

China's Great Firewall Gets Taller - rwbhn
http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-great-firewall-gets-taller-1422607143

======
wyuenho
Related news:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/world/asia/china-clamps-
do...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/world/asia/china-clamps-down-still-
harder-on-internet-access.html?_r=1)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/technology/in-china-new-
cy...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/technology/in-china-new-
cybersecurity-rules-perturb-western-tech-companies.html)

[http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/01/23/world/asia/ap-
as-...](http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/01/23/world/asia/ap-as-china-
blocked-vpns.html?_r=0)

The gist is, XJP's national security committee is using all kinds of excuses
to try to separate China's intranet from the internet at large. Not only that,
they are determined to plug every hole that exists in their
censoring/surveillance/propaganda/thought control apparatus.

Recently their cyber-army has expanded their scope to actively disrupt Hong
Kong's political activists online activities such as e-referendums, civil
organization's websites and hack into activists cellphones, email accounts and
computers. There is a tremendous lack of security professionals in Hong Kong
and China. We need all the help we can get.

If you happen to be in China, please give us a hand in setting up a Tor Obfs
relay.

------
thewarrior
This is a real tragedy. Now they'll start selling this to other authoritarian
regimes and it will begin the end of the internet as we know it.

~~~
tete
Well, it's not too different from all the things other governments do while
killing net neutrality. DPI, adding advertisement is also a way of modifying
content. Just China blocks certain services completely. The tech itself,
peeking into packets, finding out what they are about to manipulate or block
them is something also ISPs in many western countries, like the US do.

Coming from Europe I was fairly surprised how often both injecting data into
traffic or blocking ports is. Also here they say it's for protection. I
wouldn't point to China.

About what can be done. There actually many projects on decentralizing the
internet, making it more resistant to single points of control and even making
censorship hard or close to impossible.

Netsukuku, cjdns, B.A.T.M.A.N. and others are big steps into the right
direction, but it even seems like the urge isn't big enough. They don't get
lots of interest, donations, etc.

------
rahimnathwani
This isn't news. VPN blocking based on deep packet inspection appears to have
been in use for a long long time.

I have heard from two friends that their VPN provider (they both use the same
one) has been less reliable of late. This doesn't mean there's any new
technology, and this type of occurrence is common.

I have experienced no difference myself, on fixed line or mobile connections.

------
enupten
Meh.. What else can you expect. CCP's very existence depends on keeping its
citizens brainwashed.

~~~
mythealias
just like in every other country in the world ...

~~~
enupten
CCP isn't a country; it's a - paranoid - political party.

I for one, believe that China doesn't need it for its prosperity.

------
gtirloni
Anyone know the company providing the technology?

~~~
tete
I think that they are not providing it in this case, but both IBM and Siemens
are known for developing such technology. Siemens often gets mentioned with
Iran, while IBM is known to have sold such technology to Chinese companies
(not necessarily governments).

It seems though that China realizes a lot of those things work better when
nobody knows how things work. Even the Tor project every now and then calls
for people to leak information to help with censorship circumvention. It's an
arms race and of course companies and governments have more resources.

------
ryan_j_naughton
This article also made me think of a fun/fascinating project: creating a
industrial organization economics model of the impacts of the Great Firewall
on Chinese firms.

Are the economic benefits of the Great Firewall (e.g. propping up China's tech
firms by preventing American competition) greater than the economic harms of
hindering many businesses with a limited internet?

China is effectively deploying an infant industry model
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry))
but instead of using monetary tariffs, they are slowing down or blocking
foreign services. This has undoubtedly aided companies like Weibo and Baidu.

Simultaneously, the firewall acts like a tax on domestic Chinese companies. By
raising the cost of accessing information or foreign services, it is raising
transaction costs for virtually all Chinese businesses.

The model could be a simplified economy with different types of firms that
have varying degrees of needs for information. Add a tax (or some similar way
to model the transaction cost of finding that information when faced with
different levels of censorship). That tax would be only levied on certain
information goods (foreign internet services).

Then both businesses and consumers choose which internet services and
information they will consume when faced with this tax. The internet services
and information are an input to the Chinese firms' production functions and an
input to the Chinese consumer's utility functions.

You could even test the model using this upgrade as a natural experiment.
These censorship upgrades are an exogenous shock to access to foreign
information. They are effectively an unanticipated tax increase. Data could be
collected on how much this decreased business productivity in the days after
the change and used as a proxy to estimate the tax.

Similarly, when people pay for VPN services (or other ways to get around
censorship), these can be modeled using averting costs (generally used to
model pollution costs). A traditional example of averting costs: a person
buying bottled water to avoid getting diarrhea related illnesses in the
developing world. The model assumes that the cost of the bottled water is less
than the cost of getting the illness (thus why it is a rational averting
behavior). Therefore, the amount spent on the bottled water is a proxy for the
unobservable cost of polluted water (albeit a lower bound). (Note this is only
true in certain cases in the developing world, as obviously people the
developed world are drinking bottled water when their water is entirely safe
to drink). Thus, the VPN can be used as a proxy for how much the Chinese are
willing to pay to minimize the harm of the Great Firewall (and thus
representative of a lower bound of the cost of the firewall).

------
ryan_j_naughton
> "A recent upgrade to China’s web filters, commonly referred to as the Great
> Firewall, has made it more difficult to use services called virtual private
> networks"

It really demonstrates a lack of knowledge when the WSJ fails to distinguish
between the web and the internet. They note the key impact of this upgrade
being VPNs, yet incorrectly state it is an upgrade to a web filter.

Then the article goes on to explain how this change affects different
groups'/individual's productivity due to these limits. If we are going to
effectively model and understand the impacts of China's censorship, then an
accurate understanding of these censorship methods (and the internet itself)
is required.

