Google China: Inside the firewall, information is in short supply

[FarCenter]

Google's announcement in January that it was no longer willing to remove sensitive material from search results highlighted the issue of China's domestic internet controls.

But its decision last night to shift its Chinese-language service to servers in Hong Kong looks likely to put the spotlight on the methods Beijing uses to block content that is hosted overseas.

The censorship system works because it is twofold: it consists of controls on the content posted inside the country, and the "great firewall", which prevents mainland users from reading material hosted overseas.

While Google may have stopped censoring its results thanks to its move to Hong Kong, the Chinese government has not.

That is why, using google.com.hk from the mainland last night, searches for "Tiananmen student movement" in Chinese and "89 student movement" in English brought no results – just a message that is all too familiar to internet users in China: "The connection was reset."

<SNIP>

The great firewall is implemented by internet police in three ways. The first two are common tactics: blacklisting domain names and IP addresses, for example those belonging to groups such as Amnesty International. These methods are used by many countries around the world.

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The third technique used by China is "close to unique," added Murdoch. This is the keyword blocking system. Essentially, the government's system mirrors and searches each packet of data as it passes in and out of the country, looking in URLs and webpages for keywords such as "falun", in reference to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. Should it find them, it breaks the connection.

The result is that China is beginning to look like the world's biggest intranet, joke users. When Google announced it would not self-censor, the well-known blogger Hecaitou described it as "not an issue of Google abandoning China but one of China abandoning the world".

<SNIP>http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/23/google-china-firewall-censorship-internet

[FarCenter]

1. Moving google.com to Hong Kong is mainly face saving for Google

While Google will no longer censor searches, the Great Firewall will. So inside mainland China, things will be pretty much unchanged.

From outside mainland China, google.com will return uncensored search results. So it will look uncensored to the rest of the world.

[msongs]

2. google could block all search results that lead to a chinese site but it

probably won't.

Msongs

[FarCenter]

3. That would just drive rest-of-world users to other search engines

[Romulox]

4. I called this weeks ago. I'd go as far as to say this was planned between Google and Beijing.

Edit to say that the entire "pull out" Chinese Opera performance was for domestic (i.e. US) consumption.

[FarCenter]

5. The other possibility is that US is trying to stir up tension between HK and China

By Google moving their servers to Hong Kong, the State Department may be hoping that China will take some action against Google in Hong Kong.

This would be useful in trying to convince Taiwan that closer relations with China are a bad idea.

[Romulox]

6. I think the idea of there being two entities ("HK and China") is itself a fiction...

Hong Kong and Shanghai are China's "Western cities". But they are China's cities, after all.

[FarCenter]

7. Hong Kong and Shanghai's situation is completely different

Hong Kong has a government separate from the rest of China, except for foreign policy and defense matters. It has an independent judiciary and it has laws that guarantee freedom of speech.

Shanghai is part of China and subject to Chinese law.

Macau's situation is similar to Hong Kong.

[Romulox]

8. Nope. The Chinese Communist Party is the absolute sovereign in both cities.

"Hong Kong has a government separate from the rest of China,"

This is what is known as a legal fiction.

edit: Edit to point out how well the supposed HK/China dichotomy allows the ruling party to pull off its good cop/bad cop theatrics. If there are two governments in play, they certainly know how to work in perfect harmony together! :hi:

[FarCenter]

9. If that were true, then Google would have to abide by China's censorship rules in Hong Kong

We shall see.

[JCMach1]

10. Google needs to come up with a firewall buster piece of software

Some sort of always shifting secure proxy server...

[FarCenter]

11. There is an ongoing battle between firewall designers and hackers

Any organization of any size has a fairly elaborate firewall complex that governs traffic between the internet and the organizations intranet. It attempts to control what traffic from outside is allowed into the intranet, but also limits the traffic originated from inside the intranet as well, e.g. you can't surf porn or gambling sites from intranet workstations.

There is no technical reason why all the techniques developed for these firewalls cannot also be applied at the connections across national borders. In fact, China and a number of other countries have done so. The idea that the global internet is necessarily an open system is a myth.

[JCMach1]

12. there are already some sytems/protocols that can do the job

TOR, JonDo... but a company with the resources of Google! They should just go ahead and take China and the other Firewall countries on this way.