China Just Blocked Thousands of Websites

https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/nov/china-just-blocked-thousands-websites

by wyclif • 12 years ago

173 133 12 years ago

zh.greatfire.org

Inevitable. As people start using other services to get around the wall, those services will be blocked no matter how popular they are. Given what we've seen of Xi so far, I guess Chinese internet will probably be mostly cutoff from the rest of the world by the end of his term.

LiweiZ2• 12 years ago

Yes. But I think it could be way sooner than most of Chinese can be aware of. Consensus among average people in China seems in favor of Xi now. Someone is just picking up the organization's old-fashion tricks and copying them and hoping all of them work as expected since those are all that they know. When the energy begins to loose, everything could turn up-side-down shortly. It has not started yet. Everybody needs a huge stable market now. Perhaps leader can get what he wants in the end.

edwinyzh2• 12 years ago

Too me it'll be the end of the world...

wmeredith• 12 years ago

"We have acknowledged all along that our method of unblocking websites using “collateral freedom” hinges on the gamble that the Chinese authorities will not block access to global CDNs because they understand the value of China being integrated with the global internet."

If they "understood the value" of that, these shenanigans wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

133• 12 years ago

If you think about it from a purely practical standpoint, it would make sense for all countries to block the any CDN that isn't on their soil. Local companies make more money hosting websites, less traffic on the pipes coming into the country, and better control over what is censored.

mvc• 12 years ago

...and higher prices for consumers in those countries.

est3• 12 years ago

tl;dr Greatfire.org hosted content mirrors on edgecastcdn.net , China bans *.edgecastcdn.net altogether.

jsmthrowaway• 12 years ago

How helpful of them. Maybe they can throw a mirror up on Akamai and CloudFlare next.

est3• 12 years ago

They already did. See their wiki https://github.com/greatfire/wiki

They are hosting mirrors on Akamai, Azure, Cloudfront.

They previously hosted on Amazon S3 and Cloudflare, they were blocked in China already

4684499• 12 years ago

I'm sorry for using the word, but they PEE everywhere, then they blame who's trying to clean up and the way of cleaning. Yes, the way of cleaning is absolutely blamable, since the government doesn't own the place where they pee and yet some Chinese do love the pee. But I think whoever is peeing is more to blame. If you could read Chinese, you can see large amounts of content they are providing are hateful, violent and disturbing which against the ToS of many hosting providers (not all of the content are bad tbf, there is good information as well, additionally if you couldn't read Chinese, you can visit Freeweibo, there are lots of pics that express my view).

Well, greatfire.org sure don't think they were peeing anyway, on the contrary, "It's an honor", under the name of freedom of speech, the collateral damage is much more like a weapon against the government, if a website cleans those contents up on its own, the website will be tagged as "the enemy of freedom of speech", "self-censorship" as they call it. The mess keeps going on. I don't know who is winning here. What I do know is users are the losers.

riverain2• 12 years ago

Yes, and this article itself has been blocked too.

voltagex_• 12 years ago

Is there any way I can buy a Chinese VPS to see the impacts of the blocks myself?

mappu• 12 years ago

There's a bunch of providers listed on https://www.exoticvps.com/ .

jobin• 12 years ago

Try vpngate:http://www.vpngate.net , Hope you join vpngate network too :)

zhte415• 12 years ago

Actully, it isn't. Better not to tempt fate.

riverain2• 12 years ago

I can't visit the link. (https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/nov/china-just-blocked-th...) And I'm in mainland China. What can I suppose?

ryenus• 12 years ago

It worries me that this thread could get our beloved Hacker News blocked. I cross my fingers, as you might see, I'm from inside the w@ll.

est3• 12 years ago

Apparently Greatfire.org think this caused "significant economic loss as many businesses will be impacted".

I think this only cause problems for edgecast customers, and China doesn't give the slightest fuck.

And for those people who does want to see those "collateral freedom" mirrored content, they already have their own private circumventing methods.

tempestn• 12 years ago

Edgecast customers include some very popular websites, which are certainly used by consumers and businesses in China. So it's definitely a problem for China. Now, whether the Chinese government gives a fuck is indeed another matter. I'm sure they can browse whatever they want.

geekingfrog• 12 years ago

After living in China for a few years, I understood something: the only thing chinese government cares about is its longevity. The whole system is designed to keep the party in the control seat. Economic growth was a way, now that's is slowing down, the party is finding other ways, but it would be a mistake to think chinese economy is more important than power for the party.

wmt3• 12 years ago

I don't think anyone is desperate enough to rely on VPN to access the websites of technology giants already blocked or soon to be blocked by China, as greatfire.org is also mirrored Akamai and CloudFlare. What will more likely happen is that those large technology companies will just realize not to invest too much money into countries hostile towards them, like China.

tiatia4• 12 years ago

China does a good job in what it intends to do.

Most non-Chinese IP websites are not blocked but traffic gets slowed down by factor 40. I have an offshore webserver. A ping suggests a 50% packet loss.

Often you can access foreign websites. At least sometimes. Some days even gmail does work. Everything works sometimes or a little bit and or is unbelievable slow.

What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it. Facebook and Google were most of the time not working, even with the proxy. Maybe the 50% packet loss makes their websites non functional.

I just bought Astill VPN and for now I must say they are doing a tremendous job.

133• 12 years ago

What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it.

There's two possibilities that I can see; you were letting your DNS requests leak and they were being poisoned, or they were doing a direct MITM hijack of your SSH session. Neither is particularly comforting, but it's fairly easy to work out which if either is going on.

tiatia4• 12 years ago

How do I figure this out?

I resolve my DNS through my proxy.

##Preference Name Status Type Value network.proxy.socks_remote_dns user set boolean true

rahimnathwani3• 12 years ago

A ping suggests a 50% packet loss.

This likely caused by the limited peering arrangements of your host. I rent ~10 virtual private servers outside China, and ping times vary between 90ms ('best' provider) to 500ms ('worst' provider). Packet loss varies over time, but has never been an issue with > half of the providers.

What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it.

Were you using an HTTP proxy (e.g. forwarding a local port to squid running on your VPS) or a SOCKS proxy (just using the SSH command to act as a socks proxy)? If the latter, then your DNS queries would still be resolved locally (probably by your ISP's DNS server and, even if using an external DNS server, subject to MITM).

tiatia4• 12 years ago

No. I use DNS via my SSH proxy

##Preference Name Status Type Value

network.proxy.socks_remote_dns user set boolean true

bostan• 12 years ago

I am from China and SSH tunnelling works perfect for me.

mp82• 12 years ago

Where's your server? I also have issues tunneling to a UK based server

mcbridematt• 12 years ago

If a person with Wireshark can figure out what you are doing, so can a nation-scale signature detection system.

Things like custom protocol handshakes will give the underlying application away. It doesn't matter if the traffic itself is encrypted.

tbenst• 12 years ago

I'm currently in China. VPNs are very common and popular here. Many work very poorly unfortunately (Private Internet Access included). Astrill appears to be the most popular and best performing. A few high-end hotels that I've stayed at route all traffic through a VPN to cater to their Western audience.

Many, many people with little technical ability use a VPN, especially in businesses dealing with the West.

greyone• 12 years ago

There are better VPNs for China: http://www.greycoder.com/openvpn-china/

biesnecker• 12 years ago

The vast, vast majority, though, of the Chinese internet population do not use VPNs, nor will they when most of what they want/need is available on domestic sites. The slice of the population that deals with the West is tiny, and comparatively unlikely to cause problems. The chilling effect that just needing a VPN has on exploration of accurate foreign information about China and what's happening in the country is substantial and intended.

eob• 12 years ago

Speaking entirely divorced from my opinion on China politically (as someone with strong US and TW ties, FWIW), I think the Great Firewall has been a brilliant economic move in retrospect. While it may have been an accidental side-effect, blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen unless I'm mistaken.

And for a "middle class" of blocked sites, while not technically blocked, the packet delay is so great most people (except a dedicated few) will just shrug and figure that cross-continent internet connections must be too slow to be practical. Accessible, but only if you're willing to wait a minute. A brilliant political play, because it's hard to pin a charge oppression on anyone, since the information is technically there, but so slow nobody will access it.

mahranch• 12 years ago

blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen

I'm not sure I follow. It's not like there's a huge demand to do business with local Chinese nationals. There's opportunity, sure, there's always opportunity, but don't confuse that with demand. Unfortunately, very few businesses outside of China could even compete with domestic companies anyways. They're literally working for pennies on the dollar. That's also ignoring the cultural and language barriers, not to mention governmental red-tape you would have to go through.

It would be like me trying to set up an customer service business here in Maine and trying to sell my services to a lower-middle sized company in India. I wouldn't be able to compete with local Indian companies since their overhead and costs are significantly less than mine. Obviously there are exceptions depending on the industry, but they are just that, exceptions.

dummyfellow• 12 years ago

All biz are not labour intensive, in India GMail, Facebook and Twitter rule, in China the local counterparts.

landryraccoon• 12 years ago

Facebook wouldn't incur any additional costs operating in China except for the cost of additional server infrastructure, which would be the same for a Chinese company. Their engineering costs are sunk costs. They wouldn't be competing against Chinese engineers for pennies on the dollar (if you could even find Chinese engineers of the same skill set).

maged• 12 years ago

The side-effect was definitely not accidental. China has blocked the major company in every internet industry (social networks, search engines, video streaming, etc.), and as a result domestic products are booming. Now these domestic products are starting to expand internationally with the revenue they get from the artificial Chinese market.

Korea did something something similar with its Chaebols' (Hyundai, Samsung, or other large Korean companies in countless industries) in the 80s. It had protectionist policies that let the Korean companies charge outrageous prices domestically, and used that revenue to become very competitive internationally. And it worked.

RodericDay• 12 years ago

"Bad Samaritans" by Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean economist now at Cambridge University, is a good light read fleshing out these ideas.

netcan2• 12 years ago

When the companies in question are google, facebook, twitter, etc., it's a lot more difficult to make the normal "utility calculus" arguments that are the way most economists understand the cost of protectionism to domestic consumers.

When you look at the cost per vehicle paid by consumers in scenario A vs scenario B, there's a clear argument to be made. With services, it's more speculative. Is the average haircut in China better or worse than Malaysia's? With web services, it's near impossible to measure consumption or consumer surplus. The underlying economics driving normal goods and services industries (economies of scale, price competitions, marginal costs of production) aren't there. That makes the economics we can measure in goods industries and theorize in services industries very shaky.

Economists generally do have a sense that choice is good and protectionism is bad, but it's hard to formalize or measure when the products are newspapers, search engines, social networks and dating apps.

spoomor• 12 years ago

Google never got much market share before it was more seriously blocked. ICQ too failed compared to QQ despite not being blocked. I think the bigger reason is foreign companies just don't provide what Chinese people want - ie Chinese language and millions of flashing banner ads.

Al-Khwarizmi• 12 years ago

Actually, all the major economic powers got there by means of protectionism. Economic liberalism is nice when you're already at the top.

turingbook• 12 years ago

A Chinese insider here.

Most China Internet companies are more successful not because their foreign competitors are blocked, but they are more agile to move and adapt products/services to local market.

There are lots of examples. Alibaba beat eBay(never blocked) badly. JD is much popular than Amazon.com China which is continuously operating in China for long time. Tencent becomes an Internet empire via QQ, an instant messaging service which AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft all can not find reasonable monetization ways.

Maybe the best counter-example is Baidu with Google nearly blocked fully. But before that, after several years operating, Google' market share is below 30%.

killnine• 12 years ago

How can you be so sure it was not accidental?

Seems to me, the need to be in control is enough motivation for these acts... without ever thinking that someone will have to build a Chinese amazon

LiweiZ2• 12 years ago

I don't think a brilliant move, even economically, can be called in this case. When the upper class/inner circle saw the money in this field, it's the first thing they were willing to do. If this kind of action can be called that way. We can easily find mountain-high pile of cases that we can call brilliant in the ruling party's history. Yes, economically grabbing people ruled by it. Take any amount when it wants to.

edwinyzh2• 12 years ago

While I'm quite sure it's true, but I'm also sure it's a side effect.

gph• 12 years ago

I wonder if someone might challenge China on this at the WTO. It could perhaps be seen as a backhanded tariff. As you say it's acted like one for their domestic internet businesses.

chroma2• 12 years ago

I completely agree with you. On a related note: The Great Firewall is rather easy to get around, but that's the point. That tiny inconvenience sates the nonconformists while making the vast majority of people simply give up.[1] The same goes for jailbreaking one's phone or switching operating systems. Heck, many people can't even be bothered to check "organ donor" on their drivers license.

1. http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/

skatenerd• 12 years ago

The great firewall is not "rather easy" to get around. It can be a giant pain in the ass. Source: I live in Beijing

westiseast2• 12 years ago

It's easy to get around, but it's still a huge drag. eg, yeah I can dialup my vpn and get Facebook, but then there's the endless times the vpn doesn't conevt, the connection is slow, when you're on mobile and want to access something blocked. Today I spent twenty minutes sending a QQ contact an address I had in gmail. I have about as many "no VPN frustration" days as Beijing has blue sky days :)

Before anyone asks, I live in Fujian and I use a government licensed VPN.

temujin• 12 years ago

Although I was able to get around the Great Firewall while living in Shenzhen and Beijing, connection speed/quality was bad enough that more than tripling my rent to live in HK was easily worth it for Internet alone.

Quality of service matters, not just existence of service. There's a reason why lots of engineering effort goes into reducing latency. When the user is in China and the website is hosted outside, the Great Firewall negates all that effort.

crystaln• 12 years ago

Most definitely not an accident. China throttles every successful foreign internet startup. They prefer the economic benefit confers to Chinese, and political control remains in China - for obvious reasons.

grn• 12 years ago

I think that, from the economic perspective, it's just a form of protectionism. You help local producers at the expense of consumers. Few benefit at the expense of many.

westiseast2• 12 years ago

You're making a bad assumption - that because protectionism resulted in a flourishing Internet economy, that it wouldn't have happened without protectionism. Imagine what kind of Internet economy we'd have in China without this dumb firewall and protectionist policies in place - Baidu might actually be a global rival to Google instead of the piece of crap it is :) Global consumers might be happily buying from Taobao instead of the piece of crap that Amazon is :)

bnomis3• 12 years ago

Yes. They're not blocking because of protectionism. It's because they can't censor the content to meet the local rules. China is not alone in this but they are at the thick end of the censorship wedge.

spindritf• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure the language barrier and a massive internal market do most of the heavy lifting here. Look at Yandex.

The Great Firewall is a wash at best. It protects local companies from international competition but it's part of a policy that makes foreigners trust Chinese products much less and will hurt their adoption.

josefresco• 12 years ago

"I think the Great Firewall has been a brilliant economic move in retrospect. "

In the short term yes, but as China is "opened up" more to the western world, this separation and state sponsorship will hurt international growth for domestic Chinese companies.

Many in the "middle" ground will operate as they always did, but if you're a big Chinese tech company looking to expand around the world- this will hurt potential partnerships and foreign investment.

coldtea3• 12 years ago

While we may pay lip service to the web as "open" and "international", it's pretty western and particularly US dominated. From basic infrastructure like core domain names, to standards bodies like the W3C and IEEE, to the big companies like Google, Facebook, Ebay, PayPal, Anazon, Apple and co.

Even sites like Wikipedia, supposedly available to anyone to edit, are pretty much dominated by specific points of view and ideas (even if sometimes those who held those like to think that those ideas are or should be universal and/or neutral).

Neither economically, nor culturally does it make sense for a nation the size of China (or even for EU, but I digres) to participate in such a web. They are not some pushover country that was created a century ago. They have their own, millenia old, civilization. It's not like they are isolated by doing the firewall thing either. They get all the good (and the crap) we get in large does anyway, from the Kardasians to Jackson Pollock.

Think experiment: if the internet was mostly run and dominated by USSR, including a "neutral" Commipedia full of USSR points of view and material, would the US adopt it? Or would they build their own counterpart?

josephjrobison• 12 years ago

Of course there are many factors in North Korea's status as a failed state, but if protectionism is such the brilliant move, then why isn't North Korea more successful.

bnomis3• 12 years ago

I've often thought one could make an economic argument against filtering. But for that to work, those in charge need to care about the losses. I think of it like those Mastercard ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GofscoXnpDw

"Losses due to filtering: X yuan. The illusion of control: Priceless. Some sites we like, for everything else there's the GFW."

jackvalentine3• 12 years ago

You could also make an economic argument for filtering: the infant industry argument.

Protection from the west by the great firewall has made Chinese services flourish.

Compare this to say, Japan, where the native social network Mixi has been practically destroyed by foreign competitors.

ninjin• 12 years ago

Compare this to say, Japan, where the native social network Mixi has been practically destroyed by foreign competitors.

Or, maybe it was that Mixi had been lagging behind for ages and deservingly died off. You might also want to add that Line [1], a domestic company (well, subsidiary of a South Korean company, but still...), is now pretty much dominating the market.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(application)

bnomis3• 12 years ago

Many sites and services are certainly flourishing here. But I think many would any way because they are in Chinese (understandable) and local (faster, even without the GFW). And some are just better, WeChat and Taobao for example.

known• 12 years ago

I think websites should be re-developed as torrents

treffolk• 12 years ago

Then you should

a) start re-developing, or

b) open up your wallet and pay someone else to do it, while

c) accepting greatly decreased web reliability and bandwidth and

d) preparing for enormous legal and polictical shenanigans of upsetting the status quo of traffic monitoring and the shape of telecommunications bandwidth.

altcognito• 12 years ago

I think Freenet is the closest thing to a distributed, encrypted network like the one you speak of.

https://freenetproject.org/whatis.html

dbz• 12 years ago

Does anyone know if Cache Databases are blocked? I made a chrome extension called WebCache that views the cached version of a webpage which would be helpful if Google Cache, Wayback Machine, or Coral CDN isn't blocked. Here is the source: https://github.com/Dbz/WebCache

stoooooooooop• 12 years ago

The first two are definitely blocked (without the Greatfire mirrors). I'm not sure about Coral CDN.

lbenes• 12 years ago

There are a number of ways to help people in China gain access to the open Internet. One easy way to help is to setup an obfsproxy bridge to alleviate the shortage.[1] The quickest and easiest way is to setup your free Amazon EC2 account with the Instructions at the Tor Cloud Project page[2]. It took me just a couple of minutes to install my free EC2 account. Another option is to donate money to pay for the bandwidth that Tor relay and exit nodes require.[3]

NOTE: A bridge is not the same as an exit node. Only exit nodes could possibly attract attention from authorities. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people circumvent government firewalls to join the Tor network. The default EC2 Tor Cloud images only run as a bridge.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-ca...

[2] https://cloud.torproject.org/

[3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-donate-...

Kiro• 12 years ago

My former room mates were from China and I was really surprised to learn that they supported the Great Firewall. They didn't seem to have any issues with it and even thought it was for the greater good.

wmt3• 12 years ago

Foreign students from China know they'll have a very good chance at becoming one the oligarchs ruling the country, and as such likely think any tool as keeping the people subservient is a good thing.

I find it unlikely that Chinese rulers would want to send abroad anyone but its loyal opposers of democracy.

1stop2• 12 years ago

Are you seriously suggesting that Chinese students are all vetted by the government to make sure they are Pro-Communist and Anti-Democratic? AND they are all from the "ruling class".

wow. I don't even...

spdustin• 12 years ago

I legitimately want to know why the "Great Firewall" doesn't block spamming botnets that post to wp-comment.php hundreds of times per hour.

junto• 12 years ago

I think that the firewall is predominantly one way. Restricting access to external information rather than prevention of hackers going out.

But, I agree. I'd also like to see them stop. I now use a geo-IP filter and whitelist the few countries that actually don't appear to spam that much. Needless to say, China is not on that list.

Out of interest Brazil, Ukraine and Russia are also banned for this reason. Does anyone else have loads of comment spam originating from Brazil?

canadev• 12 years ago

I was about to ask, "Anyone know the significance of the part-way filled red-links?"

Did an inspect element/hover over the links and it shows the percentage that the site is blocked, which seems to be the same as the proportion of the link background that is red. Pretty neat use of styling.

tomelders• 12 years ago

I think the easiest way to undermine China right now is to trick them into further limiting it's own connectivity with the global internet by banking on their zeal for censorship and their itchy trigger finger.

Not that I'm advocating this as a strategy, it's more of a warning. China has enemies, and those enemies can do a lot of damage feeding the fire that drives it's governments oppressive policies. And they can do it practically for free.

roylez• 12 years ago

Personally I have to thank the great firewall for blocking Facebook and Twitter so that I would not waste my time on these nonsenses. For serious problems I do not mind find a way to access google, but I would not do it to try to access Facebook especially when none of my friends are there.

pherocity_• 12 years ago

There are other methods like discipline, that don't obliterate your personal freedoms.

apli• 12 years ago

When I was living in Beijing some month ago the bad Internet really upset me. Almost every international connection was quite slow. A lot of pages took minutes to load because so many sites use Google hosted fonts, js libraries or API. These requests took about a minute to timeout and finally the browser could start to render the page (e.g using a default font). Most vpns are like described often slow, so also no solution. I then wrote a chrome plugin to filter all requests to Google hosted libraries and rerouted them to a Chinese service which mirrors Google hosted libraries. This really improved my surfing experience.

askinakhan• 12 years ago

May sound opportunistic but there are some great opportunities here to create domestic companies that mimic those companies that have been blocked.

Timucin• 12 years ago

China should block itself from the internet instead. I am running several servers and getting the most useless/annoying bot/malware traffic from China. Even that I had to block everything that comes from them.

nomercy400• 12 years ago

You mean we should filter our connection based on what IP it is coming from. Yeah, that's a good idea...

sorpaas• 12 years ago

I'm really surprised that so many people are still just talking about it in an economic prospective. I'm not talking about Human Rights or Freedom because the government don't event accept them. I just want to surf the Internet.

Currently it works well because we get more and more tools to deal with GFW, but do you know how frustrating it is in the early days of the Internet in China that you spent nearly half of your life just to solve "networking issues"?

Put yourself in others' shoes for a moment please.

China Just Blocked Thousands of Websites

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