The Butterfly Effect Part II: Inside the Chinese Firewall
This is the second part of my series on the Internet in China. I recently returned from a year teaching at a Chinese University. During my time in China, I had the pleasure of getting to know the state of the Internet in China, both directly and indirectly, through my own use of the Internet and the classes. In my last article, The Butterfly Effect Part I: Microsoft, Security, and the Developing World, I dealt with the effect of pirated software and security and its impact on development. In this article, I would like to cover my experience of the Chinese Firewall from the inside and the way we contribute to censorship in China.
Scanning Chinese networks the old fashion way with nmap or similar tools struck me as a bit impolite and potentially illegal. Being on the other side of the wall, I was not going to push my luck too much. However, part of my teaching duties involved several classes on research writing and basic computer skills. This gave me access to a very effective network testing tool. Basically, several hundred average Chinese University students. To get an idea of what the average Chinese experience of the outside Internet world was like, I could simply assign my students to retrieve various information from the Internet and wait for their reports. For example, if a site was not reachable from inside China, I would be quickly inundated by emails and questions from panic stricken students trying to complete their homework assignments.
My total number of students was well over a 1,000 for the length of the school year. I could also add to this all the miscellaneous students, staff, and public seminars where I simply referred them to my teaching website (hosted outside of China). That would bring the number to something like 2,000 people. About 100-200 in any given week where engaged in some sort of Internet related project for my classes. My own холодильник беко modest teaching site received a little over 5,000 hits in my time in China. So, through my classes at the University and other schools in Eastern-Central China, I was able to run a sort of ongoing distributed human scan of Internet connectivity in China.
My informal survey results: Of course there is always a few students that would, for one reason or another, be incapable of connecting; however, when a site could not be accessed at all, I would see my student red flag go up quickly. Normally, within about 24 hours of Cadillac Records giving an assignment it would be obvious that
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