GFW, sth you cannot specify what it is

I knew what to write for the blog the day I was back to China for CNY break. Was busy with sth else and don’t want the awful topic to ruin my holiday. Whatever, since failing to finish the post on time, I decide to force myself to “have more than text” in the coming blog posts.

About two months ago, Mattermost was broken for a short time, when one of my Chinese lab mate had to Wechat me that “pls help to let Ilya know that I emailed him”. We had a back-up Telegram group, but “Eh, my phone has no VPN”.

Ilya was pretty much “???” when knowing that Telegram is also banned. It’s actually hard to answer questions like “why GFW bans that?” “What is not banned in China?”, even for me who is confident to be knowledge on the sensitive topics of Chinese.

It’s fine. Vagueness is common: just as those account of Internet celebrities getting banned for no (public-known) reason, it is hard to expect a clear definition of “what is GFW”. I can explain “why Telegram is banned” but the reasons in my mind are neither necessary nor sufficient for the banning.

After GPT is replaced by Gemini in my daily use, sth unexpected happened this year: it’s not hard to realise that Google controls the network traffic restrictedly, and my cheap VPN didn’t survive (also failed to connect to Claude). Basically, the barrier is growing higher in the new era. Or in another word, the people in certain area lose the chance to boost their life with the new technologies.

Well, let’s ignore the accessibility of LLMs. Thinking from the view of information retrieval, the most important function of the Internet. Youtube or Wikipedia are banned for sure, because several “hidden” events can be easily found there. Another interesting instance is Github: not banned but tainted. You can access Github with randomly broken connection, and TCP-based operations are seldom working.

I started reading with diverse topics, so one day I noticed that the MUSE project which can be accessed at my home is not accessible when I was at somewhere else. What happened is that, different telco providers are having different taint of DNS. If you try to test the connection of https://muse.jhu.edu/ via https://www.itdog.cn/http/, that’s amazing: in most (but not all) of the China Telecom’s servers, the connection is blocked; and occasionally, the connection is blocked China Mobile’s servers.

The connection checking is worth playing with, although a not-red result won’t imply that the website is not blocked. The most unexpected all-red result is the connection to SSRN, which is totally academic. Who’s next? Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?

I don’t know what is the clue here. GFW is trying to achieve sth undefinable, and obviously unachievable. It combines different shitty techniques to disgust Internet users. T hinking in another way: what if MFG (the reversed GFW) is implemented? China is an export-dependent country, and the isolation can only make things bad.

Joe Biden: Yes! I lift a rock only to drop it on my own foot!