China market

^{Photo:www.rolotec.ch}

Last spring when I lived in Shanghai for three months I experienced the effects of The Great Firewall. I'm originally from a small town called Falun in Sweden (Falun has nothing in common with the religious group Falun Gong which is banned in China). When I tried to send E-mails and mentioned the word Falun to friends and family in Sweden they didn't reach their destination. I also tried to get in touch with my old high school in Falun and learned that the web-site was blocked.

The blog-population in China is gigantic, 34 million blogs according to the news agency Xinhua. The blogsphere in China has shown a 30-fold increase in four years. But still, Beijing's never-ending crackdown on blogs has led to routine censorship that has drawn wide criticism from human rights organizations.

Computer experts from the University of Cambridge claim they not only to have breached the Great Firewall of China, but have found a way to use the firewall to launch denial-of-service attacks against specific Internet Protocol addresses in the country. The firewall works in part by inspecting Web traffic for certain keywords that the Chinese government wishes to censor, including political ideologies and groups it finds unacceptable.

The Cambridge research group tested the firewall by firing data packets containing the word "Falun" at it, a reference to the Falun Gong The researchers found that it was possible to circumvent the Chinese intrusion detection systems . "The machines in China allow data packets in and out, but send a burst of resets to shut connections if they spot particular keywords," explained Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge computer laboratory. "If you drop all the reset packets at both ends of the connection, which is relatively trivial to do, the Web page is transferred just fine."

Clayton added that this means the Chinese firewall can be used to launch denial-of-service attacks against specific IP addresses within China, including those of the Chinese government itself. By forging the source address of a packet containing a "sensitive" keyword, people could trigger the firewall to block access between source and destination addresses for up to an hour at a time. -So is the Great Firewall problem solved? It may be if you are a hacker!

I think it's insane that China, the "Middle Kingdom" and centre for International trade doesn't allow their citizens to find the information they like on the Internet. I really hope that the media situation will improve in pace with the modernization and International influence on China.In May I had the opportunity to meet one of the leaders of the communist party in Nanjing and asked him about the media situation in China. What happened? The interpreter refused to translate my question into Chinese and the Communist leader started to tell my about all the preparations for the Olympic Games 2008 instead. The Great Fire of China also exists in oral communication!

If you want to learn more about the media situation in China have a look at the report from the Swedish Embassy in Beijing

^{Source:http://news.com.com}