Olympic Times – Sports Daily

Internet users trapped behind China’s so-called “Great Firewall” are finding ways to scale the wall, but experts say software programs that allow unfettered access to the web are often cumbersome and difficult to find from inside the country.

China’s efforts to restrict access to the Internet have faced renewed criticism during the Beijing Olympics, especially after international journalists discovered their access was still affected despite earlier promises by Olympic officials.

The government uses sophisticated technology to filter content, blocking information about topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Dalai Lama and the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement.

The Communist regime argues the restrictions are necessary to protect national security and ensure the “healthy growth” of Chinese youth, but critics condemn them as repressive, undemocratic limits on freedom.

“We face so many shared global problems right now, you need some kind of global communications medium through which citizens around the world can communicate and share ideas,” says Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

“We need to find ways to protect these commons as something essential for what you might call planetary democracy to thrive.”

Two years ago the Citizen Lab released a program called Psiphon, which allows users in countries such as China and Iran to circumvent their governments’ Internet censorship.

The free software uses computers outside the censoring country – known as proxies – to fetch web pages and send them back over encrypted connections.

The technique is also used by a host of other tools, but Deibert says the goal was to make it as user-friendly as possible.

“That can be quite a time-consuming, laborious process, and we created this really simple program that anyone should be able to operate,” says Deibert.

Groups like the Citizen Lab and Reporters Without Borders have produced how-to guides for getting around Internet censorship.

Some techniques are relatively simple but not very effective, such as using saved or cached pages on search engines.

Other methods are better but more complex, such as “tunnelling” software that hides content inside other forms of Internet traffic.

Another popular option is a browser called Tor, which also uses proxies.

A group of German programmers have created what they call the Freedom Stick, a self-contained version of the Tor browser on a USB drive that the group distributed to German journalists heading to the Beijing Games.

And with a little money and technical know-how, just about anyone can pay for what’s called a virtual private network located outside the country, which essentially uses the same technique as Tor and Psiphon.

There are many options for Internet users in China and other countries to get around web censorship, says German IT security expert Sebastian Wolfgarten, but access to the software and information about how to use it are often blocked themselves.

“It really depends on the access you have to systems located outside of China,” says Wolfgarten.

“We know how to do it, but it’s getting the message across. The pages might be blocked, maybe the people don’t have the knowledge or the ability to install the software.”

Wolfgarten rented a server in China two years ago so he could browse from a China-based connection and examine how exactly the Great Firewall works.

“What amazed me is the sophistication in how the filtering is being done,” says Wolfgarten, who plans to repeat the process to see how the filtering has evolved.

“It’s really pervasive, and from a technical point of view it’s very well done.”

He says the filtering works on multiple levels, including: restricting sites based on their web addresses and domain names; using technology to cut off and freeze connections accessing banned content; and requiring search engines to tailor results if they want to operate in China.

Chinese officials will eventually figure out how to block existing anti-censorship software, predicts Lars Fischer, a German PhD student who came up with the Freedom Stick.

Fischer says when that happens, programmers and hackers will find ways to adapt, but it’s part of a much larger problem that software alone can’t fix.

“It’s a social problem, censorship itself is viral,” says Fischer, a member of the Chaos Computer Club, a group of hackers based in Hamburg, Germany.

“Unwanted information is not normally in the public view because news sites and blogs from the inside have a hard time linking to the outside. You create something that censors itself.”

from: canadianpress.google.com