The Dark Visitor

Totally stealing this post from China Digital Times. They find some of the best stuff, so it is really difficult not to put your hand in the cookie jar once in awhile.

“China Channel Firefox Add-on
Experience the censored Chinese internet at home!

The Firefox add-on China Channel offers internet user outside China to surf the web as if they were in China. Take an unforgetable virtual trip to China and experience the technical expertise of the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (supported by western companies). It’s open source, free and easy.”

I’ll be going to internet prison for this one but what choice did I have? This is cool!  I would post the download site for the add-on but would feel a bit better if you guys went through the China Digital Times link.  Time off for good behavior and all that.

Sorry, missed this when it first came out on 25 September 08. IntelFusion posts an article concerning pre-emptive Chinese DDOS attacks on websites that support the monks of the Saffron Uprising.  Also planned counter attacks:

In anticipation of the first anniversay of the Saffron Uprising, the government has launched DDOS attacks against three Web sites that support the monks: The Irrawaddy, the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma and the New Era in Bangkok.

The concerted attacks — which appear to originate in China, Russia and Europe as well as Burma…

Cnet News reports on North Korea restricting the use of cell phones in order to keep news of developing food crisis from getting outside the country:

Vitit Muntarbhorn, the UN investigator from Thailand, claims the clampdown on cell phone and long-distance telephone calls was to prevent people from reporting on food shortages, the Web site reported.

The site also said that recent visitors to the country have reported that the North Korean government has been confiscating cell phones.

Dear TDV Readers,

Heike and I would like to invite you to listen to our second TDV podcast where we discuss Chinese hackers, censorship, targeted attacks and naked chinese hacker vampires with foot fetishes.

It is 48 minutes long.  It would have been in longer if I had left in the part where Heike had to fix his little girl’s injury with a brownie.  Get it from the iTunes store or direct from our feedburner RSS.

With Kind Regards,
Jumper and Heike

Podcast RSS

iTunes download

James Fallows of the Atlantic has an excellent article on the PRC government’s inability to present itself in a positive light.

This is inept on China’s part. Why do I consider it puzzling? Because of two additional facts I would not have guessed before coming to China: it’s a better country than its leaders and spokesmen make it seem, and those same leaders look more impressive in their home territory.

The article is very well-reasoned and insightful as usual.

Book title: Chinese hackers

No doubt, many of you are wondering what to get us for the holidays. Well, worry no more, China’s Xinhua Online Bookstore has you covered.

Checked out their selection on hacking and found a total of 270 books on the subject.  While many of these are just translations from the US and other sources, they did have original manuscripts such as the one above.

Got bored after the first hundred or so titles and a thought hit me, what would happen if I searched for books on the Falun Gong (法轮功)?

Looking for “Taiwanese Independence” and “Free Tibet” simply returned zero hits.

(Amazon.cn also kicked me off for Falun Gong search)

NOTE: The thing about holiday gifts was a joke, a JOKE.  Sometimes my online humor doesn’t translate very well and I get e-mails asking if I was serious.

The WSJ – China Journal blog covered a recent report (pdf) by Nart Villeneuve of the Citizen lab that details some very interesting findings about PRC government monitoring of “Tom-Skype“, the Chinese localized version of Skype.

It probably isn’t suprising to anyone that Tom-Skype is being monitored. “Breaching Trust” details the process by which conversations with matching keywords are uploaded to a webserver. The suprising bit is that the server is pretty much accessible to anyone. From the report:

The full text chat messages of TOM-Skype users, along with Skype users who have
communicated with TOM-Skype users, are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and
if present, the resulting data are uploaded and stored on servers in China.

These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal information, are
stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers together with the encryption key required to
decrypt the data. 

Update (2 Oct 08, 1617GMT): Some other news organizations have picked this up:

- International Herald Tribune
- CBC News Canada
- Wall Street Journal posts Skype’s response

The iaminchina.com site has an informative article on bypassing the Great Firewall/Golden Shield. It is a how-to on using Firefox with torbutton.

There are many ways to get around the GFW. Web-CGI/PHP based proxies all seem to work reasonably well (though frequently slow) and there are other anonymizer services out there such as Anonymouse and Ultrasurf.

James Fallows from the Atlantic has blogged about using commercial anonymizing VPN services.

The well-known (to our regular readers) Chinese media site Danwei linked to a Shanghaiist article that the Anonymouse proxy servers have been blocked in the PRC (along with comedycentral.com apparently). From the article:

It’s finally happened: Anonymouse.org, the proxy service that many of us use to access blocked websites and surf the Internet anonymously, has been blocked by Net Nanny. Shanghaiist first noted it at 10:30PM last night Shanghai time, along with the block of ComedyCentral.com. While the decision to block Anonymouse is self-evident (okay, sort of), we’re not completely sure why ComedyCentral got the axe. In the mean time, Shanghaiist suggests using alternative proxy services ProxyChina or Hack520.

Commenters noted that the Hack520 program is the same as the well-known Ultrasurf/Ultrareach system and that although the client program works to anonymously proxy surfing, one needs to use another proxy to get to the download site to get the client to begin with.

One of the best client anonymizers out there is TOR, which also still works in the PRC. Interestingly enough, there are many TOR exit nodes inside the PRC, which leads me to wonder: Why would anyone who uses TOR (political dissidents, journalists, pr0n surfers) want to be proxied into a country that most people are trying to get proxied out of?

James Fallows was interviewed in a Network World article today about his articles on the Great Firewall of China.  We blogged about the GFW previously.  From the article:

When it comes to the Internet, this haziness about just what is and is not permissible has two implications. At a purely technical level, it makes it harder to reverse-engineer the firewall’s filters. One day, you can reach all pages at the BBC. The next day they’re blocked. If you’re trying to game out the system, you’re stymied. And at a social level, it makes it hard for people to be sure that they’re ever operating in a truly safe zone, since the rules of enforcement might shift tomorrow.

FYI:  www.thedarkvisitor.com has been GFW’d since January of this year.  We still get occasional hits from the mainland though.  Mostly from English language browsers – probably in hotels.

I first became interested in Internet censorship after hearing Roger Dingledine talk about TOR and Kenneth Geers’  talk “Greetz from Room 101 (PDF)” at DEFCON XV.