DisOrientated - A Weblog by Philip Sen - The Small Firewall of Shanghai

July 18, 2004

The Small Firewall of Shanghai

Just as China erected a gigantic buffer - perhaps the greatest engineering achievement in history - to repel the Mongol hordes, cities such as Xi'an and Pingyao put up their own city walls to encircle themselves in a perceived comfort zone.

Is there an analogy to the so-called great firewall of China, which protects the Chinese from the deleterious influences of free speech, diverse opinions and sometimes even actual fact? Does the celestial nanny have a microcosmic element in smaller institutions?

I know little about the technology, but any readers out there who see the following may wish to comment.

I currently live and work on a university campus, and one of the benefits is an LAN connection. The semester officially ended on 16 July, last Friday and at 7pm on the dot what seems like a firewall went up.

For over 36 hours I was unable to access any website at all hosted outside the mainland. This meant that while I was still able to view the drivelous journalism of China Daily and the infinitely better English-language blogs by Chinese people such as Leylop and Isaac Mao, for the most point I was cut off.

Yes, I know, most people don't use the Internet, it's only been around for a few years, get used to living without it etc.. But I couldn't even get on to Hotmail to send and receive important e-mails. I had to resort to sneaking around a sweletring Internet cafe downloading files onto a newly-purchased USB Flash Drive (one of those memory thingies you plug into a computer instead of a disk).

And I'm pretty sure that in order for this to have happened, whoever looks after the university network had to turn on some kind of device to filter out the non-Chinese sites. Can't see it merely being 'technical problems'.

Why exactly would something like this occur? Were they testing a system for future usage, an anti-outsiders contingency measure in the event of some kind of turmoil to which students might react?

Can't see these students reacting motivated to oppose anything at all short of nuclear armaggeddon myself, but you never know.

Posted by Sendover at July 18, 2004 10:42 PM | TrackBack

Comments

They do this at my university (BNU) as well. If I want international sites, I use the expensive dialup; the fast LAN inside the school is domestic-only. This has some interesting side-effects, like blocking the English page of the People's Daily.

I remember a few years ago there was a cheap dial-up service you could use that would only allow access to domestic sites. Don't know if it's still there.

Posted by: zhwj at July 19, 2004 10:02 AM

The easiest way around it would be to use a proxy server inside the country but outside the firewall. The best thing would be to get a tech-savy friend with unblocked access to setup a proxy server and give you access.

Alternatively you could find an open proxy inside China and use that. If you do, keep in mind that you will either be using it without the owner's permission, or it is a honeypot and is being monitored. Either way it would be best not to use it to access anything too controversial.

You can find lists of open proxies on the 'net at various places (just ask Google). This one seems to have a number of machines in China: http://www.stayinvisible.com/index.pl/proxy_list

If you need more information about any of this send me an email.

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