Of the various ways to filter the internet, manipulating DNS is probably the simplest and cheapest in terms of resources. DNS, the Domain Name Service, is the mapping between the human-readable URLs that we use, like https://www.pseudonymity.net, and the more machine-friendly IP addresses, like 87.106.104.43.
The Chinese Golden Shield Project, or Great Firewall, famously makes use of a range of techniques. These include keyword filtering, as reported by Clayton et al., as well as active blocking of services such as Tor at the IP level, and more manual censorship and takedown on services like Weibo.
In the past year or so I’ve spent some time tinkering with exactly how China’s internet is filtered. In particular, I’ve been interested in the extent to which the system is centrally-driven, with blanket country-wide decisions and implementation, against how many of its decisions are loose and locally applied by regional authorities and ISPs.
To study this it is more or less useless to fire up a VPN, or a copy of Tor, and run network tests. Filtering conditions may vary by ISP, by province, by city or by ISP. When I see a report that some site ‘is blocked in China’, my immediate response has become to ask where.… Read full post
