China doesn’t censor the Internet
November 1st, 2006 | by jg3 |Today CNET is carrying an article entitled China: We don’t censor the Internet. Really.
In China, we don’t have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that’s a different problem.
One of three things is happening here:
- Clandestine Chinese government efforts censor Internet traffic and this statement is a ridiculous lie.
- This statement is truth. The Chinese government has no restrictions on what Internet sites the people in that country can see or say on the Internet.
- Both the Chinese government’s efforts to censor information distributed in that country and big technical problems are preventing some portions of the Internet from being available to citizens of China.
Because I know first hand that big chunks of the Chinese Internet are blocked from accessing many large American networks, I tend to go with option three. I don’t have enough proof or confidence in the Chinese government’s statements to believe that it is strictly a technical issue.
Here’s what I have seen happen in my work: versions of Microsoft Windows are written in the UTF-16 character set. This software works well enough to get released. The UTF-16 character set, however, does not support enough characters for East Asian languages. To support that, a new version of the operating system must be produced with the apropriate changes. When a security vulnerability is discovered in the operating system, a fix for the UTF-16 (English) version is released first. A clever programmer can use the information in the fix as a map describing exactly what the problem is. Because of the additional work involved in creating and releasing the fix for versions which support, say Chinese (for example) there is a delay during which all of those systems are vulnerable to exploit and in a way, explicit instructions for how to do that have been provided by Microsoft. Following this, many networks in East Asia are brimming with compromised systems and network administration there isn’t significantly better than it is here. Couple that with lots of high speed Internet access and you can see why Chinese networks present a big problem to large international networks. So, yes, there are some blocks that network proviiders have placed on Chinese networks until those networks get cleaned up and traffic more balanced toward legitimate than malicious.
Filed under: Real Life, Security, The Internet
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