China Tightens Web Controls to Knock Out Proxies, Google
By Fang Yuan
Radio Free Asia
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Hong Kong - China has tightened its already firm grip on
the Internet, with a slew of new controls that make
access to the Internet outside China harder than ever,
Web users said Wednesday.
Chengdu-based Web site operator Deng Yongliang said
Google's international search engine, which the company
left filter-free after agreeing with Beijing to allow
censorship of its google.cn version, was now almost
unusable.
"It's been very difficult to get anything in recent
weeks, around the anniversary of June 4," Deng told RFA's
Mandarin service.
"Really I haven't managed to get anything at all. It's
also been very hard to use any of the censorship-busting
software like Dynapass and Freegate. Because the
government has really been putting a lot of effort into
cracking them," he said.
"So we can't get onto international Google, and we can't
use this software any more."
Deng also complained that many e-mails to friends were no
longer getting through, without specifying where the
friends were in the world.
In the past, if I couldn't get into international Google,
I'd just use a proxy server. Now you can't even get in
with a proxy. I heard that access to proxy servers had
been very effectively blocked now,
Li Xinde, citizen journalist and editor of Yulun Jiandu,
a Web site known for exposing official corruption Deng's
account tallied with that of other Internet users within
China.
Li Xinde, a citizen journalist whose Yulun Jiandu Web
site is known for exposing official corruption, said the
government was even managing to block the use of proxy
servers, previously a handy loophole in the Great
Firewall that surrounds China's Internet users.
Press watchdog complains "In the past, if I couldn't get
into international Google, I'd just use a proxy server.
Now you can't even get in with a proxy. I heard that
access to proxy servers had been very effectively blocked
now," Li told RFA reporter Fang Yuan.
The Paris-based press freedom group, Reporters Without
Borders (RSF) said Tuesday that Internet users in many
major Chinese cities had had difficulty in connecting to
the uncensored international version of Google for the
past week.
RSF linked the new and unprecedented levels of censorship
to the 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown
on June 4, which is already a banned keyword for
Beijing's system of filters.
It said the uncensored version of the search engine was
totally inaccessible throughout the country on 31 May.
The blocking then gradually extended to Google News and
Google Mail. "So the Chinese public is now reduced to
using the censored Chinese versions of these services,"
it said.
"It was only to be expected that Google.com would be
gradually sidelined after the censored version was
launched in January," RSF said.
"Google has just definitively joined the club of Western
companies that comply with online censorship in China. It
is deplorable that Chinese Internet users are forced to
wage a technological war against censorship in order to
access banned content."
It said Beijing's formidable Web police had also largely
managed to neutralize software designed to sidestep
censorship since 24 May.
Such software as Dynapass, Ultrasurf, Freegate, and
Garden Networks is normally used by about 100,000 people
in China to gain access to news and information that is
blocked by the firewall isolating China from the rest of
the World Wide Web, the group said.
But Li said he didn't believe the new levels of filtering
and censorship were directly connected to the June 4
anniversary.
"Yes, it's a sensitive time," he said. "But I don't think
it's really connected to this. This has been going on for
a long time now. As soon as the authorities succeed in
blocking us, the anti-censorship software upgrades to a
better version to get around them. And then the
government manages to block it again, and it upgrades
again."
Municipal authorities in the capital Beijing have also
revoked the licenses of six Web sites and temporarily
shut down 12 Internet service providers for
"rectification" during a 90-day city-wide crackdown.
More than 858,000 yuan (U.S.$107,000) in fines were
collected from 35 Web sites and Internet service
providers who allegedly violated Beijing regulations.
Thirty unlicensed Internet cafes were also shut down and
446 computers confiscated.
Software engineers based abroad have been trying to
update the censorship-busting programs on the basis of
information they have received from Internet users inside
China.
A new version of Dynapass was released a few days ago,
but its effectiveness is still extremely limited, RSF
said.
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/2006/06/08/china_webcontrols/
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Imagine living in a police state where visiting the wrong
website can disappear you in the middle of the night.
Where the State even tells you how you can breathe, not
to mention where. Imagine the People's Republic where the
People live in constant Fear. The People's Republic of
Fear
Posted on 6/10/2006 by at bay
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-To: at bay
And now for the tagline....
Posted on 6/10/2006 by at bay ("We actually did an
evil....." Eric Scmidt, CEO Google)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
End of forwarded messages
Jai Maharaj
http://tinyurl.com/a5ljc
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Om Shanti
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The truth about Islam and Muslims
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