VPN crackdown ‘unthinkable’ trial by firewall for China’s research world
scmp.com
scmp.com
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.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/putin-china-in...
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.
You read the postcards, and build a list of sender/receivers that communicate stuff you don't approve of.
You can use that list to block window envelopes of encrypted web traffic - you don't know what's in the envelope, but you have a pretty good idea who's talking to whom.
Now, the bubblewrap envelopes - they don't sort quite like other envelopes, they're a bit heavier. Maybe they're going to an unknown recipient, and you think that's odd. They look a bit different. Put those recipients on a list. One gets too high, maybe block them and see if anyone you care about complain.
Now, clearly, people will figure out a way to make their bubblewrap envelopes look like the regular business envelopes with windows. Look like secure web traffic.
But traffic patterns are likely to look different for streaming and peer-to-peer. You might have an idea of who you'd like to enable streaming media from.
In short - you can use pure traffic analysis to make an educated guess about the nature of a data stream. Packet size, frequency, bandwidth, participants (ip addresses).
Some packages says "VPN" clearly on the side. Some pretend to be HTTPS traffic. The latter might get through, some of the time.
(Not an attempt at summarizing the video, just an attempt at an analogy for packet inspection)
Now imagine tunneling all your network traffic over that DNS server, independent of how you encode it, you still need to send the bits to and fro.
How does that change the sent/received profile?
But isn't this use case—academia—already a very crucial aspect of society that China wants to exist? If this won't convince the CCP it's difficult to imagine what would.
Any other place that has similar restrictions must be treated the same.
http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...
Shadowsocks definitely works too.
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).
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.
tl:dr for the younger folks: Darwinism was disliked by the Soviets as it was bourgeois pseudoscience implying that the people are different. Many geneticists and biologists were fired, shot or went to the gulag. Lysenko was a agriculturist who became famous by inventing an alternative biology similar to Lamarckism where organisms inherit acquired traits. This (most of the time) didn't work but you couldn't do research showing the opposite, Stalin loved it too much.
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?
Well, Mao certainly could during the cultural revolution.
Political conditions were very different during the cultural revolution than they are now.
The Chinese government has demonstrated very clearly over the last few decades that it is more concerned about maintaining economic growth than about maintaining "ideological purity".
Of course, the money would go to those capable and loyal enough to actually try and make something. It could be used to both decrease the objective dependence on the politically dangerous but important outside-GFW resources, and bring enough rivalry between the less loyal for the access to the government grants to weaken any latent opposition.
As far as I understand, GFW does not block all access; it blocks politically-sensitive access. There's plenty scientific / engineering / whatever resources on the Internet that don't carry political messages, and don't try to. I bet effectively indexing and censoring the outside-GFW internet is a viable task for China's IT. It does not need to be as good as Google; it needs to just be OK to allow the important R&D to continue.
What's more likely is they'll work out a deal with trusted universities and corporations to give their employees access to an official VPN through which they can get unrestricted internet access. But all traffic through this VPN will be closely monitored.
Same for twitter: send your tweets via an approved gateway, get them reviewed an pushed to Twitter, get pre-censored retweets as they appear and get approved. Make the international voice of the PRC researchers official-only, Soviet-style.
With corporations, it's harder. But for each "we don't trust your servers" from a Western corp side there could be a symmetric "we don't trust your servers" from Chinese side. The resolution depends on who needs the other side more; I bet that in most cases it would be Western corporations giving in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_National_Congress_of_the_...
Unlike GP I'm not sure the situation will improve all that much post-Congress, though.
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.
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.
"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.
Nobody is talking about a revolution, that would be suicide. The intelligentsia are far more concerned with using government to their advantage, which naturally responds very well to money exchanged for favors (like how baidu got rid of Google).
It's poor people that government worries about. Because when poor people rise up, that's bad news for anyone in power who hasn't yet fled the country. And if most poor people don't read English, well then there is not much harm in allowing some printed criticism of the Party, as long as it's in English.
In other words: Encourage a little bit of criticism, and you will be able to observe those who join in - even if they don't go too far - and be able to obtain a handy register of people to pay extra close attention to.
This created a safe pool where new local companies could grow before they were able to face international competition. These companies could incubate and then burst onto the international stage.
I wonder if this is an electronic version of, e.g. what Korea does with its automobile industry using taxes...
The gap is that Chinese online companies don't seem to be exporting much as yet. In the case of chat at least, I think it is actually being held back by GFW because you need a chinese phone line to register.
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.
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
The traffic is already tunneled when it passes through the GFW.
I'm not sure if this traffic is encrypted (I assume it is), but I know GFW filtering happens at egress points so mobile traffic would already be tunneled by then. They could add dedicated hardware at mobile towers to GFW this traffic but I don't think the govt sees a need to. The primary target of the GFW is to stop Chinese citizens from accessing foreign services. Foreigners on foreign roaming data plans are not the intent of the GFW.
My bet is that they could filter this, but it's not worth the infrastructure investment.
1) Verizon had added China to TravelPass in the last year, so it now costs $10 a day for up to half a gig of data, plus unlimited voice and text. 2) There was complete access to Google and Twitter because my iPhone was using an international SIM.
I was simply making the point that the government has made accommodations to ease the use by international business travelers.
I'll also add that my ExpressVPN account (which I used from different Wi-Fi networks) often failed to connect, presumably because the Great Firewall is looking for VPN network patterns to block.
Personally, I think not all censorship is in some way aimed at free speech, that's just the most obvious parts.
Anything the party leadership disagrees with can potentially be censored. That includes criticism and ridicule of the party, but also pornography or memes they don't like.
China might be doing it in the most obvious and blunt way, but they are not doing anything that's especially unique, other countries just have less obvious ways to get what they want. Like enacting laws to fine social media companies or pressuring them to tow the line trough less visible means.
/s
Contrary to the party line China is truly an aberration when it comes to censorship for a modern, wealthy, industrialized country. Pointing out that China belongs to a tiny group of outliers compared to the entire rest of planet Earth when it comes to censorship does not equate to somehow claiming the US has no faults.
It's like, the USA executes people, china executes people too, so they must be the same. Ignore the fact that china executes a hell of a lot more people than the USA (even on a per capita basis), they aren't the same at all. Likewise, the USA has corruption, so does china, but the scales of the problems are completely different. Talking about the USA's censorship problem in the context of China's is like talking about a flu in the context of terminal brain cancer. Ya, they both suck, but one sucks a lot more than the other.
On principle they are the same, just because the scales are different does not mean the US is in any position to criticize Chinese behavior on that issue.
It's pretty much the equivalent of "do as I say, not as I do" and a very easy to spot double standard.
> Ya, they both suck, but one sucks a lot more than the other.
Murder is murder, regardless of the scale, the injustice stays the same. Let's also put the scale into context [0]
"China, together with Iran, North Korea, Yemen and the US (the only G7 country to still execute people) carried out the most executions last year."
China, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, that's a list the US wants to be on too, really? From 2007 to 2012 the US executed more people than Pakistan, Yemen or North Korea did.
> Likewise, the USA has corruption, so does china, but the scales of the problems are completely different.
You realize that if you read Chinese media, you'd get exactly the opposite stories about how corrupt the US is? What does this mean? That all Chinese are constantly lying and all US Americans are always telling the truth? No, it only means countries control the narrative to make themselves shine in the most positive light possible. They do this regardless of what form of government they run, the only thing that changes are the methods they are using.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/mar/29/death-...
This sounds like the Merkel approach to Internet censorship.
I'd argue government restrictions on free speech is a bigger threat than fake news.
So if you write a poem critical to Edrogan, whoops, it's libel against other heads of state punishable by law.
If you run a website in Germany you are liable for any and all content on your website, this includes user submitted content like comments.
Add to that the fact that Germany has libel laws and considers Holocaust denial a crime and it's not surprising at all that barely any German websites allow for comments and if they do it's pretty much only moderated comments.
While this might not be "direct censorship", it has the de-facto effect of censorship by suppressing "unpopular" opinions and putting scissors in people's head if they want their opinions to be published.
Merkel also started mentioning regulating the Internet around the G20 meeting and even before that. She's been quite evasive though, only giving some hints, since they have elections in Germany this fall and there would be no talk of pensions or censorship before that. So better watch out for EU-wide Internet censorship using the German model.
Even better: host it on IPFS.
Nothing at all, that's the thing German legislators seem completely ignorant about like a lot of other facts about the Internet. But what German news company would go that route? Not a single one because it would make them look like they want to "break the law on purpose".
So they all keep on hosting in Germany and moderating their comments or sometimes do not allow them at all because certain topics are way too much effort to moderate.
Keep in mind: This has been the state of things for decades and if you ask any regular ass German about this they wouldn't even know about it and instead keep on complaining how it's media companies who are censoring them and their opinions, even tho these companies are pretty much forced to do so by German laws, at least if they want to prevent massive legal issues for themselves.
It's a very comparable system to how Germany censors/bans media like movies, music or video games. It's not the German government "banning" certain media, the German government merely puts very heavy restrictions on certain media, which, for all purpose and effect, makes it impossible to sell them.
That's how you create an system of censorship even when your Grundgesetz (German constitution) quite clearly states "There shall be no censorship", just don't call it censorship but rather "youth protection" and you are a-okay.
Oh, they are well aware of that. However, they rightfully see technology alone not as a valid reason to stop caring about something. If you target the German market from abroad, they will try to apply German law. If you make it obvious by moving an already existing operation abroad without noticeable change to the user doubly so. Why should the physical location of the server change anything? Usually the people arguing against regulation say that there are no borders in the internet. Somehow that argument is only used when it suits them.
This is not unique to the internet. Radio stations that targeted other countries learned the same lesson 40 years ago. The same happens to people who try moving their financial assets to some tropical island. Just because technically the money isn't in the country anymore does not mean the government gives up on taxing.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Though the larger point about isolationism is still valid.
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...
And HQs gateway to the wide world web?
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.
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.
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.
As for your specific point regarding teaching English, I think you're right they wouldn't do that now, however it's a bet I could see them make if their domestic economy becomes slightly larger. After all there are other countries (Japan, Russia, France...) where English has a low penetration rate, and they get away with it.
Yeah, because there are different factions within the party that sometimes have conflicting goals or ideas. It's not as unified as outsiders think it is. I agree that they aren't always scary competent. The whole Bo Xilai scandal was a huge black eye that they didn't see coming, for instance.
> The example I have in mind is the declaration last month by the foreign affairs ministry that the Hong Kong "Joint Declaration" is not binding any more for China.
What? I didn't hear about this at all. That does seem pretty crazy. Do you have a link to a news article?
> After all there are other countries (Japan, Russia, France...) where English has a low penetration rate
Don't know about Russia or France, but Japan still teaches English in schools. Japan and China probably have a similar "penetration rate" for English. They do lots of business done with English speaking countries but the average man on the street is by no means fluent. I suspect the same is true of France. If domestic consumer demand increases, China might be able to get away with it, but the export economy is so big, I can't see them making that choice.
>> On Friday, the eve of the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover, on 1 July 1997, Beijing controversially announced that the Sino-British joint declaration was “now history” and no longer had “any practical significance nor any binding force”[1]
Re: language. I am not saying that English is not taught at school in these countries (it is), only that it has minimum impact in these societies in practice. Right now China is trying to move away from its export economy (where indeed English is needed), and if it does I think it would make sense for a paranoid government to think "well these other countries are functioning without the common citizen knowing much English, so let's stop teaching it except to some professions" -- and pronto, the next generation is cut off from 99% of foreign news sources.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/01/china-humiliat...