----- Forwarded message from Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> ----- From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 17:39:04 -0800 To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Bypassing the Great Firewall of CHina X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.746.2) Reply-To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [Note: This item comes from reader Randall. DLH] From: Randall <rvh40@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: March 3, 2006 1:16:40 PM PST To: cyberia <CYBERIA-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Dave <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>, Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: Bypassing the Great Firewall of CHina <http://htdaw.blogsource.com/post.mhtml?post_id=267971> Friday, March 03, 2006 at 4:14 PM EST Peggy Lim and Anne Krishnan, Staff Writers Bill Xia wants to lead a life guided by simple principles. Truthfulness. Compassion. Tolerance. But he's caught up in a complicated business: staying a step ahead of China's Internet censors. Xia's North Carolina-based company, Dynamic Internet Technology, disguises Web sites so they can slip past China's firewall filters. It allows Internet users in China to browse otherwise blocked pages involving such taboo topics as human rights, banned religious groups and peasant uprisings. Trying to outwit China's cybercops is a cat-and-mouse game, not without risks. Xia is reluctant to have his photograph taken. He agreed to be interviewed on the condition that the city where he lives and works not be disclosed. He met with a reporter in a quiet corner of a Triangle Starbucks. Though they keep a low profile, Xia and like-minded people who have been dubbed "hacktivists" have recently been thrust into the international limelight. On Feb. 15, a congressional subcommittee hauled executives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco Systems into hearings about their business dealings in China. Legislators also recently introduced bills that would prohibit U.S. businesses from bending to censorship in other countries and promote technology like Xia's to let people circumvent government censorship online. "It's not that suddenly we did something new," said Xia, who founded Dynamic Internet Technology in 2001. But attention on the other companies, he said, prompted people to ask: Is it possible to get around China's firewall? "And yes," he said, "actually, people have been succeeding at this for years." Studying physics in an Ohio graduate school in the 1990s, the Chinese native was once content to be ensconced in some university library, cozying up to an equation-filled textbook. He planned to become a professor. But that trajectory changed. Finding a mission Xia became friends with some computer science students. And he joined Falun Gong, a group that combines calisthenics with spiritual cultivation. The Chinese government banned Falun Gong as a subversive organization in 1999. Xia, who is in his early 30s, said his dramatic awakening came in July 1999 when China started to crack down on millions of Falun Gong followers, imprisoning and punishing practitioners. "Then it became personal," Xia said. He noticed the discrepancy between his own experience in Falun Gong and news about it from China, which branded it an "evil cult." He saw how discussion was restricted on online Chinese forums, how e-mail mentioning the subject got dropped. "I started to see the need to let people access uncensored info," Xia said. Each day, his company sends out e-mail to millions of Chinese Internet users with links to the Web pages of a short roster of clients, including Human Rights in China and the United States-sponsored Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Visits to such sites spike whenever there seems to be a government cover-up, as during the initial outbreak of a deadly respiratory virus in 2003 or the reported shooting of protesting villagers in December. Organizations such as Voice of America are an important source of income for Xia's company. Over the past three years, the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, has directed about $2 million to Xia's company, Dynamic Internet Technology, and $66,000 to UltraReach, another company that circumvents censorship. The money pays for Dynamic Internet Technology's e-mail service for VOA and Radio Free Asia. It also supports technology that continuously changes the organizations' Web addresses to escape Chinese government shutdowns. Still, Xia, who depends on his wife's salary and a team of about 10 core volunteers, says the company is constantly on the brink of bankruptcy. "We spend all we have on DynaWeb," he said. DynaWeb, Dynamic Internet Technology's main tool, offers Web users in China portals and software to anonymously view practically any blocked Web site, except some pornographic sites that the company also blocks. Pressure from China To grab a piece of the booming Chinese market, American Internet companies have bowed to pressure from Chinese censors. Yahoo China revealed private information to the Chinese government that led to the jailing of a journalist. Microsoft's MSN yanked a controversial web log from the Internet. Congress summoned Cisco for making the hardware China uses to censor the Internet. And in January, Google announced that it had launched a search engine that filters out results proscribed by the Chinese government. A search for "Falun Dafa" on Google.com and on the company's China-specific portal Google.cn, yields different results on a comparison tool developed by the OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration of universities in the United States, Canada and England. Google.com returns official and informational Web pages about the Falun Gong or Falun Dafa faith; Google.cn returns Chinese government memos and sites calling Falun Gong heretical and absurd. Google's vice president of global communications testified in congressional hearings that the company had to obey the communist government's rules to provide good service for Chinese customers and shore up its declining market share in the face of "explosive growth" of the Internet in China. Arvind Malhotra, a global entrepreneurship professor at Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill, said he thinks Google made the right business decision. "We hold values here," he said, "but it is just too big of a market, too good of a market to not compromise and bend a little bit." But businesses have more leverage than they think, said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley's graduate journalism school. American companies provide the best technology and the best services, he said, and China's Internet could not develop as well without them. Two-way leverage "They obviously need the China market, but China also needs these companies," he said. "When the companies are being pushed by the public here and the government, there will be a space for them to negotiate with the [Chinese] government, pushing back much more than they are now." So far, Xia and his colleagues have been able to avoid a backlash from the U.S. side of the technology world. In 2004, the anti-virus company Symantec briefly labeled Xia's software a Trojan horse, which masquerades as a useful program, but once opened executes malicious code. Symantec quickly removed Xia's software from its list of viruses after articles about the technology came out. Joe Freddoso, a spokesman for Cisco Systems in Research Triangle Park, said he doesn't consider tools that redirect Web surfers to different sites to be a security threat, either. "When there's something that interrupts the information flow, you're going to have smart minds that figure out ways around that stoppage," he said. "It's normal business on the Internet." Still, Xia is protective of the identity of his small team of volunteers, some of whom are software programmers in major companies across the United States. Xia, the company's only full-time staff member, doesn't want the others to risk their jobs for the maverick work they do on the side. He also acknowledges that his company must limit DynaWeb to Chinese-only versions. The company hides it from English-language users for fear they might use it to skirt corporate firewalls at their workplaces. When outrunning China's censors while remaining incognito gets stressful, Xia retreats inward to meditate on the basic Falun Gong tenets that motivated him in the first place. Truthfulness. Compassion. Tolerance. But he reflects: "To be a good person ... throughout the years, I discover, that's really hard to do." Staff writer Peggy Lim can be reached at 836-5799 or plim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ========= WHAT COMPANY DOES AND WHO USES IT What does Dynamic Internet Technology do? * It sends out mass e-mail messages for organizations including Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Asia and Human Rights in China. It uses techniques similar to spam's to get by Internet Service Provider filters. It might, for instance, substitute "V_O_A" for blacklisted words such as "VOA." * Its main technology, DynaWeb, allows Chinese Web users to anonymously view practically any blocked Web site. How does a user access DynaWeb? An Internet user in China can send the company e-mail or an instant message to get the latest working IP addresses or URLs for DynaWeb. A DynaWeb site acts as a portal from which a user can connect to practically any banned site. The Web addresses must constantly change, because China's cybercops can block a Web site within several weeks or hours. A user can also download DynaWeb software called Freegate. Freegate enables Internet browsers to directly access banned content. "The software knows lots of holes and how to identify new holes," company founder Bill Xia said. Who uses DynaWeb? About 100,000 people in China use DynaWeb each day, Xia said. That's a tiny fraction of China's estimated 120 million Web users. But Xiao Qiang, a University of California, Berkeley, professor, says Freegate is important because of the types of people who use it: journalists, writers and academics who are thinking and writing about international politics and China's domestic affairs. ONLINE Dynamic Internet Technology www.dit-inc.us/ UltraReach www.ultrareach.com/company/ You can test how the search engine results on Google.com differ from those on Google.cn at www.opennet.net/google_china. http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/411976.html Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com> ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
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