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China news tagged with: Great Firewall (95)

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The ‘State Network Information Center’ Wants to Spy on you. Here’s How to Stop Them…
From the LostLaowai blog:
This is a bit sinister: the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) has been dropping digital certificates into the computers of everyone in China, which could potentially allow them to snoop on your normally secure ‘https’ web-surfing, such as your online banking and email.
CNNIC’s digital certificate, which is probably in your computer right now, has not been proved to be maliciously spying, but it’s a matter of trust. Do you really trust CNNIC, the overlords of the ‘Great Firewall’, to not be potentially peeking into your email, Facebook, Paypal account or online bank? Nope, thought not.
These digital certificates are not viruses or malware; they’re genuine tools that sites use to encrypt and verify information, and are issued by third-party Certificate Authorities (CA). For this CNNIC certificate to be on your computer, it has taken numerous levels of consent: by the web browser makers (Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and more obscure ones, such as Opera) and by the CA ‘Entrust’, who will have evaluated, accepted and issued CNNIC’s digital certificate.
So, what’s the drama, you ask… Well, in devious hands, these important data snippets can be configured to pry, spy and snoop on your web traffic and private data. A benign digital certificate could turn malicious if remotely reconfigured, so as to tap into a certain users encrypted web data. In one other scenario, CNNIC could possibly use this tool in conjunction with the Great Firewall to tunnel into your encrypted web sessions. And, remember, CNNIC has a history of putting malware on people’s machines, hence all the alarm bells ringing over this tiny, new development.
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- February 4, 2010 9:59 PM
People’s Daily Published an Open Letter to U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
While many netizens have expressed their outrage at the recent anti-vulgarity campaign, tightening controls over online gaming, and the Great Firewall in general, People’s Daily published an open letter to Hillary Clinton’s recent speech on Internet freedom which presented another perspective (translated by ChinaHush):
First of all, Chinese government does not restrict internet users to use and access the Internet. I am a commentary writer; I spend most of my free time on the internet, looking for news, looking for different angles, writing reviews, expressing my views and opinions, and sometimes giving my personal comments and suggestions to the Government. So far, I have published thousands of articles, millions of words on uncountable websites like People’s daily, Xinhua and China Net etc. The government never give me any warnings and notices to tell me not go get on the internet or not to express my personal views.
Secondly, I do not find information on the network unable to flow freely. 9 Am this morning, I turned on my computer, and went on People’s Daily, Xinhua, China News, Sina, Sohu, Netease, IFeng and other major websites. I can open and view information about politics, economic, military, sports, entertainment and current affairs. I sent an email to my friend “Yixiao”and Netizen “Yixiao” got my email quickly. I also chat with my friends on QQ group and never was affected by anything or noticed any information not able to flow.
All the comments on the People’s Daily site showed support for the author. But ChinaHush also found the article reposted on other Chinese forums, where all the comments mocked the writer or said s/he must be a member of the Fifty Cent Party. From one comment on Netease:
Did not want to post, but I saw this news really made me angry, When the authors talks about the internet situation here why do I feel like I am dreaming?
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- January 26, 2010 11:08 AM
Sim Chi Yin: Up Against the ‘Great Firewall’
From the The Malaysian Insider, (via Wandering China blog):
Each time Web portal executive Li (not his real name) receives an e-mail from his political masters telling him to remove certain posts and articles, he curses under his breath – and then immediately carries out the orders.
Heavy-handed – and tightening – censorship was a key reason cited by international cyber giant Google for possibly quitting China, the world’s largest Internet market.
But it is a daily reality for the thousands of fresh-faced Chinese who work in China’s “Silicon Valley”, Zhongguancun, in west Beijing.
Mostly graduates of top local universities, many struggle with the sort of “schizophrenia” Li professes to have – yearning for free flow of information but having to block an ever-growing list of “sensitive” words and content.
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- January 24, 2010 10:09 AM
Authority, Meet Technology: Will China’s Great Firewall Hold?
Slate Magazine and the New America Foundation held a roundtable discussion about China’s Great Firewall in the aftermath of Google’s recent challenge to Chinese censorship and the lead-up to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s upcoming speech about Internet freedom. Participants included: Evgeny Morozov, Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy Magazine; Rebecca MacKinnon, Fellow, Open Society Institute; Tim Wu, Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation; Alec Ross, Senior Advisor for Innovation, Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Moderator, James Fallows:
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- January 20, 2010 2:17 PM
CDT Launches Social Bookmarking Project to Track Blocked Websites
Currently in China, hundreds of thousands of websites are blocked by the Great Firewall (GFW). To provide a picture of what is blocked, CDT is launching a user-generated social bookmarking project, via del.icio.us, to categorize and provide links to banned sites. This project is a work in progress and will be refined and improved as we go. The results are not comprehensive but merely a sample of what sorts of sites are routinely blocked; some of these sites may have been made accessible again since they were first reported. So far, over 600 links have been reported and categorized, primarily by Internet users inside China. Categories, in both Chinese and English, include: News, personal websites, religion, technology, non-profit organizations, circumvention tools, video and image sharing, etc.
We welcome your participation in this project. If you know of a link that has been blocked by the Great Firewall, please tag it on del.icio.us with GFWlist or send us an email (cdt@chinadigitaltimes.net).
Below is the current tag cloud for this project:
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- January 19, 2010 1:42 PM
Censorship Provokes Cracks in China’s Great Firewall
The Los Angeles Times reports on the myriad creative ways China’s Internet users have to circumvent official censorship:
if cyber censorship in China is a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse, the mice are multiplying fast. Despite increasingly aggressive government measures to tighten the flow of information and to snoop on suspected dissidents, China’s resourceful netizens are finding ways to evade the country’s Internet restrictions.
Known as fanqiang, or “scaling the wall,” these work-arounds typically involve tapping into remote servers located outside China that aren’t subject to Chinese government control. Although these skills are largely the province of tech-savvy Chinese bloggers and students, word is spreading fast about how to gain access to taboo sites.
If Google does end up leaving China, experts said, it could be a pyrrhic victory for Beijing. The company’s warning that it will exit the country rather than be party to more censorship has won praise among some Internet users here. Millions who once relied on the search engine’s services may become more defiant of government controls and more motivated to learn how to get around the Great Firewall.
And recent crackdowns on social networking sites appear to be alienating some ordinary Chinese who previously showed little concern about the government’s efforts to limit their access to pornography or politically sensitive material.
“The best censorship is the censorship you don’t know about. But with all the recent troubles, it’s becoming more public,” said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley. “That undermines the goal of censorship itself. It’s converting more and more people.”
See also “Scaling the Digital Wall in China” from the New York Times.
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- January 15, 2010 9:42 PM
Xiao Qiang (萧强): Google Prompts Soul-Searching in China
Here is the piece I wrote on the Guardian:
The Great Firewall now blocks hundreds of thousands websites outside of China. Fang Binxing, a computer scientist who is called the father of the Great Firewall, in recent public policy speeches has emphasised a unique Chinese government concept of “content security“, which includes information surveillance, blocking and public opinion analysis and monitoring.
Google has decided it can no longer aid and abet the government in maintaining such “content security”. Yet, even if the Chinese government does block all the services and products Google provides outside China, it is not the end of the story. The fact that most, if not all, Google services and products will not be available inside the Great Firewall will only generate stronger demand among Chinese netizens for circumvention tools.
This highly symbolic move by Google demonstrates the fundamental conflict between the free flow of information and an authoritarian regime; it also highlights the importance of defending internet freedom. Even if the company is not operating inside China, Google represents the force and future of the internet, which will continue to empower Chinese netizens to demand political change.
Also watch an interview I did with the Newshour

The transcript of this interview is at here:
JEFFREY BROWN: Just a brief last word, Xiao Qiang. Is there room for a compromise here? Or what do you expect to happen next?
XIAO QIANG: Well, I don’t see the Chinese government today, as the most powerful authoritarian regime, will compromise what they perceive is a regime security with a company like a Google.
But, in the long run, I do think Google represents the force of Internet and the future of Internet. The Chinese government can run what the Chinese now today call Chinternet. Chinternet vs. Internet, I think, ultimately, Chinternet will lose.
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- January 13, 2010 5:12 PM
“It’s Not Google that’s Withdrawing from China; It’s China that’s Withdrawing from the World” (Updated with Photos)
The twittersphere has exploded with the news of Google’s potential exit from the China market. CDT has translated selected tweets. Read all tweets at #Googlecn
- @qhgy RT @Lyooooo: If Google leaves I won’t use Baidu or let my children or grandchildren use it (If I have them) #GoogleCN
- @clowwindy The wings of some birds are too pretty; to lock them in a cage to enjoy them is evil #GoogleCN
- @miyafan Now begin doing two tasks 1. Quickly use Google to search censored material 2. study how to scale the wall #GoogleCN
- @aiww Long live Fanfou, long live Google #GoogleCN
- @zz4040 Google is a real man #GoogleCN
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- January 13, 2010 1:16 AM
Wall Space: Interview with Rebecca Mackinnon
Last weekend, NPR’s On the Media interviewed Rebecca MacKinnon about the current state of Internet control in China. Listen here: :
BOB GARFIELD: Now, actually on that subject, I wanted to ask you, certainly for 50 years behind the Iron Curtain the populations of the Soviet Union and its satellites were only too well aware of what they did not have access to. Are Chinese citizens by and large aware of the degree to which their view of the outside world is restricted?
REBECCA MACKINNON: I think it varies. There are a lot of well-educated people who travel abroad who are aware of the extent of the censorship. There are many others who don’t notice it because they’ve lived with it their entire lives.
And the other thing is, too, the big difference between China today and the countries of the former Soviet bloc is that one of the big reasons why people in the former Soviet bloc were pushing for change is because they couldn’t get their Beatles and they couldn’t get their blue jeans and they weren’t able to have any fun. You know, it wasn’t all just about politics. And the Chinese people, of course, are able to buy whatever they want and are able to have quite a lot of fun.
And the other thing, though, to point out is that actually a lot of Chinese people, even who study abroad and who read foreign media reports, have decided that they agree with their government’s view that the foreign media is spreading lies against China. And so, you actually get websites devoted to exposing what they feel are the anti-China conspiracies in the Western media.
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- January 12, 2010 11:38 AM
China’s Web Crackdown Continues
In the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, writes:
China is doing its best to remind us that technology can also be a tool of suppression, with Beijing recommitting to censoring its large corner of the Internet. Last summer, the authorities required computer makers to install “Green Dam” software on every PC sold in China, which would block troubling political and religious sites. The regulation was put on hold. But last week a Santa Barbara-based company called Cybersitter sued China and several computer makers for $2.2 billion for allegedly stealing code from its parental-control software aimed at blocking pornography.
The lawsuit—which faces an uphill climb because of difficulties in fighting global copyright violations—says makers of the Green Dam software lifted 3,000 lines of code from Cybersitter (even including some of its customer updates) and incorporated them into the Chinese software. Violations of rights to software in China are usually on display as close as the nearest side street, but it’s telling that the government would go to such lengths.
Cybersitter alleges there were several thousand attempts from China to hack into its servers, some with thousands of attempts at access per session, including one traced back to a government ministry. Spoofed emails originating in China purported to come from Cybersitter staff and attempted to install Trojan code to lift information from the company’s servers.
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- January 10, 2010 10:28 PM
Chinayouren: China and the World Map of the Internet
Last month, Chinayouren posted a series of diagrams illustrating the relationship between China and the World Wide Web, and demonstrating both the barriers that keep China’s Internet separate from the rest of the world and how various forces are bridging the gap:
Because in Western countries internet penetration is very high and India is still lagging behind, in the next 10 years the Chinese internet will become almost as big as all the rest together. If it continues to diverge, it may grow into a parallel network, like a dark side of the moon, a vast, self-sufficient island that the government can cut out at any moment and most people inside it don’t even notice the difference. This defeats the whole idea of the www.
Whatever the real magnitude of the problem, it is clear to most observers that there is a disconnect between China and the rest of the Internet, and there are powerful forces pulling her further apart. Fortunately, there are also forces working to balance this, and the results in the coming years will very much depend on how those factors play against each other.
See more graphs here.
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- January 8, 2010 1:03 PM
Heady Web Freedom in China as Great Firewall Falls
The Los Angeles Times reports on the brief outage of the Great Firewall over the weekend:
Cautious excitement spread on some social-networking platforms as hope flared that Internet freedoms suddenly were being expanded after months of intensifying scrutiny.
“It’s finally unblocked, reasons unknown,” wrote a blogger named EFanZh. “I hope nothing gets blocked anymore. I can’t take it any longer.”
But by the time many woke up, strict restrictions had returned. Error messages once again flashed across computer screens for sites blocked by the nation’s censorship filter.
“It seemed just like a dream,” said Michael Anti, a social critic and one of hundreds who tweeted about the development on Twitter.
Rumors abounded that the outage was due to maintenance work administered by Internet provider China Unicom. Others reasoned it had something to do with the heavy snow that blanketed northern China over the weekend.
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- January 4, 2010 2:11 PM
C.A. Yeung : The Will of Heaven Once Again Confuses the CCP! (Updated)
From the Under the Jacaranda Tree Blog:
As I am writing this blog post, millions of netizens in China are celebrating the unblocking of their favourite websites, including Youtube, Picasa, Bloggers, etc. Many of these sites have been blocked since late 2008 as a part of a Chinese government sanctioned anti-vulgarity campaign.
Messages posted on Twitters suggest that blockages to Internet access have been lifted in Dalian, Changchun, Wuhan, Chongqing, Xiamen, Shenzhen, Beijing and Guangzhou.
It is not clear why or to what extent the blockage has been lifted.
Update: The outage of the GFW was temporary, according to reports from inside China, where Internet users can no longer access blocked sites. See this post from Danwei.
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- January 3, 2010 4:33 PM
iZaobao: See You There, Inside or Outside the Great Firewall
iZaobao (Paper of Jujube Lovers) is a popular online publication, known for its witty news selection and humorous comments. Founded by Guangzhou-based blogger Peng Yi (彭毅) in 2006, it has produced over 600 issues and has over 440,000 subscribers. iZaobao was blocked in June, 2009 but its loyal readers still use circumvention tools to “Scale the Wall” and read their favorite news digest with commentaries.
Here is iZaobao’s 2010 New Year’s Greeting: “See you there, inside or outside the Wall.” translated by CDT’s Yuanxi Huang:
Happy New Year! Today is the first day of the new year.
On the planet and even in the universe so far as we’ve learned, the only creature that knows the concept of the “new year” is the human being. Only human beings can divide time into continuous sections of a certain length. Only human beings recall the past, look into the future, and collectively make wishes at regular intervals –usually every 365 days or sometimes 366 days if measured by “day”.
Only human beings believe that this day is supposed to be used to do this, and on such a day we are supposed to think of a certain power that may bathe our cheeks with tears.
Actually we know this day has no apparent difference from any of the days before or after: some are born and some are buried; the icebergs in the Arctic are melting, and the dolphins in Taiji, Wakayama are being slaughtered; some websites are shut down, and some government officials are counting their money. However, we still need to faithfully make numerous wishes on the first day of the new year—whether we’re poor, rich, good, evil, corrupted officials, ordinary people, carnivores, or hobos. Yes, everyone, from the bottom of his heart, can stir up some secret little personal wild wishes on this day. Because, we need hope.
We’re all willing to believe that this day has something different. To give ourselves a chance, on our way we would throw away the pains that we can’t put down, and believe there will be singing birds and fragrant flowers at the end of the thick fog we’re walking through; we won’t be able to repack and forge ahead without taking a good glance at the happiness we seized before locking it safely at the bottom of the chest. While the calendar pages have been ripped off one by one and eventually the number changes, we need a chance, to make us believe all the pain, hardship, torment and wounds would be soothed, healed and changed. Because, we need hope.
We care about misfortune. We are fortunate, for those woes didn’t happen to us. When Tan Zhuo walked out of the movie theater, he didn’t know he would be unable to lie on his warm bed at home that night; people who died from the attack of fists, sticks and fire on the streets of Urumqi, had no idea why passersby had gone insane. Our peace should not be taken for granted. Even though we covered our eyes when faced with adversity, we can’t ignore the warm and glutinous blood that spattered on us. If we don’t know where those misfortunes come from, how can we make sure our happiness would be passed onto the next generation?
We care about happiness. We look, we listen, we write, we think. We won’t give up the happiness of not being brainwashed, so someday we would have options other than praying; we won’t give up the happiness of climbing over the Great Firewall, for the wall is not supposed to be in the Internet world; we won’t give up the happiness of enjoying vulgarity, for if there was really a certain power that can make tears bathe our cheeks, we’d rather it be Ai Iijima than the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. These simple happinesses aren’t supposed to be unharmonious, for we happen to have an organ called a brain that we can use to think what happiness is.
Life always advances at a constant speed. The re-departure after retrospection, is like a review of what we’ve experienced and preview of what we are yet to have. We’ve always been so greedy with time, hoping the time of happiness would last longer and the time of sadness would never come.
Therefore, on the first day of the new year, let us together say “Happy New Year!” Every member of iZaobao is glad to be here and to have experienced the years of 2007, 2008 and 2009 together with you. We’re so ordinary, yet we 440,000 are such a enormous group; we’re so young, yet youth is our advantage others can’t take away; we’re so humble, yet we are the essential elements of the grand narration of this society.
In 2010, we have more confidence! This is our time, and this is our life
Starting from tomorrow, to be a free person,
Think, express, and care about the world,
Starting from tomorrow, know who I am,
Not follow blindly like sheep, nor be relaxed or burn out
We have a website,
See you there, inside or outside the Wall.
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- January 2, 2010 2:32 PM
Kaifu Lee (李开复) on Circumventing the Great Firewall
Kaifu Lee (李开复) was the founding president of Google China, serving from July 2005 until September 4, 2009. He is currently the CEO of Innovation Works. His Twitter account had 733,906 followers at the time this blog post is written, a large number of whom are from China.
Here are two of his recent tweets:
“Top dreams at a Chinese high school (went w/3 American reporters): 1) very rich businessman, 2) study in the US, 3) to be loved after I die.” 8:21 PM Dec 11, 2009.
“拜托，不要总是讨论翻墙的问题，好吗？这个问题，你们才是专家。” (CDT translation: “Please, don’t always discuss the question of circumventing the Great Firewall [with me], OK? On this question, YOU are the experts.”) 5:23 PM Dec 11, 2009.
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- December 13, 2009 4:09 PM