The Net-Nanny

The innocuous, almost child-like sounding name of the much more insidious wall of blocks and bans that China uses to forcibly censor what its people can and cannot see on the web: The Net-Nanny. It goes by another name from many of its detractors - both Chinese and foreign: The Great FireWall (GFW). It is the system put into place by the Communist regime which moniters and "harmonizes" China's internet by banning sites and content they deem subversive, potentially-subversive, humiliating, or just bad press for their government.

Common targets are: Wikipedia, Western media outlets, blog sites, YouTube, occasionally Facebook, and many of the other sites across the Great Series of Tubes that make the internet actually useful and fun. As usual with China, the results are haphazard at best. Often entire sites are blocked out for months at a time (currently, YouTube) because of a single item (in this case, a video of Chinese police savagely beating Tibetan protesters) which could - according to the govt - cause unrest or disharmony.

The sad irony to this is two-fold:
1) by using such a draconian method of censorship, the Chinese are using the proverbial hatchet to remove a fly from their forehead. In blocking YouTube for having this video, the Chinese Govt. unwittingly alerted many, many people worldwide to the existence of the video. The damage they were trying to prevent to their reputation is therefore doubly done, both by the initial "item in question," and by the inevitable firestorm of their blatant lying and censorship to cover it up. Cock gun, aim at foot, fire.

2) The GFW is notoriously... well, STUPID. It will block one site which is considered subversive, but miss a whole host of others which, really, have more potential damage to do harm. Back to the ongoing YouTube incident, the site is still down, but the event (the 50th anniversary of the failed uprising of Tibet against the Communists) is now months behind us. The continued blocking only serves to remind everyone again and again just what an oppressive tact the government is forcing down their throats.

Currently, we're coming up on two big events in China's history: the first is the 60th anniversary of the birth of the PRC, so this leads the govt. to want to make the internet as "clean" and "harmonious" as it can. The second is the 20th anniversary of the June 4th Incident (aka the 1989 Tiananmen Square Student Massacre), an event which the CCP continues to deny to this day. So of course, the GFW has gone batshit crazy as of late.

The latest victims? Blogs. As of now, my blog site (and many, many other blogging services) cannot be accessed all in Mainland China... through normal means. You may be asking: how then am I still posting? Good question...

The internet was created, and is still fundamentally made up of people who, quite frankly, don't want Big Brother peering over everything they do. It is designed to subvert authority and disseminate knowledge freely and unfettered. The Chinese Govt. obviously did not - and still does not - fully realize the can of worms it was opening by allowing the internet into their country at all. There are things called "proxys" which befuddle websites IP addresses. For those of you not "in the know," an IP address is exactly what is sounds like. It's the "place" on the web when a particular page or user can be found. Censors like the GFW, as well as any other tracking service, such as Google, et al, function by looking up IP addresses and then... doing whatever they are designed to do with them.

A proxy makes the Net Nanny think that the site I'm viewing is some other site in Wisconsin, Bermuda, Cincinnati, London, Moscow... wherever.... by routing the IP address through itself before sending it to me. Voila, clean slate. Untrackable. Unblockable. It's different ever time you use it, so there's no way to simply anticipate and thwart it, as a government.

my current proxy is called zendlife... and it's quite nice. I'm liking it a lot, so far :D

This ongoing farce of "control over the internet" makes me shake my head, though. And I'm not the only one by a long shot. Even the Chinese shake their heads at it (except that media whore Jackie Chan, who agree with the government that the Chinese people are effectively children and need "to be controlled"). It's enough to make one wonder how long this tangled inter-web of misinformation, lies, deceit, and blocks will hold up to the scrutiny and disdain of not just the outside world, but the Chinese people themselves...

(CS)WC Out.

The sleet rain on the slate roof