Well, it has finally been confirmed — I will be in Guangzhou in the next two days for Open Source China 2007. See you there.
Tag Archive for 'China'
I noticed a strange new development in Beijing since I last visited here (and practically since the last time I wrote something here); almost all restaurants now require payment immediately after ordering. Even ones that didn’t use to do this, the ones that you wouldn’t expect to require this now do.
Does anybody else see this? Why? It’s not as if people are running off or something…
The banner reads, “Register as a voter by law, exercise your voting rights”. Shot at a residential development in Beijing.
See, even they are more democratic than us in Hong Kong, at least superficially…
I was trying to get my caffeine fix this afternoon at a Starbucks (well where else can you get half decent coffee in Nanjing…)
Me: I’d like a tall latte, please.
Starbucks: Hot or iced?
Me: Hot.
Starbucks: Wouldn’t it be too hot in this kind of weather?
Me: No, I prefer my coffee hot, thanks.
Starbucks: You sure you don’t want to try our iced coffee?
Me: No.
Starbucks: Please be careful, you might get heat exhaustion.
Me: JUST GIVE ME A HOT LATTE!
Starbucks: Do you want syrup with that?
Me: (WTF? Only iced coffee come with syrup) NO!
……
So we thought one way to defeat the bloody GFW is to just silently drop all RST flagged packets, which is very simple to do with Linux and iptables.
Over the past month, our colleagues in mainland China have been complaining about not being able to connect to our email server, which is located in Hong Kong. Connecting to ports 25 (SMTP), 143 (IMAP4), 110 (POP3), 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS) and 22 (ssh) often results in an immediate ‘Connection closed by foreign host.’
Well, not quite immediate… often some bits can be passed through, for example:
# telnet mail.sw-linux.com 143 Trying 202.153.106.243... Connected to mail.sw-linux.com. Escape character is '^]'. * OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT IDLE ACL ACL2=UNION STARTTLS XMAGICTRASH] Courier-IMAP ready. Copyright 1998-2004 Double Precision, Inc. See COPYING for distribution information. Connection closed by foreign host.
# telnet mail.sw-linux.com 25 Trying 202.153.106.243... Connected to 202.153.106.243. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mail.sw-linux.com ESMTP Exim 3.35 #1 Fri, 09 Jun 2006 13:14:12 +0800 HELO nanjing 250 mail.sw-linux.com Hello nanjing [218.104.86.222] MAIL FROM: xxxx@sw-linux.com 250 <xxxx @sw-linux.com> is syntactically correct RCPT TO: xxxx@sw-linux.com 250 <xxxx @sw-linux.com> is syntactically correct Connection closed by foreign host.
So what do we do? Let’s do a trace of the actual TCP/IP packets, courtesy of ethereal. Here’s what our Hong Kong server sees:
Capturing on eth0 0.000000 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [SYN] Seq=0 Ack=0 Win=5840 Len=0 MSS=1460 TSV=92231345 TSER=0 WS=6 0.000811 202.153.106.243 -> 218.104.86.222 TCP smtp > 39758 [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=5792 Len=0 MSS=1460 TSV=15684968 TSER=92231345 WS=7 0.102624 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=5888 Len=0 TSV=92231453 TSER=15684968 0.103506 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [RST] Seq=1 Ack=1302803663 Win=0 Len=0 0.190447 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [RST] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=0 Len=0 0.231670 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [RST] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=0 Len=0
And from our Nanjing client:
Capturing on eth0 0.000000 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [SYN] Seq=0 Ack=0 Win=5840 Len=0 MSS=1460 TSV=92231345 TSER=0 WS=6 0.107777 202.153.106.243 -> 218.104.86.222 TCP smtp > 39758 [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=5792 Len=0 MSS=1460 TSV=15684968 TSER=92231345 WS=7 0.107813 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=5888 Len=0 TSV=92231453 TSER=15684968 0.234913 202.153.106.243 -> 218.104.86.222 TCP smtp > 39758 [RST] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=0 Len=0 0.269906 202.153.106.243 -> 218.104.86.222 TCP smtp > 39758 [RST] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=0 Len=0
Now I’m no networking expert, but look at all these packets with the RST flag set… no wonder the connection drops. Even more strangely, look at the line I bolded; that Ack number seems to have came out of nowhere.
Man-in-the-middle, perhaps?
So this morning at around 11am, we opened another set of ports with non-standard port numbers for our mainland colleagues to use. It worked… while it lasts; even these ports were blocked by around 12:20pm ten minutes later.
What can we do?
Update Duh, this is very likely due to the enforcement of the new anti-spam legislation.
No, this isn’t really about Google.cn not having a legal ICP license. Someone just doesn’t like what they have done, especially in how they are telling users they are censored (emphasis mine):
But the China Business Times, a business newspaper with a sometimes nationalist slant, blasted Google for even telling people that links are censored. “Does a business operating in China need to constantly tell customers that it’s abiding by the laws of the land?” it said, adding that Google had “incited” a debate about censorship. The paper likened Google to “an uninvited guest” telling a dinner host “the dishes don’t suit his taste, but he’s willing to eat them as a show of respect to the host.”
Yes it’s all about face-giving. Go ahead and close it down I say. People still uses the uncensored Google.com instead anyway.
That BitTorrent case sure did cause quite a bit of stir around technology sites. But what’s this about spending years in a PRC prison and flea markets around the corner?
Hong Kong is not China. They are under completely different jurisdictions. Is that clear mate? Criminals convicted in Hong Kong never serve their sentences in a PRC prison, just as criminals convicted in the UK don’t get sent to a French prison.
Furthermore, Hong Kong is a common law jurisdiction, and I haven’t seen any Americans grasp the significance of that. Americans. Ignorant as always.
(BTW has anyone seen the full text of the judgement yet? Case number is TMCC1286/2005.)
Rumours about possible consolidation in the Chinese Linux market are spreading fast.
Most concentrate on the business side. While there are some truths there, as with most rumours there are nothing substantiative in any of the news articles… other than quotes from a disillusold guy.
Also, there are more politics involved than others imagine. One is hated by the government, another not doing well financially, while one appears to be facing their own China-Japan relationship problems…
While swine flu is still affecting pigs in Sichuan, we now have anthrax cows in Liaoning.
So no chicken (H5N1), no pork and now no beef. Now don’t take away my lamb…
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