So, how do restrictive countries like China, N. Korea, Iran, etc. prevent their residents from accessing internet sites that they (the government) deem undesirable? If you can restrict one site, couldn’t you restrict them all.
By telling the ISPs in their country to restrict certain sites.
Countries restrict internet access the same way a parent restricts internet access for their kids. One way is just not let anyone have computers and phone lines, see North Korea. Another way is to set up filtering software. Parents can do this for one machine, a country can do this for all legal ISPs for that country. You just create a giant list of all forbidden addresses, and when you try to connect to one of those your ISP won’t do it. For optional bonus points the attempt to access a forbidden site can be recorded by the secret police.
Of course, just like a savvy kid can get around filtering software, a savvy citizen of an authoritarian country can get around filtering software. But if you’re like most people you just know enough to visit web pages and check your email when you go to an internet cafe.
Yes, he does. He was asked in an interview the other day whether he googled anything. He said he did. He likes to look at his ranch in Crawford using the “map thing”, which he forgets the name of. He says he avoids email because it leaves a paper trail and then he can’t deny things. Yes, he really said that.
China is a well known user of keylogger programs so even if you went around the filters, the government could record your keyloggers and get an idea.
Remember though not all websites anymore have specific IP addresses. At one time almost all websites had a unique IP number as well that routed it to a specific website. Now that isn’t possible.
The internet consists of email, telnet, gopher, usenet, ftp and others. Most people think of the internet as the world wide web. Most people can’t see the difference between webmail and email. And for all practical purposes there is little difference to the user. And Google certainly didn’t help any by making it so difficult to naviage between Google Groups and real usenet groups. All this helps lessen people’s perception of the internet.
That’s the urban legend that refuses to die. It isn’t true.
Charles Herzfeld, Director of ARPA
See Inventions.
Actually, I believe several posters offered suggestions as to the ease of shutting down Internet connections.
For example, if I can recall correctly, in the late 1990s while in Australia we had a severe network break when two different construction crews dug through fibre optic cables simultaneously. Both breaks were in different parts of the country, but the breaks effectively split the entire country in half, except for a single network connection through Darwin. For all intents and purposes, the east coast was unable to communicate with the west coast for several hours.
The USA certainly does not have that level of vulnerability, and one can surmise that Australia has since lifted its game for its own self-preservation. However, as mentioned by others there are different levels of choke points where Internet links and access are vulnerable in their own right. When you add into the mix can our own government sever those links for its own ends, common sense tells me it’s a no brainer. Besides, if a virus hacker can create a simple virus to take offline thousands of computers within a matter of hours, what could our government do with seemingly endless resources to do the same?