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Comment by open-source-ux | Hacker News Reader

According to this BBC video report, more Shanghai residents are venting their anger and frustration by posting videos on social media. Such videos are normally censored by China's 'Great Firewall'.

The BBC website states: "...the sheer volume of the clips has made it difficult for censors to keep up. Many are also being passed around in private group chats, which has made them harder to catch."

Shanghai lockdown: How angry netizens test China's 'Great Firewall' (video): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-china-61102809

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I know this is a nit, but that is a misrepresentation of what the Great Firewall is (to keep things out of the country) vs. the internal censorship regime that domestic internet services are supposed to provide. In this case, it is the internal censorship apparatus that cannot keep up, not the great firewall failing from letting information in or out of the country.

I think the term 'Great Firewall' has become a colloquialism for the compute resources the CCP uses to further their agenda. They've used the same set of network/compute resources to commit cyber attacks, so thinking of the Great Firewall as only the filter for the outside world gives a false impression of how their systems work and are deployed.

But this is not a technological thing...and it isn't CPC driven (rather, private companies are supposed to self censor inside China, via manual inspection or increasingly via AI). The Great Firewall specifically is package filtering technology installed at ISPs with out-of-china links. China can't use it against internal traffic because it would basically shut the internet down completely in the entire country (given its slow performance).

> it isn't CPC driven (rather, private companies are supposed to self censor

The CCP dictates what gets filtered, so not sure what you mean by them not 'driving' it. Are you saying that because they don't own the hardware? If so, that's rather pedantic, given that the party has effectively unlimited power to dictate how any given resource is used, and is doing so in this case.

> The Great Firewall specifically is package filtering technology installed at ISPs with out-of-china links.

If this were an academic conversation about what the word means, or where it originated, then yeah, I get you. However, I was pointing out what the term has come to mean colloquially and why. If you generally have a gripe about the confusing overload of the term, then your argument should focus on potential confusion.

> China can't use it against internal traffic because it would basically shut the internet down completely in the entire country (given its slow performance).

Edit: I misread your last paragraph.

There s ample evidence the CCP deploys the same type of filtering internally, I don't think it being potentially different hardware or methods is anything more than technical detail is the outcome if the same.

> The CCP dictates what gets filtered

That isn’t accurate, the CPC (let’s use the correct acronym at least, even if the word order is different in Chinese) doesn’t dictate, they just tell the private companies “don’t allow anything that will make us mad”, and they then have to enforce rules that aren’t dictated, but are left intentionally very vague.

The internet companies would of course be in a much better place if the government just did all the filtering for them. Unfortunately they don’t get off that easily. The GFW is another matter altogether: the government simply maintains a list of what to block that all ISPs (most state owned) plug into.

> That isn’t accurate, the CPC (let’s use the correct acronym at least, even if the word order is different in Chinese)

No thank you. The English web is still wholey organized around the term CCP. I'm not going to switch my terminology because the party wants me to, no matter how nicely they ask.

> doesn’t dictate, they just tell the private companies “don’t allow anything that will make us mad”,

You are aware of the definition of dictate correct? So, you can see how that is what that is, no? Vague, sure, but that's still a command, and still carries legal consequences if you do it wrong. Just because Xi doesn't feel the need to create a formal list everytime a new meme pops up doesn't make it less of dictation.

> The internet companies would of course be in a much better place if the government just did all the filtering for them

Cost savings for the party I suppose.

> the government simply maintains a list of what to block that all ISPs (most state owned) plug into.

Wait, I thought it was vague? Sounds like it's absolute, just ever changing. That's not what vague means.

Can anyone explain how an automated filtering/censorship system can't "keep up" with this, technically? Even with a tiny delay, it seems to me the problematic videos or posts could be taken down easily. It's not like every Chinese citizen is posting terabytes of data daily...

My understanding is that normal people have to find and manually block a lot of the content. That's why it can't keep up - because there's MUCH more content to block now than normal.

Anyone?

I worry the US internet is trending in that direction. It already sounds too familiar.

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