Free Republic

A networking error has caused computers in Chile and the U.S. to come under the control of the Great Firewall of China, redirecting Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube users to Chinese servers. Security experts are not sure exactly how this happened, but it appears that at least one ISP recently began fetching high-level DNS (domain name server) information from what's known as a root DNS server, based in China. That server, operated out of China by Swedish service provider Netnod, returned DNS information intended for Chinese users, effectively spreading China's network censorship overseas. China tightly controls access to a number of...

While there has been an international arms embargo on China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, this ban did not cover espionage and computer security hardware and software. China has exploited this by importing all the hardware and software they could get access to. Some items were considered illegal for export for national security reasons. But lots of valuable gear is available to sale, although sometimes only to government agencies. The Chinese have been particularly keen to obtain the latest corporate Internet security and user management software. This stuff has been a key component in the Chinese effort to manage...

China has a long history of restricting internet access, but the Green Dam initiative would have represented a new front in the war on information. For the last decade, China has been fighting – and largely losing – a running battle against the internet, and the free access to information it brings. The government, so used to managing and monitoring the flow of news and disemmination of information within its borders, has at times appeared impotent in the face of a universal technology that has no respect for time zones or geography.