Toppling the Great Firewall of China
The People's Republic of China has no firewall perched on its routers to enable censors to block Internet sites.
Rather, the authoritarian regime relies on a far more sophisticated censorship system that uses a keyword blacklist and routers that reach deep into Internet traffic to find forbidden words or phrases.
"Conventional wisdom was it's a firewall—all around the border, you'd be blocked. We found that sometimes [it takes a few hops within China to get blocked], up to 13 hops. Some paths weren't filtered at all," Jed Crandall, an assistant professor of computer science at University of New Mexico's School of Engineering, told eWEEK.
In fact, the "Great Firewall of China" that researchers believe is used by the government to block users from accessing what it considers objectionable content is in reality a "panopticon"—a type of prison that relies on prisoners not being able to tell whether or not they're being observed.
source:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2182514,00.asp
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