<story><title>How great is the great firewall? Measuring China’s DNS censorship [pdf]</title><url>https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec21-hoang.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jiggawatts</author><text>As someone living blissfully unaware of the struggles people go through in countries with rampant government censorship -- sorry, &lt;i&gt;control for the public good&lt;/i&gt; -- of the Internet, it was a bit a of a shock when I got some first-hand experience.&lt;p&gt;I had a customer that wanted to set up some web servers in China so that they could sign up students for some classes at their school.&lt;p&gt;At first I just assumed that this is a straightforward matter of selecting a Chinese region in a public cloud, deploying a couple of web servers, and we&amp;#x27;d be done by lunch. Easy!&lt;p&gt;Turns out... that this is actually technically achievable, as long as: You have a Chinese business registered in China, you have a photo ID that you register with the &amp;quot;local authorities&amp;quot; (in person!), pay in Renminbi from a Chinese bank account, and read and write Chinese.&lt;p&gt;No, really. That&amp;#x27;s the process. &lt;i&gt;Really:&lt;/i&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;azure&amp;#x2F;china&amp;#x2F;overview-checklist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;azure&amp;#x2F;china&amp;#x2F;overview-checkl...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;They want to make sure they have &lt;i&gt;someone&lt;/i&gt; by the balls. It&amp;#x27;s either you personally, or someone willing to step up and take the risk of jailtime on your behalf if you publish anything the Grand Pooh Xi doesn&amp;#x27;t like.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, I can spin up a server in Dubai or South Africa or Brazil like... &lt;i&gt;right now.&lt;/i&gt; No paperwork. No prostrating myself in front of the Police to beg for permission to be able to post government-approved content.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, on the map of AWS or Azure regions -- or on any CDNs map -- there&amp;#x27;s just a &lt;i&gt;hole&lt;/i&gt; where China is. It&amp;#x27;s like those photos of Earth from space, where you can see the city lights glowing brightly everywhere except for North Korea, where there&amp;#x27;s just &lt;i&gt;darkness&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Remind me, why do we do business with these people again? Why do we give them our money?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway984393</author><text>You have to get your ICP number registered by a Chinese national (like you say) and then display it on the footer of all your web pages (if you don&amp;#x27;t, your site will be taken down &amp;amp; you&amp;#x27;ll be fined). You&amp;#x27;ve also got to store all data on Chinese citizens on a Chinese server.&lt;p&gt;And they don&amp;#x27;t mention this on that page, but for every publc IP you want to use in China, you have to re-submit your ICP filing&amp;#x2F;license paperwork, listing every public IP you will use, and what it is used for. So don&amp;#x27;t accidentally destroy your AWS load balancer, or you&amp;#x27;ll need to re-file all your paperwork before you can bring your site back up! (AWS load balancers can&amp;#x27;t be configured with static IPs)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Remind me, why do we do business with these people again? Why do we give them our money?&lt;p&gt;Because then &lt;i&gt;we&lt;/i&gt; get money. It&amp;#x27;s the largest &amp;quot;emerging&amp;quot; market in the world. If you have a product that makes 1 million dollars in the US, do some localization work and launch it in China, and you&amp;#x27;ve doubled your money. Every major corporation is actively working on launching in China, because it&amp;#x27;s obvious that they&amp;#x27;re leaving money on the table by &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; being in China.</text></comment>
<story><title>How great is the great firewall? Measuring China’s DNS censorship [pdf]</title><url>https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec21-hoang.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jiggawatts</author><text>As someone living blissfully unaware of the struggles people go through in countries with rampant government censorship -- sorry, &lt;i&gt;control for the public good&lt;/i&gt; -- of the Internet, it was a bit a of a shock when I got some first-hand experience.&lt;p&gt;I had a customer that wanted to set up some web servers in China so that they could sign up students for some classes at their school.&lt;p&gt;At first I just assumed that this is a straightforward matter of selecting a Chinese region in a public cloud, deploying a couple of web servers, and we&amp;#x27;d be done by lunch. Easy!&lt;p&gt;Turns out... that this is actually technically achievable, as long as: You have a Chinese business registered in China, you have a photo ID that you register with the &amp;quot;local authorities&amp;quot; (in person!), pay in Renminbi from a Chinese bank account, and read and write Chinese.&lt;p&gt;No, really. That&amp;#x27;s the process. &lt;i&gt;Really:&lt;/i&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;azure&amp;#x2F;china&amp;#x2F;overview-checklist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;azure&amp;#x2F;china&amp;#x2F;overview-checkl...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;They want to make sure they have &lt;i&gt;someone&lt;/i&gt; by the balls. It&amp;#x27;s either you personally, or someone willing to step up and take the risk of jailtime on your behalf if you publish anything the Grand Pooh Xi doesn&amp;#x27;t like.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, I can spin up a server in Dubai or South Africa or Brazil like... &lt;i&gt;right now.&lt;/i&gt; No paperwork. No prostrating myself in front of the Police to beg for permission to be able to post government-approved content.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, on the map of AWS or Azure regions -- or on any CDNs map -- there&amp;#x27;s just a &lt;i&gt;hole&lt;/i&gt; where China is. It&amp;#x27;s like those photos of Earth from space, where you can see the city lights glowing brightly everywhere except for North Korea, where there&amp;#x27;s just &lt;i&gt;darkness&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Remind me, why do we do business with these people again? Why do we give them our money?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fuckchina</author><text>Your comment is one of the reasons why my account is named like this, their dictatorship is absolutely ridiculous, btw they even claim they got democracy and free speech over there[1].&lt;p&gt;[1]: Simply search &amp;quot;中國 民主&amp;quot; or something like &amp;quot;
中國 言論自由&amp;quot; and you could found various bulls****. here&amp;#x27;s one of them ( &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.qingdaonews.com&amp;#x2F;content&amp;#x2F;2010-06&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;content_8398807.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.qingdaonews.com&amp;#x2F;content&amp;#x2F;2010-06&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;content_83988...&lt;/a&gt; )</text></comment>