back to article China's Great Firewall inventor forced to use VPN live on stage to dodge his own creation

The architect of China's Great Firewall was forced to use a VPN to bypass his own creation in a lecture this week on internet safety. Fang Binxing was speaking at his old university, the Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang, China, when he attempted to access webpages hosted in South Korea as a way to illustrate a …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    1. Any sufficiently advanced internet filtering is indistinguishable from someone randomly unplugging your modem every 5 minutes.

    2. The fact that even the most sophisticated censorship can be circumvented leads people to complacency. Censorship works at far, far less than 100% efficacy, and is best thought of as a low-pass filter for political / cultural information. Even the fairly weak-sauce censorship that's growing in the west is extremely dangerous.

    1. Teiwaz

      please unplug your modem...

      "Even the fairly weak-sauce censorship that's growing in the west is extremely dangerous."

      - So dangerous you only felt safe posting anonymous?

      1. Uplink

        Re: please unplug your modem...

        "you only felt safe posting anonymous"

        It's quasi-anonymous. El Reg still knows who you are (Anonymous Coward had to log in) and can tell on you to any interested parties. This isn't Slashdot.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: please unplug your modem...

          Coupled with the tracking cookies and IP logs, they even know when and where you posted...

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. SolidSquid

        Re: Censorship sole function is political

        There's the old D-Notice thing where the government makes a "request" for media companies not to cover a subject. Technically they can do it anyway, Guardian did so over the Snowden papers iirc, but they almost always tow the line on that to avoid conflict with the government

        Quick check, it was the US PRISM programme part of the Snowden releases, and when the Guardian ignored it apparently Cameron brought up the possibility of judicial action to force them to stop covering it in parliament

  2. Sgt_Oddball

    just because..

    You're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you.

    Also, we've managed to create a system that even Orwell would have marvelled at. We completely removed the need for sending old news to the incinerators once corrected, and it's only a matter of time before they figure out how to filter the information insitu with the need to be so heavy handed and just blanket banning everything.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: just because..

      @ Sgt And these days, to some extent "they" (the criminals, commercial entities, the three letter agencies, dictatorships, even proper authorities and so on) really are out to get people, no paranoia necessary.

    2. mosw

      Re: just because..

      ... you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you."

      Given that some government agencies want to treat all encrypted data as suspicious you could rephrase that to "If you are paranoid, then they are after you."

    3. Nifty Silver badge
      Big Brother

      Re: just because..

      So true, and you really could not make this up:

      Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=0

      1. Sgt_Oddball

        Re: just because..

        Yes I remember that one too.. Thats the reason I own a Sony ereader. No WiFi or whisper net to pull that sort of crap on me with.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A taste of his own poison

    Nice.

    1. Trainee grumpy old ****
      Big Brother

      Re: A taste of his own poison

      And it was ever thus: do what I say, not what I do.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Unlike our governments...

    .. who already collect our traffic and spy on everything we do.

    At least China make it obvious they are fucking with you.

  5. BitDr

    Schadenfreude

    That is all.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Schadenfreude

      Hm .. and also a little bit of the "'what goes around comes around", I would venture.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Funny that he did not use Tor.

    I guess using Tor would have been too much for the Thought Police.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is someone checking the checkers?

    I live in a little slice of ex Briton in China and have always wondered if my internet traffic is being modified in any way.

    If, for example, stories on the Panama papers on the BBC news web site were being altered or some how replaced would anyone know? Is anyone checking?

    1. Seajay#

      Re: Is someone checking the checkers?

      If you're looking at news sites that use https and using your own computer which you can be confident no-one has installed dodgy certificates on then you would know if the page had been altered. If either of those things isn't true then you wouldn't know.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Is someone checking the checkers?

        Or they are spoofing the CA server.

      2. Charles 9

        Re: Is someone checking the checkers?

        Not if it was altered BEFORE encryption, say at the news site itself...

    2. Topperfalkon

      Re: Is someone checking the checkers?

      You live in part of a British person living in China? How does that work?

  8. xperroni
    Facepalm

    Payback, she is a bitch

    Or as our Verity Stob would put it, "hahahahahahahahahahahahahah."

  9. raving angry loony

    Ah yes.

    Hypocrisy at its FINEST. Well done for showing up the entire system.

  10. Winkypop Silver badge

    Hey everyone. Look over THERE!

    ....while I configure my pc...

  11. The Islander
    WTF?

    Hold on ...

    Why would he do this so publicly? I can claim no great insight to Chinese culture and apparatchik but I'd be amazed if one of the most basic of human concerns - for self preservation - simply went offline during his lecture.

    I doff my hat to Occam, Hanlon, et al.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hold on ...

      He might have his regrets, and took at chance to send a message .. who knows?

  12. agatum
    Black Helicopters

    To the audience's amazement, Binxing then tried to bypass the firewall using a VPN installed on his computer – the same tool secretly installed by millions of Chinese to get around censorship efforts, but whose use is heavily frowned upon by officials.

    Perhaps frowned so much as to put Mr. Fang to good use at the local salt mine for, say, ten years?

    1. Dog11

      >> To the audience's amazement, Binxing then tried to bypass

      >> the firewall using a VPN installed on his computer – the

      >> same tool secretly installed by millions of Chinese to get

      >> around censorship efforts, but whose use is heavily frowned

      >> upon by officials.

      >

      > Perhaps frowned so much as to put Mr. Fang to good use at

      > the local salt mine for, say, ten years?

      No, he's an official. The rules don't apply if you're sufficiently high in that category (and that's not only in China), though it was very bad form to do it in front of an audience.

  13. enormous c word

    Paranoia is just a heightened state of awareness

    1. Chris Fox

      Paranoia

      Panama is just a state of heightened tax avoidance

      1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

        Re: Paranoia

        Isn't Paranoia somewhere near Uruguay?

  14. Tommy Pock

    You think we don't have internet censorship?

    Look at Google (UK) autocompletes for

    Labour is

    Lib Dems are

    UKIP are

    The Greens are

    And then

    Tories are

    Conservatives are

    And this tells you exactly why Google paid about ten pence in owed taxes. Google is not your friend.

    1. Sir Runcible Spoon

      Thank you for posting that - most enlightening.

    2. MrXavia

      Bloody hell....

      That is quite a shock...

      Also Try

      Theresa May is

      1. Sir Runcible Spoon

        Still..

        "Nigel Farage is"

        Must have slipped through the net that one :)

    3. OrientalHero

      Woah, that's quite skewed. Also indefensible with the "only what is most popularly searched on" arguement...

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Also indefensible with the "only what is most popularly searched on" [argument]...

        Google doesn't claim that autocomplete shows the most-popular searches. I don't know if there's an official description of the the process, but while the base algorithm is no doubt a fairly simple predictor (probably something like an HMM doing Viterbi, though they might just be reusing one of their ANN implementations), it's likely that personal search history is also an input, if Google can identify you by session, cookie, or other means.

        More importantly, Google lets people request particular autocomplete results be removed. So it's quite possible that one organization (say, a particular political party) has a small team of interns looking for autocomplete results and submitting removal requests to Google, while another organization is less vigilant.

        A conspiracy seems rather less likely, since it's quite cheap for organizations to arrange this state of affairs themselves.

    4. David Nash Silver badge

      Interesting. There is some discussion of it on the Guardian page (that came up as part of the same searches) here:

      https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/02/google-tories-are-labour-are-autocomplete-conspiracy-theories

    5. This post has been deleted by its author

  15. Fullmetal5

    Link?

    Does anybody have a link to his speech?

    I'm interested to hear how he portrayed places that don't censor their internet.

  16. Tony Paulazzo

    members of China's politburo are among those shown to have used offshore accounts to hide or obscure their wealth

    TIL:

    China is not a communist state but authoritarian.

    China has 128 of the world's billionaires (and British poor beats Chinese poor).

    China loves the Transformer movies.

    We really should eat the rich!

  17. Andy 97

    My daughter has a phrase she uses for occasions like this:

    LOL

    1. Sir Runcible Spoon
      Black Helicopters

      Not to put too much of a downer on your daughters mood - but you do realise that is her future she's laughing at don't you?

    2. Trigonoceps occipitalis

      Lots of Love?

      D Cameron

  18. Ralph B

    Thinks

    Thinks: I wonder if you might be able to protect yourself from Chinese hackers by having a copy of the Panama Papers on your HDD.

    1. SolidSquid

      Re: Thinks

      Probably easier to make your computer's hostname "Tianamen Square"

  19. Anonymous Blowhard

    Was the sponsored link at the bottom of the article a joke inserted by a human, or are the AIs messing with us?

    Sponsored: Network monitoring and troubleshooting for Dummies

  20. crayon

    Yeah right, blame it on Panama

    "Panama is just a state of heightened tax avoidance".

    That Panamanian law firm is only acting as a middle man. The real tax avoidance takes place in the offshore tax havens, many of which are under British jurisdiction.

  21. BurnT'offering

    When his political career is over

    the next obvious move is into desktop support

    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Re: When his political career is over

      I gather techniacally he already has a helldesk job.

  22. Alan Brown Silver badge

    Making the Great Firewall unpopular

    Put mentions of Free Tibet, Fanlun Gong, Tianamen Square and the Panama papers _everywhere_

  23. johnfbw

    This post has been deleted by its author

    The censors are here as well!

  24. Someone Else Silver badge
    FAIL

    Reminds me of my mother...

    "Do as I say, not as I do!"

  25. Whiskers

    Demonstration successful then

    He wanted to demonstrate 'internet sovereignty' and that's what he did.

    Surely no-one imagined that he was seriously trying to show students how to break out of his firewall?

  26. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Reminds me

    of the GDR in its later years:

    "To the audience's amazement, Binxing then tried to bypass the firewall using a VPN installed on his computer – the same tool secretly installed by millions of Chinese to get around censorship efforts, but whose use is heavily frowned upon by officials."

    Everybody* was watching West German TV in the evening to know what's going on and read the Neues Deutschland in the morning to check what was the current official party line. Leading to something best described as a controlled state of paranoid schizophrenia. People would stay on message during "official" conversations and talk more or less freely amongst people they trusted**.

    *Except in the Dresden area. Hence the rest of the GDR called Dresden "The Valley of the Clueless". They were somewhat topographically challenged - the usual extra aerial plus amplifier wouldn't work, you'd have needed a full blown radio tower, which would have been a bit of a giveaway. As long as you kept quite about it, the state would look the other way, in the later years at least.

    **Tricky bit, that one. When the files the MfS hadn't had time to shred surfaced, a lot of people were in for a very nasty surprise indeed.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nevermind Google, keep an eye on FaceSpook

    I'm more concerned that FaceSpook* seems to be taking an active role in manipulating story visibility. Many posts by my friends, a pretty progressive bunch, are pruned from view even when I specifically go to 'friends only' news feed and set it to sort chronologically. Similar story with pages and groups. This is the reason behind forcing all users to see what their flaky algorithms decide they should see, which includes significant amounts of advertising, and to hell with any preference the user has expressed. Then there was the crippling of the photo sharing feature (forcing handsets to download the jpeg then re-upload it with a post) when the Arab Spring was kicking off.

    Seems to me FB is often effectively (deliberately?) a man-in-the-middle attack on people's everyday interaction and communication.

    Their advertising algos need some tweaking too. No matter how many times FB put that grinning tory twat Goldsmith (for Mayor of London) next to promises to do the polar opposite of everything his lower-than-vermin party stand for, it will not influence me in any way. My membership of groups and pages with the strings "labour" and "green" and "corbyn" in their names should be enough of a clue. Anyone who wants to copy-paste The Sun Says at me will be ignored/mocked, depending on the effort made.

    Pro tip: the 'FB Purity' browser extension is essential, even for casual users; FB is quite intolerable without it.

    *Oh, feeling smug because you don't use it? Clever you, have a cookie. The fact remains it is a communications and news channel for millions.

    Posting anon just because.

  28. AnastasiaB

    oh what an irony that he has to use a VPN for China

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