128 lines
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128 lines
6.3 KiB
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From fork-admin@xent.com Mon Sep 23 22:48:30 2002
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Subject: How about subsidizing SSL access to Google?
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From: Rohit Khare <khare@alumni.caltech.edu>
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To: fork@spamassassin.taint.org
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Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 14:44:41 -0700
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[a cheeky letter to the editors of the Economist follows, along with the
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article I was commenting on... Rohit]
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In your article about Chinese attempts to censor Google last week ("The
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Search Goes On", Sept. 19th), the followup correctly noted that the most
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subversive aspect of Google's service is not its card catalog, which
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merely points surfers in the right direction, but the entire library. By
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maintaining what amounts to a live backup of the entire World Wide Web,
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if you can get to Google's cache, you can read anything you'd like.
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The techniques Chinese Internet Service Providers are using to enforce
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these rules, however, all depend on the fact that traffic to and from
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Google, or indeed almost all public websites, is unencrypted. Almost all
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Web browsers, however, include support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
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encryption for securing credit card numbers and the like. Upgrading to
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SSL makes it effectively impossible for a 'man-in-the-middle' to meddle;
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censorship would have to be imposed on each individual computer in
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China. The only choice left is to either ban the entire site (range of
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IP addresses), but not the kind of selective filtering reported on in
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the article.
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Of course, the additional computing power to encrypt all this traffic
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costs real money. If the United States is so concerned about the free
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flow of information, why shouldn't the Broadcasting Board of Governors
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sponsor an encrypted interface to Google, or for that matter, the rest
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of the Web?
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To date, public diplomacy efforts have focused on public-sector
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programming for the Voice of America, Radio Sawa, and the like. Just
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imagine if the US government got into the business of subsidizing secure
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access to private-sector media instead. Nothing illustrates the freedom
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of the press as much as the wacky excess of the press itself -- and most
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of it is already salted away at Google and the Internet Archive project.
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On second thought, I can hardly imagine this Administration *promoting*
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the use of encryption to uphold privacy rights. Never mind...
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Best,
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Rohit Khare
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===========================================================
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The search goes on
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China backtracks on banning Google<6C>up to a point
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Sep 19th 2002 | BEIJING
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From The Economist print edition
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IN CHINESE, the nickname for Google, an American Internet search engine,
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is gougou, meaning <20>doggy<67>. For the country's fast-growing population of
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Internet users (46m, according to an official estimate), it is proving
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an elusive creature. Earlier this month, the Chinese authorities blocked
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access to Google from Internet service providers in China<6E>apparently
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because the search engine helped Chinese users to get access to
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forbidden sites. Now, after an outcry from those users, access has been
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restored.
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An unusual climbdown by China's zealous Internet censors? Hardly. More
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sophisticated controls have now been imposed that make it difficult to
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use Google to search for material deemed offensive to the government.
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Access is still blocked to the cached versions of web pages taken by
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Google as it trawls the Internet. These once provided a handy way for
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Chinese users to see material stored on blocked websites.
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After the blocking of Google on August 31st, many Chinese Internet users
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posted messages on bulletin boards in China protesting against the move.
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Their anger was again aroused last week when some Chinese Internet
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providers began rerouting users trying to reach the blocked Google site
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to far less powerful search engines in China.
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Duncan Clark, the head of a Beijing-based technology consultancy firm,
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BDA (China) Ltd, says China is trying a new tactic in its efforts to
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censor the Internet. Until recently, it had focused on blocking
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individual sites, including all pages stored on them. Now it seems to be
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filtering data transmitted to or from foreign websites to search for key
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words that might indicate undesirable content. For example earlier this
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week when using Eastnet, a Beijing-based Internet provider, a search on
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Google for Falun Gong<6E>a quasi-Buddhist exercise sect outlawed in China<6E>
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usually aborted before all the results had time to appear. Such a search
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also rendered Google impossible to use for several minutes.
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