simple question, really.
would an IP changer, spoofer or whatever get around the chinese government’s censorship?
VPNs usually do the trick, though I have heard there has been a recent crackdown.
China’s great firewall is not really designed to put a total lockdown on information. Rather, it makes accessing sensitive information just difficult enough to discourage the casually curious masses. Most people are going to try a restricted site once or twice and then go back to playing Bejeweled. That’s enough to keep the masses in line.
I’m in China and use an IPN masking service. Some of my students also do the same thing. The key is affordability. What you or I would consider to be a paltry fee of $10, $20, or $30 a month, well, a struggling family in this city might consider better spent on such inconveniences as food. Of course that brings up the issue that said struggling family in this city probably doesn’t have Internet at home.
As even sven said, it’s not about restricting information; it’s more about making it inconvienient to access it. At least in theory, folks here have a right that’s even recognized by both the government and the CPC (yeah, yeah, I know; they’re in effect the same) to freedom of information. Heck, just last night, I was watching uncensored news from Hong Kong on the local cable TV. For some reason, the gov’t/party seem to freak out over Internet but not so much other stuff. Here’s an oddity: current popular movie is V for Vendetta. One of the state-run TV channels showed it a week or so ago.
Also as even sven said, the vast majority of the Internet users here seem to spend an inordinate amount of time [del]pissing their brains away[/del] playing MMOG.
I was reading an article the other day that China was cracking down on troublemakers by having isp’s require a user’s real name when signing on. I’m no hacker extraordinaire by any means, but wouldn’t it be fairly easy to supply a fictitious name without stirring up any suspicion?
Here’s the explanation for every “oddity” of the Chinese government: When your government is run by people who are unaccountable and untransparent, its employees turn out to be largely incompetent buffoons who get their job based on personal connections or bribery. It’s better to have politcally reliable fools who inefficiently safeguard the interests of the ruling class than actual competent people who might take their jobs too seriously.
This applies to every authoritarian regime ever, everywhere.
China has a system of national ID cards, “real name” in China usually means having an associated ID card number. In practice this isn’t a particularly big hurdle as real ID card numbers aren’t exactly hard to get considering the level of safety that personal data in China is afforded.
I’m not sure I “get” why people pay for a VPN in China considering that they are entities known to the authorities and thus easy to block, as even sven notes is happening right now. I currently use a combination of either Google App engine with goagent, or PuTTY SSL with an associated Amazon Web Service account. Both are free and essentially unblockable unless they also want to block out most of the rest of the internet too.
I used various services, but in the end it was worth my $10.00 for something that was plug and play. I also liked being able to watch Hulu, BBC, and other location-restricted streaming services.
thank you all
I spent a week in china two years ago, the Internet restrictions applied to me could be circumvented by VPN and google DNS.
I am currently in China, and have tried several times to download the goagent app to my smartphone without success. Seem that the downloading of the app is blocked in China.
For anyone planning on visiting China it is probably best to download apps, programs, and VPN’s before your arrival in China.
I think that some of the blocking is due to political reasons, and some of the blocking is due to financial reasons.
Making Western websites difficult to access greatly encourages Chinese people to use only Chinese websites, and to keep all the money in China.
The media in China, including the internet, tends to block anything negative about China, and to emphasize and publicize anything negative about Western countries, especially the USA.
Currently not so easy. Many VPN’s are inaccessible now, and using the Google DNS typically does not work anymore
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goagent works fine for me right now. You can download the GAEproxy android app directly here or through one of the local android marketplaces such as baidu apps or 360 apps however it requires a rooted phone and I can’t be assed to go through that rigamarole.
I doubt there are any financial reasons behind it as the state sector doesn’t really dabble in internet stuff and there is little love lost between the state and the private, fairly dynamic and innovative private sector companies that dominate the Chinese internet, rather, they want you to use Chinese site because they can lean on the Chinese providers to self-censor or provide data on dissidents, more easily than they can lean on Google or Amazon. The Russian government has a similar approach but are much more subtle about it - there is no heavy handed censorship, rather most Russian internet traffic voluntarily goes through Russian providers because they are just better.