China's Great Firewall Gets Taller | Hacker News Reader

China's Great Firewall Gets Taller

wsj.com

18 pointsrwbhn14 comments

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/technology/in-china-new-cy...

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/01/23/world/asia/ap-as-...

The gist is, XJP's national security committee is using all kinds of excuses to try to separate China's intranet from the internet at large. Not only that, they are determined to plug every hole that exists in their censoring/surveillance/propaganda/thought control apparatus.

Recently their cyber-army has expanded their scope to actively disrupt Hong Kong's political activists online activities such as e-referendums, civil organization's websites and hack into activists cellphones, email accounts and computers. There is a tremendous lack of security professionals in Hong Kong and China. We need all the help we can get.

If you happen to be in China, please give us a hand in setting up a Tor Obfs relay.

This is a real tragedy. Now they'll start selling this to other authoritarian regimes and it will begin the end of the internet as we know it.

Well, it's not too different from all the things other governments do while killing net neutrality. DPI, adding advertisement is also a way of modifying content. Just China blocks certain services completely. The tech itself, peeking into packets, finding out what they are about to manipulate or block them is something also ISPs in many western countries, like the US do.

Coming from Europe I was fairly surprised how often both injecting data into traffic or blocking ports is. Also here they say it's for protection. I wouldn't point to China.

About what can be done. There actually many projects on decentralizing the internet, making it more resistant to single points of control and even making censorship hard or close to impossible.

Netsukuku, cjdns, B.A.T.M.A.N. and others are big steps into the right direction, but it even seems like the urge isn't big enough. They don't get lots of interest, donations, etc.

This is a very important point. I honestly don't know what can be done about this, but I hope this is on the radar of any country that cares about freedom of expression for all people regardless of their country of domicile.

This isn't news. VPN blocking based on deep packet inspection appears to have been in use for a long long time.

I have heard from two friends that their VPN provider (they both use the same one) has been less reliable of late. This doesn't mean there's any new technology, and this type of occurrence is common.

I have experienced no difference myself, on fixed line or mobile connections.

Meh.. What else can you expect. CCP's very existence depends on keeping its citizens brainwashed.

just like in every other country in the world ...

CCP isn't a country; it's a - paranoid - political party.

I for one, believe that China doesn't need it for its prosperity.

Anyone know the company providing the technology?

I think that they are not providing it in this case, but both IBM and Siemens are known for developing such technology. Siemens often gets mentioned with Iran, while IBM is known to have sold such technology to Chinese companies (not necessarily governments).

It seems though that China realizes a lot of those things work better when nobody knows how things work. Even the Tor project every now and then calls for people to leak information to help with censorship circumvention. It's an arms race and of course companies and governments have more resources.

Likely Huawei, they are big in the space and are under the control of the government (the ownership structure is secret, but well, it's secret for a reason).

I expect that it's built in-house rather than outsourced.

This article also made me think of a fun/fascinating project: creating a industrial organization economics model of the impacts of the Great Firewall on Chinese firms.

Are the economic benefits of the Great Firewall (e.g. propping up China's tech firms by preventing American competition) greater than the economic harms of hindering many businesses with a limited internet?

China is effectively deploying an infant industry model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry) but instead of using monetary tariffs, they are slowing down or blocking foreign services. This has undoubtedly aided companies like Weibo and Baidu.

Simultaneously, the firewall acts like a tax on domestic Chinese companies. By raising the cost of accessing information or foreign services, it is raising transaction costs for virtually all Chinese businesses.

The model could be a simplified economy with different types of firms that have varying degrees of needs for information. Add a tax (or some similar way to model the transaction cost of finding that information when faced with different levels of censorship). That tax would be only levied on certain information goods (foreign internet services).

Then both businesses and consumers choose which internet services and information they will consume when faced with this tax. The internet services and information are an input to the Chinese firms' production functions and an input to the Chinese consumer's utility functions.

You could even test the model using this upgrade as a natural experiment. These censorship upgrades are an exogenous shock to access to foreign information. They are effectively an unanticipated tax increase. Data could be collected on how much this decreased business productivity in the days after the change and used as a proxy to estimate the tax.

Similarly, when people pay for VPN services (or other ways to get around censorship), these can be modeled using averting costs (generally used to model pollution costs). A traditional example of averting costs: a person buying bottled water to avoid getting diarrhea related illnesses in the developing world. The model assumes that the cost of the bottled water is less than the cost of getting the illness (thus why it is a rational averting behavior). Therefore, the amount spent on the bottled water is a proxy for the unobservable cost of polluted water (albeit a lower bound). (Note this is only true in certain cases in the developing world, as obviously people the developed world are drinking bottled water when their water is entirely safe to drink). Thus, the VPN can be used as a proxy for how much the Chinese are willing to pay to minimize the harm of the Great Firewall (and thus representative of a lower bound of the cost of the firewall).

> "A recent upgrade to China’s web filters, commonly referred to as the Great Firewall, has made it more difficult to use services called virtual private networks"

It really demonstrates a lack of knowledge when the WSJ fails to distinguish between the web and the internet. They note the key impact of this upgrade being VPNs, yet incorrectly state it is an upgrade to a web filter.

Then the article goes on to explain how this change affects different groups'/individual's productivity due to these limits. If we are going to effectively model and understand the impacts of China's censorship, then an accurate understanding of these censorship methods (and the internet itself) is required.

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