a minute to timeout and finally the browser could start to render the page (e.g using a default font). Most vpns are like described often slow, so also no solution. I then wrote a chrome plugin to filter all requests to Google hosted libraries and rerouted them to a Chinese service which mirrors Google hosted libraries. This really improved my surfing experience.

askinakhan 12y ago

May sound opportunistic but there are some great opportunities here to create domestic companies that mimic those companies that have been blocked.

Timucin 12y ago

China should block itself from the internet instead. I am running several servers and getting the most useless/annoying bot/malware traffic from China. Even that I had to block everything that comes from them.

nomercy400 12y ago
You mean we should filter our connection based on what IP it is coming from. Yeah, that's a good idea...

sorpaas 12y ago

I'm really surprised that so many people are still just talking about it in an economic prospective. I'm not talking about Human Rights or Freedom because the government don't event accept them. I just want to surf the Internet. Currently it works well because we get more and more tools to deal with GFW, but do you know how frustrating it is in the early days of the Internet in China that you spent nearly half of your life just to solve "networking issues"? Put yourself in others' shoes for a moment please.