JISHOU, HUNAN — With the National Holiday fast upon us, China’s net nannies have blocked yet another Internet service, the Tor proxy network, which had been pretty reliable until quite recently.

China typically blocks access to the World Wide Web around important national holidays, such the 60th anniversary of the founding the People’s Republic of China next Thursday. With so many sites blocked already (YouTube, Facebook, Blogspot, to name but a few), I guess the censors decided the surest way to cut off potentially inflammatory websites was to choke the Tor network off.

Of course, there are ways around the newest layer of bricks in the Great Firewall of China.

I noticed something was fishy when I tried to connect to Facebook using Tor. My Tor client couldn’t complete the connection to the network. My little onion stayed yellow, and never went to green.

Tor uses a decentralized network of proxies scattered around the world. The Tor client checks a list of active proxies (computers acting as go-betweens), then logs into the network using one or more of the proxies. An add-on to Firefox then switches Firefox over to use the proxy to access the WWW.

An active Tor connection displays a green onion icon in the Windows taskbar. A pending one shows a yellow onion. The icon refers to Tor’s “onion routing” of connections to make tracing difficult.

September 27th, 2009 | Tags: blockage, censor, censorship, China, Great Firewall, proxy, Tor, torproject | Category: China, Civil liberties | Comments (2)

JISHOU, HUNAN — Sometime in the last week, China’s Internet gatekeepers decided to block Facebook, thereby cutting off my students (and thousands of other Chinese users) from communicating with their Facebook pals.

I can still use FB, but now I have to go through the Tor proxy network. Whatta pain.

China’s net nannies have been on a campaign recently to lock down the Internet, obstensibly to shut off access to pornography, but coincidentally to limit access to sites critical of the government. Given the recent riots in Xinjiang between Muslim Uighurs and local Han (the ethnic majority in China), one can only guess why Facebook has been banned here.

The media site, www.danwei.com, is now also blocked, too. Danwei’s writers are openly critical of Internet censorship in China, and provide links to news sites that are less biased than the official government sources.

For example, if you believe CCTV-9, the international arm of the state TV media, everything is just peachy keen in Xinjiang, where more than 150 people were killed earlier this month and where the army is patrolling the streets to prevent more outbreaks of ethnic violence. CCTV-9 interviewed a Westerner who teaches at a university in Urumqi, the provincial capital, and who said categorically that there were no problems on campus and everything is back to normal. We also got to see a queue of Chinese residents stuffing 100-yuan notes into a donation box — the whole scene was patently contrived for the telecast.

July 15th, 2009 | Tags: blogs, censorship, Facebook, Great Firewall, net nanny, Xinjiang, youtube | Category: China, Civil liberties, Commentary, Media | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — China’s censors have postponed the deadline by which computer manufacturers must include a net-filtering application called Green Dam Youth Escort.

Green Dam was supposed to be installed on all computers sold in China as of tomorrow.

The requirement — made ostensibly to protect youngsters from pornography — resulted in an avalanche of protests from China’s Internet users, computer manufacturers and the US government. China’s netizens were prepared to boycott the Internet tomorrow as a protest.

[UPDATE July 1: Green Dam has inspired China's wittier netizens to create a manga-style "Green Dam Bitch." A variety of renderings of GDB can be seen here. A link in the accompanying article takes you to an image search for 绿坝娘 (Green Dam Bitch) on www.baidu.com, but the search will fail. Baidu, a homegrown search engine, will instead say, "The search result possibly does not conform to the related laws and regulations and content policies."]

Critics of Green Dam say the application is not only a security risk, allowing external computers access to users’ files and browsing history, but a probable means for Chinese authorities to censor the Internet.

Chinese authorities offered no explanation for the delay.

June 30th, 2009 | Tags: censorship, China, green dam, Internet | Category: China, Civil liberties, Media | Leave a comment