Quote:
Originally Posted by VincentVega  The great firewall of China |
They still get around that. I was talking with some Chinese people from China (?!) and I brought up their firewall and his reply was simply "Yeah, but anyone with a little bit of computer knowledge can get around it." (Corrected English).
So even though they think they're censoring their people, their people are still getting around it and seeing any content they want.
If they were to try to set up something similar here, it just wouldn't work.
The infrastructure of the current internet is just not set up to be handled that way.
In order for something like this to work, they would have to do any of the following:
- Set up a very restricting firewall on just about every broadband, DSL, fiber, etc. provider.
- Have each individual provider route all traffic to a central location that does the filtering
- Filter traffic at the provider based on the service port or by packet inspection
None of these are plausible.
In the case of 1, it would make maintaining such content a pain. There are too many places that provide internet access and too many places to deal with. Then who's to say that those providers won't modify, tweak, or mess with that firewall? It would require introducing new protocols to do checksumming and other methods that would verify it hasn't been tampered with.
In the case of 2, we do not have the bandwidth or infrastructure to pipe all internet traffic in the US through a central location. Imagine if you were trying to VNC to your neighbors computer or connect to your home computer from work, and you had to go all the way across the US to have your content scanned/filtered before being send back to your home computer. If providers were just to redirect their local traffic to other local systems without filtering it, then the whole idea is shot down because people will just start hosting and delivering their own content.
In the case of 3, most providers aren't equipped with enough hardware to do deep packet inspection. If they simply filter by port, then people will just start running servers on other ports. Or they might start making protocols that behave similar to FTP or torrents where random ports are assigned and used. Deep packet inspecting all traffic would require obtaining a ton of new systems just to handle it.
In any of these cases, everyone will just start encrypting traffic by default. There are plenty of perfect forward encryption schemes that prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. This would make it impossible for them to scan previous traffic, as well as being impossible to scan active traffic without being detected.
