“The Connection Has Been Reset”

I live in Beijing, and the article is accurate. For anyone with even minimal technical expertise it's trivial to circumvent censorship. I use tor for blocked sites, and get my email over secure IMAP.

The government doesn't care about what any individual reads here, but I'm sure they log everything, and if you attract too much attention, you'd be in real trouble. Mainly, they seem to be concerned (read: paranoid) about (large) groups of people organizing in a way that could threaten the government's power to such an extent that they would have to suppress them in a PR-damaging way.

Chinese culture values "face" to a ridiculous extent, and the government is learning fast that crude suppression is inferior to "acknowledge, downplay, spin and lie by omission" - they are, in a way, just catching up with their Western counterparts, making their propaganda more sophisticated.

Getting back to Internet censorship, I have two interesting observations:

1. Not a single major US newspaper is blocked here - this could mean that the US has a lot of influence on Chinese censorship, or that US newspaper reporting is not considered threatening. cbc.ca and news.bbc.co.uk are blocked. Non-english sites are not blocked, probably because too few people speak those languages to make them a threat.

2. I encounter what I call the reverse firewall almost as often as the firewall. It appears that a lot of sites blacklist Chinese IP address ranges (probably because of attacks/spam), but it can get kind of annoying.

Internet access here is definitely frustrating for power users, because of high latency, internal and external blocking, and additional slowdowns through proxy use to do things like blogging.

"For two months in 2002, Google’s Chinese site, Google.cn, got a different kind of bad-address treatment, which shunted users to its main competitor, the dominant Chinese search engine, Baidu. Chinese academics complained that this was hampering their work."

It's nice to know that some people in China also use Google to do their jobs.

My back of the envelope calculation says an electon at normal electronic speeds (maybe 1/10 the speed of light) takes less than a millisecond back and forth across the Pacific. So blame the electronics, not the ocean

It would be interesting to know if they filter all DNS requests or only DNS requests to their own servers. Like if they see someone using a service like opendns and filter those dns requests as well. Perhaps they just block DNS servers too.

You still have to make a DNS request for secure connections if you use a domain name... so some of their filtering would still work on secure connections.