thestar.com — Looking at them you might not guess it. But deep in a basement room on the University of Toronto campus, three unassuming computer hackers with messy hair and wrinkled T-shirts are working to tear down China's "Great Firewall," the most sophisticated Internet censorship system in the world.
May 8, 2006 View in Crawl 4
bobothnMay 8, 2006
I dont know about it being the most sophisticated system maby the one that affects the most people.
jer2eydevil88May 8, 2006
Chinese government is nothing more than an opressive regime that has its roots in communism and doesn't really have any claims left in that.
zonemenMay 8, 2006
Not if you have your own private one...
blahblahMay 8, 2006
You don't understand how HTTPS works. First the browser connects to remote-address.com port 443, then it initiates a secure (encrypted) channel. Then, over this encrypted channel, it sends the remaining part of the URL, the part with the request to load google in it. A firewall will not see the request to load google as it will be encrypted. You can verify it works this way by checking the https protocol information using a sniffer. The only clear text will be for remote-address:443The only way to block this would be within the browser or OS (TCP stack). This is probably beyond the capability of a government to do in general (ie, in all cases), but could be effective against a majority of users. Force all software vendors, computer sellers etc to include special code to block URLs in the browser, and/or force users to install government mandated software before allowing connection to an ISP.
mikegioiaMay 8, 2006
to add to your "another point"Over 90% of China's Internet users are located in cites. The people in rural China are too poor to afford computers, so getting unfiltered Internet access doesn't really affect them. China's college students are the ones who know how to surpass the firewall so this would probably affect them the most.I just did a paper on China's Internet censorship...wish I would have seen this article yesterday.
starmanjonesMay 9, 2006
people were giving google trouble for selling out to china. but... they knew... and YOU knew that this is what was going to happen if they just got the door open a crack.
tidejweMay 11, 2006
I see good and bad sides to this. The good sides are mostly obvious, so I will deal with the downsides. If the firewall is hacked, it would only be broken on a temporary basis, and would be re-written and harder to bypass in the future. Also, this could be considered an act of war, and the Chinese could demand their government extradite them (turn these guys over) for trial, etc...to avoid war with a nuclear super-power Canada might have little choice...afterall Their government did nothing to stop such an attack on the Chinese even though everyone clearly knows about it now. These idiots went around bragging about what they are doing so everyone knows who they are...you think the Chinese Government isn't going to take action to prevent it? They wouldn't be hard to track down...they already told everyone where they're located (idiots). If worse comes to worst, and the Chinese government can't stop the firewall breaches, you think they'd simply give up? We're talking about an evil vicious dictatorship...they wouldn't give in, they'd modify the rules of the game. The Chinese government could simply make ALL internet access illegal and that'd keep people from not only reading stuff about freedom, etc but from reading ANYTHING. Oh yeah...that'd really help the country out if they had to resort to shutting off ALL internet access instead of simply "Limited" internet access.I think the downsides far outweigh the benefits....
expertbloggerMar 16, 2008
'Tor' might be a better alternative as it provides the benefits of both mixes and proxies and already has a large 'trust network' to tap in to. It's not quite ready for full-scale China implementation yet (not enough exit node bandwidth available), but it could be soon: afterall Their government did nothing to stop such an attack on the Chinese even though everyone clearly knows about it now. These idiots went around bragging about what they are doing so everyone knows who they are...you think the Chinese Government isn't going to take action to prevent it? <a class="user" href="http://tubaslivre.info">http://tubaslivre.info</a> <a class="user" href="http://vuggytapis.info">http://vuggytapis.info</a> <a class="user" href="http://wailstable.info">http://wailstable.info</a> <a class="user" href="http://whealyamen.info">http://whealyamen.info</a> <a class="user" href="http://whiptkonks.info">http://whiptkonks.info</a>