This is about protesters subverting the purpose of the firewall, not a technical loophole. Tourists from mainland China might not know about the protests, because of the firewall. Protestors are using AirDrop to directly deliver photos and information to the tourists, which is probably much more effective than physical posters that people can ignore or rip down.
Question for those who might know: how common is it for the ordinary mainland Chinese person to attempt to circumvent the great firewall? Do people there actually care about what they might be missing, as this incident implies?
Those people who are skilled enough to circumvent the censorship also know they could be summarily punished for doing so.
That is, the firewall/censorship is not designed to be unbreakable, but just to send a message: when you go around this, you are now breaking our rules, and we can get you at our option. This is effective enough to induce people to limit their curiousity. See for example James Fallows, who lives in China and is not just speculating on what's 'ludicrous to think':
"'The Connection Has Been Reset' - China’s Great Firewall is crude, slapdash, and surprisingly easy to breach. Here’s why it’s so effective anyway."
The punishment might include "re-education through labor" without any trial, or disappearing into detention, as with people who simply applied for protest permits during the recent olympics:
In China mainland, there is a censor tech named Great Firewall.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall?wprov=sfti1) It just cut off the connection between China and the World Internet by blocking famous website like Twitter, Facebook etc. Only the people have eagerness of finding truth will use anti-blocking tech like VPN to find information by themselves. Of course, it’s inconvenience and sometimes not working because of outer server banned. Not sure how many people could get information by themselves. But it’s pessimistic for people living in China how willing to find the information.
Recently, because the propagation by gov, the citizens even think the GFW is protecting them from harmful information and the outside force want breaking up China rather than censorship itself. Especially, this time the protest is propagated as a riot planned by western country. Being lack of information, most citizens support gov’s standpoint.
So maybe not ignorant, just like not conscious, as a result of being accustomed.
More reason for people to protest. Now they're deploying the firewall to censor information that people already know? Doesn't make sense... Why are people using a VPN in HK?
It may be that it just isn't that strictly enforced for a variety of reasons. China allows a number of VPN services that bypass the firewall to function. My guess is that it isn't a huge deal because the vast majority of people don't care enough to go out of their way to bypass the firewall; the social effects of having that firewall are still in place.
Start enforcing it heavily and the people that DO use those services may start protesting or moving into activist roles.
I don't know, but it is clear that the Chinese firewall is about preventing Chinese people from accessing the wider internet, not about preventing non-chinese people from accessing the Chinese internet.
China is a poor example if you're trying to say that people can circumvent political technology decisions. The firewall works for 90%+ of their population and allows them to present versions of events that don't align with the rest of the world. That can happen in the US as well, and we already know there's organizations that are willing to do it.
Doesn't Chinese techies circumvent the great firewall of China constantly? Also, I think there was an article recently about how the government officials turn a blind eye at breaches that didn't involve political matters.
The great firewall is deterrent to spreading fake news, disinformation, and lies among the masses(1.4B) who make take it for truth resulting in social divisiveness and potential violence of which is happening in the US w/only 1/4 of the population.
That said, the firewall is easily bypassed with VPN by many with the means to do so. Chinese govt does not view this as contradiction with their policy as it is deemed those able to read Englis/foreign news are educated enough to discern the truth.
James Fallows argued pretty persuasively that these sorts of things aren't actually relevant to the Chinese government's ability to accomplish effective censorship in his article about the Great Firewall: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall
What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?
The same points arguably hold for the Green Dam.
Edit: I guess I missed the point of the advisory (see comment below). I assumed they were discussing methods of circumventing the system, but after a second (more careful) reading, that's obviously not the biggest concern.
It's really a crappy situation: mandated software that's this broken. Either join a botnet or potentially raise the government's suspicions by uninstalling the software.
> ...but the blocks can be circumvented by sufficiently motivated individuals.
As I understand it, using a VPN to get past the firewall is a crime for Chinese nationals. And the govt is constantly blocking them anyway as they find them.
The Chinese government is always messing with the internet here. I can't even see photos in Flickr or articles in Wikipedia without using a proxy. They are unpredictable and annoying. Government involvement in this would not surprise me at all.
If this is the response to mass protests I wonder which kind of protests will happen in response to this.
This is not just another great firewall of China, this is more like a nation-wide intranet. I do not believe that the Russians are as indoctrinated to this as the Chinese are.
No, they aren’t. Foreigners in China often get around the Great Firewall through foreigner-specific SIM cards or VPNs. A tiny, tiny amount of locals is able and interested in avoiding the Great Firewall. But for the vast majority of Chinese, the Great Firewall is never overcome; few even feel motivation to evade censorship. Compare that to a situation like Belarus where nearly every computer-literate person is aware of what to do.
Regarding censorship: if the Chinese firewall was really about censorship and not about foreign monopolies, China would be prosecuting people for going around it. And they don’t - VPNs are commonplace, government doesn’t care.
I currently live in China and the firewall isn't as bad as it looks. I used to believe it was meant to censor information but I increasingly believe that it is meant to encourage the digital economy in China. The Chinese alternatives (Baidu, TaoBao, RenRen, etc.) would probably have a much harder time without the firewall. That being said, as a free market enthusiast, I disagree with this kind of politics.
I was in China just last month and was surprised how openly everyone circumvents the blocks. I stayed in a very large 25+ floor 4* hotel where the entire free wifi went through a VPN. My Chinese friend said the government turn a blind eye because they know business needs it and they want the business.
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