Understanding the Practices of Global Censorship through Accurate, End-to-End Measurements

It is challenging to conduct a large scale Internet censorship measurement, as it involves triggering censors through artificial requests and identifying abnormalities from corresponding responses. Due to the lack of ground truth on the expected responses from legitimate services, previous studies typically require a heavy, unscalable manual inspection to identify false positives while still leaving false negatives undetected. In this paper, we propose Disguiser, a novel framework that enables end-to-end measurement to accurately detect the censorship activities and reveal the censor deployment without manual efforts. The core of Disguiser is a control server that replies with a static payload to provide the ground truth of server responses. As such, we send requests from various types of vantage points across the world to our control server, and the censorship activities can be recognized if a vantage point receives a different response. In particular, we design and conduct a cache test to pre-exclude the vantage points that could be interfered by cache proxies along the network path. Then we perform application traceroute towards our control server to explore censors' behaviors and their deployment. With Disguiser, we conduct 58 million measurements from vantage points in 177 countries. We observe 292 thousand censorship activities that block DNS, HTTP, or HTTPS requests inside 122 countries, achieving a 10^-6 false positive rate and zero false negative rate. Furthermore, Disguiser reveals the censor deployment in 13 countries.

Chinese Private International Law and Online Data Protection

This paper explores how Chinese private international law responds to online data protection from two aspects: jurisdiction and applicable law. Compared with foreign laws, Chinese private international law related to online data protection has two distinct features. Chinese law for personal jurisdiction is still highly territorial-based. The “target” factor and the interactive level of a website have no play in Chinese jurisprudence. Regarding applicable law, Chinese legislators focus more on the domestic compliance with data regulations rather than their extra-territorial application. Moreover, like foreign countries, China also resorts to Internet intermediaries to enhance enforcement of domestic law. These features should be understood in the Chinese contexts of high-level data localization and Internet censorship.

Disagreement Strategies on Chinese Forums: Comparing Data From Hong Kong and Mainland China

Prior research on disagreement has mainly focused on its negative impact, suggesting that disagreement should be avoided in communication. Consequently, disagreement is rarely studied in computer-mediated communication, particularly in the Chinese context. Adopting the interactional approach, this project pioneers the investigation of disagreement strategies on online forums in Hong Kong and mainland China, in hopes of providing insights into a better understanding of disagreement in the Chinese online context and shedding light on politeness theory in intercultural communication among Chinese people. Two threads on a similar topic were selected, from which 400 comments were collected and annotated for further analysis. Our results showed that, instead of being a face-threatening act, disagreement maintained and enhanced the interlocutors’ face and advanced the communication of information within each thread. Moreover, although the distribution of the five disagreement strategies was similar in the two sites, there were notably more disagreement tokens and negative comments on the Hong Kong forum. The observed divergence has been attributed to the different degrees of collectivism–individualism in the two regions, the internet censorship in mainland China and the nature of the two forums selected, which remain to be confirmed in future studies.

PredictRoute: A Network Path Prediction Toolkit

Accurate prediction of network paths between arbitrary hosts on the Internet is of vital importance for network operators, cloud providers, and academic researchers. We present PredictRoute, a system that predicts network paths between hosts on the Internet using historical knowledge of the data and control plane. In addition to feeding on freely available traceroutes and BGP routing tables, PredictRoute optimally explores network paths towards chosen BGP prefixes. PredictRoute's strategy for exploring network paths discovers 4X more autonomous system (AS) hops than other well-known strategies used in practice today. Using a corpus of traceroutes, PredictRoute trains probabilistic models of routing towards prefixes on the Internet to predict network paths and their likelihood. PredictRoute's AS-path predictions differ from the measured path by at most 1 hop, 75% of the time. We expose PredictRoute's path prediction capability via a REST API to facilitate its inclusion in other applications and studies. We additionally demonstrate the utility of PredictRoute in improving real-world applications for circumventing Internet censorship and preserving anonymity online.

Government regulation of the Internet as instrument of digital protectionism in case of developing countries

The research is devoted to the study of digital protectionism technologies, in particular, Internet censorship as a non-tariff barrier to digital trade and the determination of the strategic motives of states to use them. The reports ‘Freedom on the Net’ and ‘The network readiness index 2020’ acted as a basic data source for the study of modern instruments of government regulation of interactions in the digital environment. Internet censorship technologies have been considered in six countries with varying levels of Internet freedom: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia and Estonia. The key instruments of digital protectionism as a non-tariff barrier of the digital economy have been identified, such as: localisation requirements; restrictions on cross-border data flow; system of national protection of intellectual property rights; discriminatory, unique standards or burdensome testing; filtering or blocking; restrictions on electronic payment systems or the use of encryption; cybersecurity threats and forced technology transfer. Internet censorship technologies have been demonstrated and their influence on the strategic development of trade relations between economies in cyberspace has been determined. The scientific value of the article lies in substantiating the understanding of Internet censorship as a natural tool for regulating the development of a digital society and international trade relations. Each state at one time goes through a technological stage of development, which leads to the emergence of different levels of digital isolation and integration; and Internet censorship is a natural element in the system of building a national platform economy and consolidating the country’s internal technological and innovative advantages in digital realities.

Delegated Censorship: The Dynamic, Layered, and Multistage Information Control Regime in China

How does internet censorship work in China, and how does it reflect the Chinese state’s logic of governing society? An online political publication, Global China (海外看世界), was created by the authors, and the pattern and record of articles being censored was analyzed. Using results from A/B tests on the articles and interviews with relevant officials, the article shows that the state employs delegated censorship, outsourcing significant responsibility to private internet companies and applying levels of scrutiny based on timing, targets, and stage of publication. The dynamic, layered, multistage censorship regime creates significant variation and flexibility across the Chinese internet, most often in decisions about what to censor. This approach aims to maintain regime stability and legitimacy while minimizing costs. Rather than blocking all information and players, the state recognizes its technical and bureaucratic limits but also realizes the benefits of a degree of toleration. Delegated censorship utilizes both power control and power sharing and offers a new understanding of authoritarian state-society relations.