Gawyn said:
subedii said:
Meh, the anime fans will just use bittorrent. I can't imagine there was much good anime on China TV anyway.
Do you really think that China would allow bittorrent and bittorrent links sites through the Great Firewall of China? They have one of the most restrictive policies with regards to the internet of any nation on Earth and I doubt they would be happy with people watching things that they downloaded off the internet and could contain who-knows-what.
There's the great 'firewall of China', and there are still ways around it.
Even if they block off the specific sites, actual torrents are still viable, especially if they make use of the encryption feature which so many download programs now have. This measure was largely introduced to defeat Traffic Shaping by ISP's, since the ISP won't see anything other than raw data and won't be able to tell the format of it (i.e. won't be able to tell that the data is actually a torrent being downloaded, it will just look like any other data transferred across the internet). Even if they completely banned anything to do with the bittorrent protocol (unlikely, but possible, especially given the government at hand), as long as a person can find their access to a torrent (a tiny file which they can even receieve in e-mail as text if they're really pushing the restriction), the rest largely takes care of itself.
Then of course there are other measures either in use or developement. The Tor network. Onion routing. The freenet project. The Ultrasurf project (I only recently heard about this one, sounds interesting). Even proxy servers (although these aren't nearly as effective). Wikipedia has some good articles on those if you want to learn more, some really interesting stuff happening with them.
All it takes is that clever people have found and continue to find ways around this (and I'm sure China has no shortage of tech geeks :mrgreen: ). They then make programs which allow everyone else to do so.
At the moment in China, I would agree that net access is heavily restricted, and accessing what the government doesn't want you to see is difficult. But it is by no means impossible. I would actually rate getting torrents via encryption as probably being
easier than trying to browse restricted websites in China.
The Firewall that China has isn't a static programme. It's more like a constantly updating arms race. People find ways around it, then the government tries to update again.
Who's going to win in the end? I honestly couldn't say.