By Philip Shishkin December 30, 2012 6:30 PM aND
Two things struck me first when I flew into Beijing :. lack of sunlight and lack of Internet
The sun over several days, hangs behind a fog of pollution, its filtered light to a soupy dusk. The Internet is stuck behind a firewall government blocked its main offers to those who live in China.
That neither the sun nor the Web is completely gone, just paralyzed, faced their abbreviated especially annoying me. You know their full versions are there somewhere, because they tease you most of the time. The orange sun halo may appear briefly at dawn to be engulfed by smog. Gmail home page could start charging temporarily, only to stumble and freeze.
In many parts of the world (with some notable exceptions), we learned from breathing air and Internet unimpeded between the basic amenities of man, along with inside plumbing and access to education. That's why it's so shocking and disorienting to suddenly lose their Beijing for the forces of unbridled industrialization and censorship man. No amount of reading or hearing about the pollution of the Beijing air and the great firewall, such as Internet censorship system is inevitably known, is enough to prepare you to deal with them.
For now, I will let the sun where I always hope, wrapped in a blanket away from the smog so thick I can barely see the skyscrapers of less than a mile away. It feels slightly like someone burning tires.
Registration required
The Great Firewall is a more complex and nuanced phenomenon, and it seems to become more capable of tripping unwanted Web connections.
Like many foreigners in China, I signed up for a virtual private network, or VPN, geek-speak for a link to an overseas server, allowing you to skip the Internet Chinese and plug directly into the real thing, as if you were sitting in New York or London. Twitter, the New York Times and Gmail loaded transparently on my iPad, ending a couple of tense days of withdrawal symptoms. And then everything crashed.
My VPN provider, a major player in the market, explained in an email that the disturbance is due to a recent update of the Great Wall, known as GFW, which "is now ability to learn, discover and block VPN protocols automatically. "
The next day, the global Times, a Chinese newspaper, published an article entitled "Illegal Foreign-run VPN in China: govt. "In it, the man known as the founding father of the Great Wall was quoted as saying that foreign VPN providers required to register with the government." I have not heard that all foreign companies recorded, "fang binxing, who is now president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told the newspaper.
Fang gained notoriety in 2011 when a student threw a shoe at him while he was delivering a lecture on cybersecurity. The pad connected to the target. The student fled the scene and went into hiding, becoming an instant celebrity among many opponents of Internet borders of the country. Some time later, hackers broke into the home page of the University of Binxing and disfigured with a picture of what is called the shoes angry, a parody on the "Angry Birds" very popular game. Birds slingshot are replaced by shoes, and pigs in the wooden house is replaced by the face of Binxing.
The most recent disturbance VPN seemed designed to target mobile devices, which are becoming an important means to access the Internet. As my VPN provider promised to find a way to circumvent the Great Firewall, several articles in the state media have reminded readers of the dangers lurking on the Web.
China Justification
On December 18, for example, a comment piece on Xinhua, the official news agency of China, calledfor new laws to govern the Internet: "If n 't has strict legal penalties on offenders in cyberspace, negative factors wild place to destroy the order of the Internet and even incite violence online, which bring great harm to people and the society. "This is original logic of the Chinese government to build the great firewall, a network of blocks, slowing the network and complex censorship rules that keep large numbers of half a billion Internet users in China in the dark about events in the world and in their own country.
unease about the broader issue of curbs on freedom of expression was fed again recently when Mo Yan, Chinese writer who won the Nobel prize this year for literature seemed to equate censorship airport security checks :. a necessary nuisance
China's Internet is a strange place. Twitter and Facebook are blocked, their ability to disseminate new and unwelcome serve the organization of platforms for all kinds of events considered too serious a threat. Some of the services of Google Inc., including Gmail, are intentionally slowed to a snail's pace, which is probably even worse than being blocked outright because it gives customers an impression of poor service.
At the same time, the Chinese clones of these US companies operate freely and charge high-speed, their research thoroughly washed for sensitive terms by the internal censorship. Western Internet companies who choose to enter the Chinese market booming have to play by the rules of the government.
The most striking example is Skype Inc., owned by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) As detailed by Greatfire.org, tracking all things related to the Great Wall (and, of course, blocked by it), when you download the Skype software in China, you are actually a product of a twisted Site crucial manner. Chinese Skype, a joint venture majority-owned by a local company, allows the government to monitor your conversations.
Among the many curious things on the Chinese Internet, an apparent contradiction stands out. Xinhua, which insists on blocking Twitter, recently opened a Twitter account, sending more than 3,000 tweets, and attract 8,000 followers - following only himself. The appearance Xinhua on Twitter, and the unidirectional nature of its boosterish account, invited a ridiculous avalanche in the Chinese blogosphere.
Blocked Sites
New Western outlets that touch taboo subjects are blocked, too. Bloomberg.com and nytimes.com are both blocked because of their recent survey reports on financial transactions of top Chinese leaders.
How effective the Great Wall, given the many ways to jump on it? Internet detectives in China are not too concerned about how foreign companies and individuals access the web, or what they read there. They are concerned about Chinese public opinion, and how to influence through regulation what the Chinese people and are not allowed to see on the Internet.
By this second measurement, the firewall achieves its objectives very well, despite the availability of VPN and other technical tricks, many of them free.
500 million Web users in China, only about 1 percent "use these tools to circumvent censorship, either because most do not know how or because they lack interest enough - or awareness - that exists on the other side of the "great firewall", "Rebecca MacKinnon writes in" network of consent, "a book on Internet freedom worldwide
Meanwhile, the magicians of my VPN provider has finally found a way around the latest crackdown firewall on smartphones and tablets. my iPad is useful again until the firewall catch and a new series of cat and mouse begins.
Unfortunately there is no good news to report on violations of the wall of smog blocking the sun. Nobody yet invented a virtual private network for transporting by Beijing pollution
(Philip Shishkin is a researcher at the Asia Society and the author of "Restless Valley :. Revolution, Murder and Intrigue in the heart of Central Asia, "to be published in May by Yale University Press opinions expressed are his own)
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