China's Great Firewall inventor forced to use VPN live on stage to dodge his own creation The architect of China's Great Firewall was forced to use a VPN to bypass his own creation in a lecture this week on internet safety. Fang Binxing was speaking at his old university, the Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang, China, when he attempted to access webpages hosted in South Korea as a way to illustrate a …
1. Any sufficiently advanced internet filtering is indistinguishable from someone randomly unplugging your modem every 5 minutes.
2. The fact that even the most sophisticated censorship can be circumvented leads people to complacency. Censorship works at far, far less than 100% efficacy, and is best thought of as a low-pass filter for political / cultural information. Even the fairly weak-sauce censorship that's growing in the west is extremely dangerous.
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There's the old D-Notice thing where the government makes a "request" for media companies not to cover a subject. Technically they can do it anyway, Guardian did so over the Snowden papers iirc, but they almost always tow the line on that to avoid conflict with the government
Quick check, it was the US PRISM programme part of the Snowden releases, and when the Guardian ignored it apparently Cameron brought up the possibility of judicial action to force them to stop covering it in parliament
You're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you.
Also, we've managed to create a system that even Orwell would have marvelled at. We completely removed the need for sending old news to the incinerators once corrected, and it's only a matter of time before they figure out how to filter the information insitu with the need to be so heavy handed and just blanket banning everything.
I live in a little slice of ex Briton in China and have always wondered if my internet traffic is being modified in any way.
If, for example, stories on the Panama papers on the BBC news web site were being altered or some how replaced would anyone know? Is anyone checking?
If you're looking at news sites that use https and using your own computer which you can be confident no-one has installed dodgy certificates on then you would know if the page had been altered. If either of those things isn't true then you wouldn't know.
To the audience's amazement, Binxing then tried to bypass the firewall using a VPN installed on his computer – the same tool secretly installed by millions of Chinese to get around censorship efforts, but whose use is heavily frowned upon by officials.
Perhaps frowned so much as to put Mr. Fang to good use at the local salt mine for, say, ten years?
>> To the audience's amazement, Binxing then tried to bypass
>> the firewall using a VPN installed on his computer – the
>> same tool secretly installed by millions of Chinese to get
>> around censorship efforts, but whose use is heavily frowned
>> upon by officials.
>
> Perhaps frowned so much as to put Mr. Fang to good use at
> the local salt mine for, say, ten years?
No, he's an official. The rules don't apply if you're sufficiently high in that category (and that's not only in China), though it was very bad form to do it in front of an audience.
Also indefensible with the "only what is most popularly searched on" [argument]...
Google doesn't claim that autocomplete shows the most-popular searches. I don't know if there's an official description of the the process, but while the base algorithm is no doubt a fairly simple predictor (probably something like an HMM doing Viterbi, though they might just be reusing one of their ANN implementations), it's likely that personal search history is also an input, if Google can identify you by session, cookie, or other means.
More importantly, Google lets people request particular autocomplete results be removed. So it's quite possible that one organization (say, a particular political party) has a small team of interns looking for autocomplete results and submitting removal requests to Google, while another organization is less vigilant.
A conspiracy seems rather less likely, since it's quite cheap for organizations to arrange this state of affairs themselves.
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members of China's politburo are among those shown to have used offshore accounts to hide or obscure their wealth
TIL:
China is not a communist state but authoritarian.
China has 128 of the world's billionaires (and British poor beats Chinese poor).
China loves the Transformer movies.
We really should eat the rich!
Was the sponsored link at the bottom of the article a joke inserted by a human, or are the AIs messing with us?
Sponsored: Network monitoring and troubleshooting for Dummies
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