Behind the Chinese Cyber Curtain
Nicely interesting article about how the "Cyber Curtain" in China can be circumvented with a small piece of programming - better yet, the architecture of the "Great Firewall of China" allows for DOS attacks against internal targets in China - using the flaws in their own censorware infrastructure.
Academics break the Great Firewall of China | CNET News.com
The machines in China allow data packets in and out, but send a burst of resets to shut connections if they spot particular keywords," explained Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge computer laboratory. "If you drop all the reset packets at both ends of the connection, which is relatively trivial to do, the Web page is transferred just fine."Clayton added that this means the Chinese firewall can be used to launch denial-of-service attacks against specific IP addresses within China, including those of the Chinese government itself.
The IDS uses a stateless server, which examines each data packet both going in and out of the firewall individually, unrelated to any previous request. By forging the source address of a packet containing a "sensitive" keyword, people could trigger the firewall to block access between source and destination addresses for up to an hour at a time.
Cool huh? My problems arise with the latter part of the article:
... the researchers had reported their findings to the Chinese Computer Emergency Response Team.This means tha, despite all this research into the flaws of the Chinese censorware firewall - which is explicitly designed to prevent freedom of speech - public purse funded research is helping the Chinese to make their censorware firewall even better ...
Why are UK academic institutions helping countries to enforce censorware and aiding the restictions on free speech?
Enquiring minds want to know ...
Tags: censorship, censorware, great firewall of china, cyber curtains, freedom of speech