China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says • Hacker News Board

Re: China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says

#11

Post by gaius » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 8:58 AM UTC

PavlovsCat wrote: post #7

gaius wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. ALL newspapers, TV channels, websites have an agenda. ALL of them. If you think that your pet one hasn't, then you are in an echo chamber without realizing it, time to take a step back and reevaluate the situation. Best thing is to read two equal-but-opposite new sources. I like The Times for my right-wing slant and the New York Times for my left-wing, that way I get a balanced picture. You might prefer the…

> ALL newspapers, TV channels, websites have an agenda. ALL of them. How does that preclude a particular agenda from being to seek and tell the truth? Not commenting on the Guardian as much as on basic logic.

Because the world is a complex place and the truth is often subjective. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, as the old saying goes.

There is also the factor that news outlets are commercial enterprises and have a certain vested interest in telling their audience what they want to hear. I used to work for Reuters, and news is a horribly expensive business to be in, the margins are razor thin. Some organizations have workarounds for that (Reuters subsidizes news with financial services, Al Jazeera has a Sheik, the BBC has the taxpayer and so on). The Guardian makes a loss, but someone is footing the bill - what does that someone want you to think?

But as I say, as an individual, you can defend yourself against this, by reading two newspapers, or at least, cross-checking stories. If the Guardian and the Daily Mail ever agreed on anything, then that thing would probably be "the truth" in an objective sense...

Re: China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says

#12

Post by gaius » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 9:01 AM UTC

caoilte wrote: post #10

gaius wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. ALL newspapers, TV channels, websites have an agenda. ALL of them. If you think that your pet one hasn't, then you are in an echo chamber without realizing it, time to take a step back and reevaluate the situation. Best thing is to read two equal-but-opposite new sources. I like The Times for my right-wing slant and the New York Times for my left-wing, that way I get a balanced picture. You might prefer the…

"Best thing is to read two equal-but-opposite news sources. I like The Times for my right-wing slant and the New York Times for my slightly less right-wing slant, that way I understand what both sides of the American establishment want me to think." There, I fixed it for you.

Except that The Times is a British newspaper and IIRC has been since before America.

Thanks for playing.

Re: China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says

#13

Post by rahimnathwani » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 9:32 AM UTC

songgao wrote: post #2

Just now? I thought all news sites that they can't control are already blocked in some way. Some are keywords-triggered instead of fully blocked though. There are always ways to "unblock" blocked websites. HTTPS (for anti-keyword-filtering), SSH Tunnels, VPNs, Proxies, Tor, they all had their presence in Chinese Internet history. And then the government are always able to either block or weaken methods that unblock b…

The technical method of the blocking is indeed interesting. From my home broadband connection:

- I can connect to port 80 on fallback.global-ssl.fastly.net (to which the CNAME entry for www.theguardian.com points).

- I can successfully get a 404 page (from that same server) by doing something like this: GET / HTTP/1.1 Host:www.invaliddomain.com

- I get disconnected if I specify Host: www.theguardian.com in any HTTP request, even if I'm connecting to some IP address that has no relationship with theguardian.com.

So, in this instance, the GFW is not blocking by IP address, nor is it blocking by keyword. It is blocking by the hostname in the Host: header of the HTTP request.

Re: China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says

#14

Post by test1235 » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 9:43 AM UTC

xfs wrote: post #4

songgao wrote: post #2

Just now? I thought all news sites that they can't control are already blocked in some way. Some are keywords-triggered instead of fully blocked though. There are always ways to "unblock" blocked websites. HTTPS (for anti-keyword-filtering), SSH Tunnels, VPNs, Proxies, Tor, they all had their presence in Chinese Internet history. And then the government are always able to either block or weaken methods that unblock b…

The Golden Shield Project has nothing to do with the GFW. The whole Wikipedia article is a misnomer.

Can you explain further for those of us who aren't familiar with either term?

Re: China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says

#15

Post by nisa » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 9:45 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #12

caoilte wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Best thing is to read two equal-but-opposite news sources. I like The Times for my right-wing slant and the New York Times for my slightly less right-wing slant, that way I understand what both sides of the American establishment want me to think." There, I fixed it for you.

Except that The Times is a British newspaper and IIRC has been since before America. Thanks for playing.

A British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Re: China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says

#16

Post by test1235 » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 9:47 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #12

caoilte wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Best thing is to read two equal-but-opposite news sources. I like The Times for my right-wing slant and the New York Times for my slightly less right-wing slant, that way I understand what both sides of the American establishment want me to think." There, I fixed it for you.

Except that The Times is a British newspaper and IIRC has been since before America. Thanks for playing.

Altho' The Times is owned by News UK, which is 'a wholly owned subsidiary of News Corp' which is 'an American multinational mass media company'.

Tenuous, but you can't deny the relationship. Most papers (especially tabloids) in the UK are owned by News Corp.

Re: China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says

#17

Post by jychang » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 10:06 AM UTC

rahimnathwani wrote: post #13

songgao wrote: post #2

Just now? I thought all news sites that they can't control are already blocked in some way. Some are keywords-triggered instead of fully blocked though. There are always ways to "unblock" blocked websites. HTTPS (for anti-keyword-filtering), SSH Tunnels, VPNs, Proxies, Tor, they all had their presence in Chinese Internet history. And then the government are always able to either block or weaken methods that unblock b…

The technical method of the blocking is indeed interesting. From my home broadband connection: - I can connect to port 80 on fallback.global-ssl.fastly.net (to which the CNAME entry for www.theguardian.com points). - I can successfully get a 404 page (from that same server) by doing something like this: GET / HTTP/1.1 Host:www.invaliddomain.com - I get disconnected if I specify Host: www.theguardian.com in any HTTP r…

This implies that HTTPS would easily bypass it.

If only the Guardian had HTTPS support...

Re: China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says

#18

Post by seanmcdirmid » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 10:16 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #6

atmosx wrote: post #3

Not surprisingly so the Guardian is the only newspaper in the western world that might wanna tell you the truth as is, and even take a shot or two while doing it.

Nonsense. ALL newspapers, TV channels, websites have an agenda. ALL of them. If you think that your pet one hasn't, then you are in an echo chamber without realizing it, time to take a step back and reevaluate the situation. Best thing is to read two equal-but-opposite new sources. I like The Times for my right-wing slant and the New York Times for my left-wing, that way I get a balanced picture. You might prefer the…

Right.

The nice thing about the Chinese press (xinhua, chinadaily) is that they are so biased and divorced from reality that no one takes them seriously. Just one step above the North Korean Press. This is quite more honest than the western press, which try to hide their agenda more carefully and present information that we could possibly believe.

Re: China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says

#19

Post by rahimnathwani » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 10:47 AM UTC

jychang wrote: post #17

rahimnathwani wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical method of the blocking is indeed interesting. From my home broadband connection: - I can connect to port 80 on fallback.global-ssl.fastly.net (to which the CNAME entry for www.theguardian.com points). - I can successfully get a 404 page (from that same server) by doing something like this: GET / HTTP/1.1 Host:www.invaliddomain.com - I get disconnected if I specify Host: www.theguardian.com in any HTTP r…

This implies that HTTPS would easily bypass it. If only the Guardian had HTTPS support...

Sadly it's not as simple as that. Facebook has HTTPS support, but TCP connections on port 443 just time out.

The GFW is sophisticated. It would be trivial to stop all obvious VPN traffic (obvious = PPTP and L2TP/ipsec on default ports) without affecting other things, but this isn't done, unless many people connect to the same server over some period of time.

Unidentifiable TCP/UDP traffic on other ports (e.g. OpenVPN on a port number in the 1000s) again isn't blocked. However, if the same TCP/UDP port on the same server is accessed for long enough, and often enough, it will get blocked. Switching to a different port on the same server will probably fix it, until the next time.

Re: China blocks the Guardian, censorship-tracking website says

#20

Post by johneth » Wed, Jan 08, 2014, 11:14 AM UTC

test1235 wrote: post #16

gaius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that The Times is a British newspaper and IIRC has been since before America. Thanks for playing.

Altho' The Times is owned by News UK, which is 'a wholly owned subsidiary of News Corp' which is 'an American multinational mass media company'. Tenuous, but you can't deny the relationship. Most papers (especially tabloids) in the UK are owned by News Corp.

> Most papers (especially tabloids) in the UK are owned by News Corp.

They only own The Sun and The Times. The other ones are owned by various others.