Internet: September 2009 Archives

By Owen Fletcher, IDG News Service | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
September 25, 2009

Security forces with black masks and machine guns on the streets of China's capital are just the more visible side of a security clampdown in the country this month: there is also its secretive battle to control the Internet.

The heightened security comes ahead of a massive military parade Beijing will hold in the heart of the city next week to celebrate China's 60th anniversary of communist rule, an event the government hopes will showcase the country's development and go untarnished by security threats or shows of dissent. China's newest nuclear missiles will be included in the arsenal of weapons and equipment shown off in the parade, according to state-run media.

Security measures have included a crackdown this month on online tools that help users circumvent the "Great Firewall," the set of technical measures China uses to filter the Internet, according to providers of the tools.

"They put more resources into the blocking," said Bill Xia, president of Dynamic Internet Technology, which makes a widely used anti-censorship program called Freegate.

"It has been getting worse and worse this month," he said.

Many expatriates and savvy locals in China rely on Freegate as well as proxy servers and virtual private networks (VPNs) to bypass blocks that China places on Web sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. But accessing some of those tools has become more difficult in recent weeks.

China has always blocked IP (Internet Protocol) addresses it believes are used by Freegate, which routes users' communication through foreign IP addresses to grant access to Web sites blocked in China. But this month it became more aggressive and began blocking a wider range of IP addresses, risking taking down unrelated targets in order to hit more Freegate users, Xia said. The moves have left most users unable to use the program, prompting Xia's company to ready an updated version of Freegate that will be available in a few days.

China also cranked up its efforts to stifle Freegate ahead of another sensitive date this year: the 20th anniversary of its bloody crackdown on student democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

Measures China uses to limit access to certain Web sites include altering entries in the DNS (domain name system), which translates URLs like google.com into the numeric IP addresses used to relay information online, and resetting a computer's connection when it tries to visit a banned site. The country's police force also patrols the Internet for sensitive or pornographic content.

Authorities appear to have stepped up efforts to block other circumvention tools as well. China-based users of Hotspot Shield, another popular program that encrypts and reroutes online activity, have had problems accessing the program's Web site since last month, a representative of developer AnchorFree said in an e-mail.

China last month also started blocking the Web site of Blacklogic, a VPN provider, a company representative said, though the Web site can currently be accessed from China. The company had to switch to a new tunneling protocol when some users recently became unable to connect to any servers, the representative said.

"I'm unable to tell you with a 100 percent guarantee what [technical] measures are taken in China to interfere with our service, but these measures are being taken," the representative said.

Not all VPN providers appear to have been affected. China has mainly blocked free VPNs and proxies while allowing similar paid services, a representative of VPN provider 12vpn said in an e-mail.

Accessing blocked Web sites is fairly easy in China and many users do so through free Web-based proxies. Most VPN users in China are expatriates, but more local Chinese may be signing up as well. 12vpn and other tool providers said their number of China-based users rose after early July, when China blocked Facebook and Twitter.

Some VPN providers declined to comment for a news story for fear of drawing China's attention and potential restrictions on VPNs.

At least one Chinese city has adopted a further measure to monitor Internet traffic. The southern city of Guangzhou this month ordered Internet service providers to install "security monitoring" software on all servers and threatened punishment for failure to do so, according to government notices posted on the blog of one data center management company. Two such software programs, called Blue Shield and Huadun, were recommended in one of the government notices. Huadun's Web site says the program helps server owners remove illegal and pornographic content from their systems.

The software is meant to "create a favorable online environment" for China's National Day celebration next week, the government orders said. A representative of the data center company reached by phone said it put the orders on the blog for reference by clients and that the order applied only to Guangzhou.

Some of China's new security measures could remain in place long after the 60th anniversary celebrations, but others are likely to be lifted. China has long gone through cycles of blocking and allowing access to Web sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia, and updates to Freegate have repeatedly allowed the tool to bypass evolving government security measures against it.

Still, Chinese users have posted skeptical notes on Twitter about China's newest Internet controls. When asked if Twitter and Facebook would be unblocked after the National Day celebration next week, one user said they would not.

"Last year we had the Olympics, this year is National Day (which actually happens every year), and next year is the World Expo," the user wrote. "Actually, every year and every month and every day are sensitive."

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By Marianne Barriaux - Agence France Presse | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
September 10, 2009

China has announced that all songs posted on music websites must receive prior approval and foreign lyrics must be translated into Chinese, in a new push to control online content.

The culture ministry says the rules are designed to step up regulation of the Internet, curb rampant piracy and protect intellectual property rights, but experts say they will be difficult to implement.

"If there are thousands of websites that provide content, how can a single government check all of the content in just a few months?" said Liu Ning, an analyst with Beijing-based high-tech consultancy BDA.

The official Global Times said Thursday that music providers would have to submit songs for approval by December 31, at which date the new rules are to go into effect.

They would also have to translate the lyrics of foreign songs into Chinese, the report said.

In a statement sent to AFP, the ministry said the rules were necessary "to regulate the transmission of cultural information, guarantee the safety of the nation's culture, and regulate public ethics."

It said information that violated public morality or spread pornography and violence "continuously appeared" online, "seriously damaging the healthy development of China's online cultural market."

China has at least 338 million Internet users, more than any other country in the world.

The government regularly blocks online content it deems unhealthy, which includes pornography and violence, but also information critical of the government, a censorship system dubbed the "Great Firewall of China."

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By Jonathan Ansfield | The New York Times
September 05, 2009

News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments, a shift in policy that the country's Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.

Until recently, users could weigh in on news items on many of the affected sites more anonymously, often without registering at all, though the sites were obligated to screen all posts, and the posts could still be traced via Internet protocol addresses.

But in early August, without notification of a change, news portals like Sina, Netease, Sohu and scores of other sites began asking unregistered users to sign in under their real names and identification numbers, said top editors at two of the major portals affected. A Sina staff member also confirmed the change.

The editors said the sites were putting into effect a confidential directive issued in late July by the State Council Information Office, one of the main government bodies responsible for supervising the Internet in China.

The new step is not foolproof, the editors acknowledged. It was possible for a reporter to register successfully on several major sites under falsified names and ID and cellphone numbers.

But the requirement adds a critical new layer of surveillance to mainstream sites in China, which were already heavily policed. Further regulations of the same nature also appeared to be in the pipeline.

And while the authorities called the measure part of a drive to forge greater "social responsibility" and "civility" among users, they moved forward surreptitiously and suppressed reports about it, said the editors and others in the media industry familiar with the measure, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid putting their jobs at risk.

Asked why the policy was pushed through unannounced, the chief editor of one site said, "The influence of public opinion on the Net is still too big."

Government Internet regulators have been trying to usher in real-name registration controls since 2003, when they ordered Internet cafes around China to demand that customers show identification, nominally to keep out minors. Last year, lawmakers and regulators began discussing legislation on a more extensive "real name system," as it is known.

But such proposals have aroused heated debate over the purview of the state to restrict China's online community, which is the largest in the world at about 340 million people and growing.

Proponents, led by officials and state-connected academics in the information security field, argue that mandatory controls are necessary to help subdue inflammatory attacks, misinformation and other illegal activity deemed to endanger social order. They often note registration requirements on large sites in South Korea to support their point.

Critics counter that government regulation represents an incursion on free speech, individual privacy and the watchdog role of the Web in China.

The critics say sites and users should retain the right to discipline themselves. Given the country's huge population of Internet users and its failure to guarantee freedom of expression, they argue, the case of China is hardly analogous to that of South Korea.

In 2006, Internet users and the news media rebuffed one official proposal to require real-name registration on blog hosting sites. Star bloggers denounced the notion, while ordinary users overwhelmingly rejected it in surveys conducted on sites like Sina.

In another key test of the policy earlier this year, the legislature in Hangzhou, near Shanghai, passed a regulation that would have placed the requirement on users who comment, blog or play games on sites based there. Amid a popular outcry, however, the city shied away from enforcing the regulation.

Central authorities have gone to new lengths to tame online activity in 2009, a year peppered with politically delicate anniversaries.

Government censors have closed thousands of sites in a continuing war on "vulgarity," closed liberal forums and blogs for spreading "harmful information," blocked access to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and cut off Internet service where serious unrest has erupted, notably in the Xinjiang region of the west after deadly clashes between ethnic Uighurs and Han in July. Increasingly, officials have defended the Web shutdowns on the grounds of national security.

The government recently set off an international furor when it ordered that all computers sold in China come prepackaged with pornography filterting software that authorities could remotely control. Officials were forced to retreat from the order after international companies and trade bodies protested and Chinese hackers showed that the software was designed to block politically offensive content as well.

The authorities had aimed to avoid a similar showdown over the new real-name requirement. "We had no recourse to challenge it," said the news editor of another portal.

Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong-based newspaper loyal to Beijing, first leaked news of the State Council edict in late July. But the report was scrubbed from the paper's Web site within a few days.

Another state newspaper tried to follow up on the Ta Kung Pao report soon thereafter, the paper's editors said, but they were forced to abort their article because they were warned that the order was a state secret.

The State Council Information Office had yet to respond to a list of submitted questions about the move.

The new mandate did not appear to affect formerly registered users of the portals. Nor did it affect blog hosts, forums or government news sites like People's Daily or Xinhua.

Whether because it had an impact mainly on rookie users or because of the void of news about it, bloggers in China were unusually slow to recognize the measure. But those who did were critical.

One commentator on the popular forum Tianya wrote, "Not daring to write one's real name, in truth, is a form of self-protection for the weak."

There were signals in the state media in recent weeks that more name registration measures would follow.

An influential advocate of the policy, Fang Bingxing, the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told a forum in August that the "time was ripe" to roll it out widely to bolster information security, newspapers reported.

A trail of comments on Sina thrashed the report.

Late last month, the Communist Party-run Guangming Daily ran a positive story about a city government portal in western China that imposed the requirement on new bloggers, calling it a "forerunner."

Hu Yong, a new media specialist at Peking University, said government-enforced registration requirements carried long-term side effects.

"Netizens will have less trust in the government, and to a certain extent, the development of the industry will be impeded," he said.

From a comparison of the most commented-on articles in July and August on a number of portals it was hard to determine whether the volume of posts had been affected so far.

But both editors at two of the major portals affected said their sites had shown marked drop-offs.

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