The Dark Visitor

In what may be the most significant news posted to this blog in a long time, the Official Google Blog reports that Google will be working with the PRC government to deliver an unfiltered google.cn to users in the PRC.  If an agreement with the PRC government cannot be reached, google.cn may suspend operations.  From the blog post:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

This move is in response to an internal Google investigation that revealed widespread targeting and surveillance of human rights activists with interests in the PRC.  The blog indicates that there are two distinctly different problems that were uncovered.  One involved the compromise of internal Google intellectual property and the other involved the accessing of gmail accounts by unauthorized third parties.

…we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties.

Google believes that the sophisticated attacks that resulted in the internal compromise of Google information have also hit more than 20 other organizations.

So what does this mean?  It is difficult to say at this point.  Perhaps it will draw attention to the censorship issue as well as the widespread hacking frequently attributed to the PRC government.  I think it will be unlikely that google.cn will be allowed to operate in the PRC without filtering its search results.  This may mean that google.cn will cease to exist or that it is operated outside of the PRC where it will probably get GFW’d.  Either way, Baidu wins.

It would be very cool if others (yahoo!, microsoft) follow suit.

Now for a break from the Adobe zero day stream…

The censors in the PRC are now apparently blocking searches and taking down articles related to a recent bribery scandal over a multi-million dollar contract in Namibia.  The censors at baidu.cn got a little ambitious and briefly blocked any searches that contain the word Namibia so any search was filtered rather than just results that contained information about the scandal.  As of this post, it appears that baidu.cn searches for “纳米比亚” work just fine without any error message – news about the scandal still does not appear however.  Maybe next they will reach into Chinese Kindles to delete anything related to Namibia.

baidu.cn briefly blocked searches for 纳米比亚 (namibia)

Source: Open Net Initiative:  http://opennet.net/blog/2009/07/no-more-namibia-china-blocks-search-results-entire-country

On May 1, a zip file was posted to wikileaks.org that contained several internal files that appear to be from Baidu.cn, the most popular search engine in the PRC.  There is an html file within the zip that contains several sections with a list of key phrases that will cause the search engine to filter the results.  Here is an automated translation of each category (after the jump):

Continue Reading »

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.

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.

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.