Censorship in China #gcf #censorship #green dam

FIRST HIDE: Get an encrypted VPN Virtual Private Network

China imposes a complex system of blocks, keyword filters, and human censorship known collectively as the Great Firewall, or GFW.

CAN'T F^CK
WITH CHINA
and YOUR $$$$

3/20/14 UGH OH investigative journalism isn't worth losing money for bloomberg's terminal sales. Of bourse billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg needs more money - the world doesn't need more journalists telling secrets about corrupt politicians and their effects on BIG CARTEL money!

Bloomberg Should Have Rethought Articles on China, Chairman Says Sales of the company's financial-data terminals declined sharply in China after its news service published articles on the family wealth of high-ranking politicians in the country. " the news division should be assessed in the context of the business operation, which provides the bulk of the company's revenue. They also signaled which of those considerations might get priority." Bloomberg, the financial data and news company, relies on sales of its terminals, which are ubiquitous on bankers' desks around the world, for about 82 percent of its $8.5 billion in revenue. But sales of those terminals in China declined after the company published an article in June 2012 on the family wealth of Xi Jinping, at that time the incoming Communist Party chief and the family wealth of Wen Jiabao, then the prime minister. After its publication, officials ordered state enterprises not to subscribe to the service. Mr. Grauer did not specifically mention the article about Mr. Xi or any other articles.

CONTROL THE NET

May 2011 China set up a nationwide command center to oversee the country's 477 million netizens and to "manage information" on the Internet, prompting fears that online controls will get tighter still. The State Internet Information Office, directly under the control of China's cabinet, or State Council, will "direct, coordinate, and supervise online content management," official media reported.

CHINA barred individuals from applying for Chinese domain names, ending with .cn, from yesterday as part of a national campaign against pornographic content spread online, the industry regulator said. Applicants for domain name registration are required to hand in written application forms, with a business license and the applicant's identity card, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The new application system will help the CNNIC better regulate the Internet environment in the country and crack down on improper content online, experts said. CNNIC decided to screen applicants' qualifications strictly to stop individuals obtaining domain names using fake information, said Liu Zhijiang, vice director of the regulator.
"The applications in written form can help us do our work more accurately," media reported quoting Liu.
The more than 13 million existing Websites with the domain name .cn won't be affected, according to CNNIC. The announcement came after a report by China Central Television aired criticism of the CNNIC's registration process. CCTV reported last Wednesday that some domain registration agents have approved Website addresses with .cn even though the information submitted was incomplete or inaccurate, which could lead to a large quantity of pornography Websites created.
CNNIC suspended the business of three domain name registration agents in China. They are Zhengzhou-based unndc.com, Beijing-based namerich.cn and xinnet.com.
China has strengthened the battle against pornographic content spread online, including shutting down file sharing Websites.

Fang Binxing is a synonym for the Great Firewall

Fang Binxing Father of China's Great Firewall admits to owning software to evade the censorship he helped create but defends his Invention that blocks out hundreds of thousands of foreign websites.

2/17/11 In a rare English-language newspaper interview published Friday

Fang Binxing, president of the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told the state-owned Global Times that he owned six virtual private networks, or VPNs, to scale the firewall and determine what was and wasn't accessible in China. "I have six VPNs on my home computer," Fang, 50, told the newspaper. "But I only try them to test which side wins: the GFW or the VPN." He added, "I'm not interested in reading messy information like some of that anti-government stuff." Fang, who could not be reached for comment Friday by The Times, said the filtering technology was operational five years before it came online in 2003, and he likened the system to traffic control that constantly required upgrading. The firewall is assumed to identify keywords to prevent access to websites featuring sensitive topics such as Tibetan independence or the outlawed spiritual group, the Falun Gong. At the same time, authorities are blocking access to sites making the software available. Fang is vilified within China's small but thriving technological elite. On his site, Hong Bo, a popular IT blogger in Beijing who goes by the screen name Keso, features a voodoo doll of sorts with Fang's head affixed. "Fang Binxing is a synonym for the Great Firewall and people hate the Great Firewall," said Hong, who added that he believes blocking open source sites such as Google's Android is far more detrimental to the country's development than censorship of anti-government material. In one embarrassing episode in December, Fang joined a Twitter-like service in China known as a micro-blog or weibo. Within hours, he was battered by thousands of angry and abusive comments laced with expletives. "He is the enemy of all netizens who are forced to scale the wall all day long because of GFW," read one post translated by China Digital Times, a site dedicated to news out of China. Fang shut down his account a few days later. "I regard the dirty abuse as a sacrifice for my country," he told the Global Times about the incident. "They can't get what they want so they need to blame someone emotionally: like if you fail to get a U.S. visa and you slag off the U.S. visa official afterwards." The interview with Fang did not appear in the Chinese-language edition of the Global Times, which is far more nationalistic and anti-Western in tone. English-language newspapers in China often display more leeway exploring sensitive issues, partly because of their small and largely foreign audience.

ICANN offers New Domain Names and expects all new gTLDs to be operational.
gTLDs are expected to be delegated within one year of signing a registry agreement with ICANN.
This offers an opportunity to avoid the Great China Firewall. “From now on, there might be a cyber-address ending with sensitive terms in Chinese pinyin such as .liusi or .falungong,” he added. “Liusi” is the Chinese pinyin for “June 4th,” the day when troops opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, killing thousands according to some estimates. “Falungong” is the name of a religious meditation group that was banned by Beijing in 1999. Its members are the target of an ongoing government crackdown. Censors can still block the new domain names because the technical principles are the same.
The Chinese Communist Party unveiled a new government search engine www.jike.com. Tests revealed that many sensitive terms, such as “liusi,” remain filtered out from search results.

The Revolution will be Tweeted and Televised Egyption Revolution

2011 Signs with Chinese on them have begun to appear in the Cairo demonstrations. Here is a protester whose sign combines Chinese and two varieties of Arabic: The events in Egypt have continued to ripple through Chinese circles. Official instructions to the media, sent out in secret from the State Council Information Office and Bureau 11 of the Ministry of Public Security, have leaked (via China Digital Times): “Websites are to strengthen [monitoring] of posts, forums, blogs, and particularly posts on microblogs,” the orders say. “Our bureaus will forcibly shut down websites that are lax in monitoring.” Does China have sufficient, robust institutions whereby average Chinese citizens can vent their frustrations, anger, and grievances.” Are China's institutions for managing discontent up to the task? Adam Minter

2011 With protests growing, Egypt cuts links to Internet 88 percent of network routes in Egypt suddenly vanish; government is blamed. Citizens have taken to the streets demanding an end to the government of President Hosni Mubarak. China ordered similar measures in 2009 when deadly rioting erupted in the country's western Xinjiang region. The government shut down the Internet across the region to halt the spread of the riots. Both Twitter and Facebook were also blocked, and have continued to be inaccessible from China. The county began restoring full Internet service in the region almost six month later after the rioting began.

12/2001 Father of China's "Great Firewall" bricked off microblog by furious, foul-mouthed netizens. On Monday morning, Fang Binxing, (方滨兴) the President of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications who is known as the “father of the Great Firewall,” opened a Sina Microblog account. Within the first three hours, over 3818 netizens followed him, and despite rapid deleting of comments to his posts by Sina editors, many comments still appeared, the vast majority of which made fun of or cursed him. http://bit.ly/gN8FQc

In 1991, the People's Republic of China saw its first TCP/IP college network, Tsinghua University's TUNET. The PRC went on to make its first global Internet connection in 1995, between the Beijing Electro-Spectrometer Collaboration and Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center. However, China went on to implement its own digital divide by implementing a country-wide content filter. Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China is conducted under a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations. In accordance with these laws, more than sixty Internet regulations have been made by the People's Republic of China (PRC) government, and censorship systems are vigorously implemented by provincial branches of state-owned ISPs, business companies, and organizations. Most national laws of the People's Republic of China do not apply to the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong or Macau. There are no known cases of the Chinese authorities censoring critical political or religious content in those areas. The escalation of the government's effort to neutralize critical online opinion comes after a series of large anti-Japanese, anti-pollution and anti-corruption protests, many of which were organized or publicized using instant messaging services, chat rooms, and text messages.

All Internet service providers in China must have their licenses reviewed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in March, though the agency may extend the reviews for some companies into April.

1. What is ICP license?
ICP license (ICP stands for Internet Content Provider) is a permit issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to permit China-based websites to operate in China. The ICP license numbers for Chinese websites can often be found on the bottom of their front page.
This license regime was instated by the Telecommunications Regulations of the People's Republic of China that was promulgated in September 2000. By the letter of the law, all websites with their own domain name that operate inside China are required to obtain a license, and China-based Internet service providers are required to block the site if a license is not acquired within a grace period. Licenses are issued at the provincial level.

2. How to register an ICP license?
Register at http://www.miibeian.gov.cn/

If you see a number on the site You can find if an icp number is valid or not at a website of China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, but the page is in Chinese only.

3. If I build a Chinese website but host in on US server, do I need to register for an ICP license?
No, only websites based on Mainland China are required to register for ICP license.

4. I am using a .com domain, not .cn domain, do I still need to register for ICP license?
Yes, no difference with .com or .cn.

5. My site is neither political nor pornographic, will it be safe if I host outside the GFW?
If your site has pornographic or anti-Chinese government contents, it will be blocked by GFW shortly. However, it does not mean if your site does not have such content it will be safe. For example, if you use virtual hosting, when china block an IP it may block your site as well. In many cases, china also block a range of IPs.

6. Do I need to pay for the license or is it free?
It does not require any fee for the license itself. But in order to get the license, your must have a company. That's expensive. You can also choose to apply the personal icp license, which costs much less.

7. How long does it take to get an ICP license?
It says it will take 20 days to get the license. But there is no guarantee your application will go through.

8. Do I really need to get an ICP license if my site is based on China server and are there any consequences if I don't?
Many Chinese sites do not have ICP license but they are still accessible to users, your site may be one of them. But do not feel surprised if one day, you found that you cannot access your site anymore.

9. My site is not ecommerce, do I have to apply for ICP license?
Yes, you still need an ICP license. There are two kinds of ICP license, commercial and none-commercial.

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the state network information center of China, was founded as a non-profit organization on Jun. 3rd 1997. According to the statistics of China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), by December 31, 2007, the number of Internet users in China has reached up to 210 million, while the number of the broadband Internet users has reached 163 million, accounting for 77.6% of the total. There are totally 11,931,277 domain names in China with 9,001,993 CN names, about 1,503,800 websites, and international bandwidth about 368,927Mbps.

The Golden Shield Project (a.k.a. Great Firewall of China) is owned by the Government of China (MPS) and started in 1998. The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internet gateways of China's ISPs. The banning of websites is mostly uncoordinated and ad-hoc, with some web sites being blocked and similar web sites being allowed or blocked in one city and allowed in another.

Test any website
in real-time and see if it is accessible from China.

Jun 25, 2009 “You can find everything on Google” but you cannot find google.com in China. By the order of Ministry of Information Industry, google.cn start “rectify” its search engine service to so filter “ill” information. Since June 23, google.com was cut off in China, with only google.cn works here. Some of other services, such Gmail is also affected in some areas. Websites forced into exile

China Web Sites Seeking Users' Names - There are many critics of the Communist Party. NYTsource: CDT reported, the State Council Information Office has required all news websites to implement real name registration for their commenter's, and websites are now quietly beginning to comply.

Four million bloggers, we are told. And now the government wants them all to register, claiming a success rate of 75% already.

• October 1, 2009 will mark the Peoples Republic of China 60th anniversary.
• 50th anniversary of an uprising in Tibet that led to the flight of the Dalai Lama to India.
• June 4, the 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.
  
• July 22, the 10th-year anniversary since the banning of the spiritual group called Falun Gong.
• Due to the riots on July 7th, 2009, all internet has been cut within Xinjiang.
• No Privacy in Personal Details
  PERSONAL details of city residents, "almost 100 percent accurate," is being sold online, bringing with it an onslaught of unwanted text messages and phone calls. And the scary thing is that the practice is legal.

March 2003: We still don't know the story behind China's blocking and unblocking of Google. It may be that Google's acute interest in geolocation by IP number is designed primarily to sell more ads in more markets. In an article by Josh McHugh ("Google vs. Evil," Wired Magazine, January 2003), several paragraphs imply that Google worked out some sort of secret deal with Chinese authorities:

Brin was no expert on international diplomacy. So he ordered a half-dozen books about Chinese history, business, and politics on Amazon.com and splurged on overnight shipping. He consulted with Schmidt, Page, and David Drummond, Google's general counsel and head of business development, then put in a call to tech industry doyenne Esther Dyson for advice and contacts. Google has no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens to get the message to Chinese authorities that Google would be very interested in working out a compromise to restore access. "We didn't want to do anything rash," Brin says. "The situation over there is more complex than I had imagined." Four days later, Chinese authorities restored access to the site. How did that happen? For starters, the Chinese government was deluged with outcries from the nation's 46 million Internet users when access to Google was cut off. "Internet users in China are an apolitical crowd," says Xiao Qiang, executive director of New York-based Human Rights In China. "They tend to be people who are doing well, and they don't usually voice strong views. But this stepped into their digital freedom." The quick workaround: Chinese authorities tweaked the national firewall, making the new Google China different from the site that was turned off. Today, Chinese who use Google to search on terms like "falun gong" or "human rights in china" receive a standard-looking results page. But when they click on any of the results, either their browsers are redirected to a blank or government-approved page, or their computers are blocked from accessing Google for an hour or two. "They have a new mechanism that can block the results of certain searches," Brin says. Did Google help China find or obtain the filtering technology? "We didn't make changes to our servers" is all he'll say.

The Greatest Internet Crime Trial in China
It is said that China has built the largest and most sophisticated firewall in the world, dubbed the Great Internet Firewall of China. It is said that China routinely filters web pages, BBS posts and e-mails on the basis of a list of banned keywords The List of Filtered Items and this list given at China Digital News. It is said that China employs more than 30,000 Internet censors whose job it is to monitor web sites, bulletin board systems, forums, and so on. It is said that, among the countries of the world, China has the largest number of people held in prison for exercising freedom of speech on the Internet. Here is a photo of a public trial being held at the Number 1 Intermediate People's Court in the city of Hefei in Anhui province. There are eleven defendants altogether. They are being accused of being part of a criminal enterprise based upon an Internet forum..

China tightens online control in schools The Chinese government issued a new rule requiring primary and secondary schools in the country to install filters to prevent young people from accessing "obscene content" on the Internet.

you need a VPN

A VPN, or virtual private network, creates your own private, encrypted channel that runs alongside the normal Internet. From within any country, a VPN connects you with an Internet server somewhere else. You pass your browsing and downloading requests to that American or Finnish or Japanese server, and it finds and sends back what you're looking for. Nothing can stop you, because it can't read the encrypted messages you're sending. Every foreign business operating in any country uses such a network. Every bank, every foreign manufacturing company, every retailer, every software vendor needs VPNs to exist. Closing down the free, easy-to-use proxy servers would create a milder version of the same problem. Encrypted e-mail, too, passes through without scrutiny, and users of many Web-based mail systems can establish a secure session simply by typing “https:” rather than the usual “http:” in a site's address—for instance, https://mail.yahoo.com

Bill Gates Defends Microsoft Complicity in Chinese Censorship
Gates characterizes China's attempts to stifle dissent on the Internet as "very limited" since "it's easy to go around it." Not a problem right Bill?

Censorship: What's happening online: Twitter.com (blocked), Facebook.com (blocked), Wordpress.com (blocked), Blogspot.com (blocked), Youtube.com (blocked), HuffingtonPost.com (blocked), Danwei.org (blocked), PekingDuck.org (blocked), Technorati.com (blocked), Gutenberg.org (blocked), Flickr (partially-blocked), Wikipedia.org (partially-blocked). Exchange of ideas (blocked), impartial and freely critical media (blocked), creative development (blocked), self-empowerment (blocked), humanitarianism (partially-blocked), acceptance of China as a forward-looking developed nation on the global stage (blocked), national Chinese pride and self-respect (blocked).

The Great China Firewall: #gcf #censorship #green dam
Bravo! Hewlwtt-Packard, the world's top PC maker and Dell Inc. Said they were not providing Green Dam with their PC's in China. Gov't Delays order on porn filter software.
Over the years, human rights groups and members of the U.S. Congress have intensely criticized U.S. Internet companies for agreeing to restrictions, Censorship in China, including censoring search results as Google does. Yahoo, in particular, has been attacked for turning over personal user information to Chinese police that was used to identify dissidents and imprison them.

How to Stop Censorship.

How China censors / filters Google and is Keeping the information out. with the help of U.S. Companies.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that China has 384 million Internet users. "The number of people going online by mobile phone rose 106% [last year] to 233 million" (8% of whom access the Net only by phone).

#gcf #censorship #green dam

Fifty different Asian nations in the Pan-Asian satellite TV network STAR, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation censored Just Jared acceptence, the34-year-old screenwriter 2009 Oscar Winner for Best Original Screenplay.

Chinese government surveillance: It is impossible to send anything privately from Internet cafes, chat rooms, and e-mail.

China's domestic laws. Those laws, the commission says, give authorities a lot of "wiggle room" to define actions that might "endanger state security" or "disrupt social order."

Software program called Internet Detective. The program, installed by Feiyu at the insistence of the police, "records the sites people surf, their identity card numbers, plus e-mails and message boards, and even games"

Dark Visitor Blog by Scott J. Henderson, inside the world of the Chinese Hacker follows Hacking in China. Representative Chen Wanzhi of the National People's Congress reportedly considers the network security situation in China to be grim.

THE “Human flesh search engine” - the idea of mobilizing thousands of individuals to dig out facts and expose them publicly - may no longer be a fun game to play as a draft amendment now bans government staff from seeking and publicizing private information. Several high profile scandals in China had seen the online vigilantes of the “human flesh search engine” engaging in what amounted to cyber lynchings of individuals and their reputations.

All keystrokes are recorded: recorded by the government.

Tech giants Cisco Systems, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were called before Congress to defend their cooperation with Chinese government censors in order to do business in that nation. And a Chinese firm, also citing Congress' resistance, last summer withdrew a bid for U.S. oil firm Unocal.
Lenovo was based in China until it bought IBM's PC division has U.S. headquarters, an American CEO (former Dell executive William Amelio) and big investors including IBM and several U.S. holding companies. But the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government body, remains the largest shareholder, owning 27%.

The Internet Detective: The Chinese government uses a special kind of spy software called the Internet Detective that records sites you visit, e-mails, games, message board activity and identity card numbers. The government says that it uses this spyware to make it easier to catch criminals who use Internet cafes.

Jurisdiction and Punishment

If you're caught violating the laws of Chinese censorship and appropriate online behavior, you may have to go to jail. Find out how journalists, web surfers and even U.S. companies become entangled in the Chinese censorship movement.

Offending China online warrants jail time: If you are caught and convicted of offending China and the government, you may be sent to jail.

• There's no Twitter in China: Twitter is very often blocked in China, so don't get your hopes up for tweeting action when you study abroad there.
• You can check Inaccessible Sites Tested by Users of the Real-Time Testing System to see if your website is blocked in China: You can stop worrying about catering to Chinese readers if you know you're blocked there anyway. this tool from Harvard's Cyber Law page.
• YouTube and Flickr are often blocked: Sometimes these two media sharing sites are blocked completely, and other times, they're just heavily restricted.
• Blogger blogs are often blocked:
• Even outbound links are restricted: In 2000, China passed a law that forbids China websites to link to outside news websites — or even reference news reported by outside news sites — without getting approval from the government.
• The Tiananmen Square anniversary was heavily censored: The 20th anniversary for one of Chinese history's darkest days — Tinanmen Square — was censored all over the Internet. Comment boards were shut down by companies afraid of being prosecuted for encouraging discussion about the massacre, and Twitter was shut down.
• Falun Gong censorship: The Chinese spiritual group Falun Gong is one of the most widespread censorship targets in the country. It is a practice steeped in principles of morality and supposedly rose after the Maoist revolution. The group staged a silent protest in 1999 against an incident of beatings and arrests in 1999, and China has censored and abused them since.
• Search engines are filtered: There is an effort on behalf of China to eliminate certain words from search engines like Yahoo! and Baidu.
• University access blocked: Some online university systems have been blocked since 2004, making it impossible for students at schools like George Washington University to access assignments and notes from China.
• Rogue ways of getting past censorship: Some savvy Chinese citizens intent on getting past censored sites have created applications with names like Gollum and picidae to get past servers and browse pages as images.
• Forced restriction leads to self-restriction: Time reports that James Fallows of the Atlantic brought up a frightening reality: that Chinese who were afraid of being caught using the Internet in illegal ways were starting to censor their own use. Fallows wrote "The idea is that if you're never quite sure when, why and how hard the boom might be lowered on you, you start controlling yourself, rather than being limited strictly by what the government is able to control directly."