Not just any firewall, but the Great Firewall of China

Sep 13, 2007 07:40 GMT  ·  By

I guess you've heard of GFC before. It's a Web policy that the Chinese have installed in order to filter web content. It has been enabled by their government and it's strict as well as blunt. It will not allow users to access certain WebPages; not only the ones with an anti-commie content, but also pages that are considered "bad". And, boy, do they have a large understanding for the word "bad". They ban lots of sites automatically, just for having certain "bothering" content.

But the thing is that the Great Firewall of China doesn't actually act like a firewall. Firewalls sometimes prompt users about certain connections, but not this one. It acts more as a blacklist. And a simple one too - it just contains a lot of keywords. And say a site would contain a word from the blacklist, well, their policy doesn't just censor a part of the page. Nope. It restricts any access to that page. And being based on words, and not in Internet Protocol, no matter what you do, or where you move it to, it will still be banned.

But we have been spammed for many years now, and spammers have shown us how easily they can bypass filters by somehow disrupting the words but still sending a clear message. Suppose you have the word "massacre" on your site, the GFC will block the whole page, but if you have the word "mas$acre" or "mass.acre" or "ma s s acre" then the filter will render your site as clean. I knew that something good had to come out of spam! Not saying that this should be used to undermine their government or anything, but it's unjust for some sites to be blocked, just because they contain certain words, without even being related to something anti-commie. In any case, there is not much that can be done against the GFC yet, because it filters thousands of words and expressions while only about a hundred are known.