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Ofcourse, the first thing you (or maybe just I) do when you find an internet cafe in China is to search for "Tiananmen Square".

Originally, all i got was a load of gobbledegook Chinese characters, which I thought might be some sort of crazy restriction message from the Chinese government. After translating it, I saw that this was just the standard 404 error: not found or currently unavailable. This made me think it was some kind of DNS filtering (which would have been my first guess anyway as it seems most simple to implement). However, on trying some other sites, I realised that the page would sometimes flash up before disappearing with that same error message. The partially downloaded page could be reached through the cache so I thought that something must be interrupting the connection at the packet level.

After a bit of research (very hard to research about the Chinese firewall from behind the Chinese firewall) I found out that this is exactly what does happen. Reset packets are sent to both client and server which terminates the page download [see Ignoring the 'Great Firewall of China']. Some sites are banned outright at the DNS stage but otherwise it is a fairly forceful and primitive way of achieving internet censorship (hopefully the Chinese government doesn't read my blog: lonely planet tells me that 27 executions occur every day (including us foreigners!)). I suppose I can't suggest a better method, since intelligent search of 1.3 billion people's traffic without introducing horrid latency would require a google-scale amount of processing power! That being said, the Great Firewall of China is more penetrable than you'd imagine, especially at busy times of the day (I'd imagine) ;) .

I would be (temporarily) fine without wikipedia and other anti-Chinese sites, but when they outright ban the bbc site and its subsidiaries (including BBC football), they must be ‘avin a laff!?! Therefore, I shall be proxying most my internet content while I'm in China, and if the authorities sniff anything, hopefully I'll be out the cafe by the time they arrive (the internet cafe man being hung instead eeek ).

A posting about my time in Vietnam coming soon... Zaijian!
Posted by Will Ryan under the categories China and Travel and Computing
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