alt Hacker News> Heh, lucky you, at least you get a message. My ISP just drops traffic to the affected IPs. No ping, no traceroute, just a spinner in the browser until it says "page not found".
This is generally how the GFW works in China. Instead of an overbearing nanny like a school or corporation's DNS blocker, you're left with a sense that you're on a version of the Internet that is just intermittently and somewhat mysteriously broken.
And indeed, in China, a lot of things that probably aren't fully intended to be blocked are not reliably accessible. Implementation varies, so you get strange routing and peering issues. It feels like an Internet that isn't fully formed, that hasn't finished coming together yet.
Nation states and corporations obviously gain some things sometimes by having Internet censorship/blocking frameworks in place. Maybe, sometimes, ordinary people even benefit, too, if it helps shut down illegal and genuinely harmful businesses.
But it feels like the whole world is gradually trending towards more and more Internet censorship without realizing that we are un-building a miraculous thing that took enormous effort and cleverness and expense to build. I wish we could think about this not only in terms of freedom (and we absolutely should think about it in terms of freedom), but how we are disintegrating the infrastructure of communication and computing.
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Your last paragraph: it is sad. But we had successful global networks before the Internet (the PSTN, telegraph) and we'll certainly have global networks after this at some point in human history. Perhaps in the the time between the Internet and what's next, the world will become a bit more mature about a few things.
> a version of the Internet that is just intermittently and somewhat mysteriously broken.
That's actually just how the Internet is. Nothing to do with the great firewall.
This is generally how the GFW works in China. Instead of an overbearing nanny like a school or corporation's DNS blocker, you're left with a sense that you're on a version of the Internet that is just intermittently and somewhat mysteriously broken.
Oh boy, an excuse to share my favourite great firewall story on a visit to China. Keep in mind, this is 15 years old, so probably doesn't represent the current state of affairs. At the time, my daily news reading habit had me checking BBC and CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). The BBC site seemed to be working fine, but whenever I clicked on an article on CBC, it was blocked. A few minutes later, I went to show my wife that CBC articles were blocked, and I clicked on the same one again, and it loaded. I clicked on another: blocked. Tried it again after a few minutes and it loaded. Someone was screening the articles in real time for me. When I was done reading, I clicked on several of the weirdest headlines I could find, and after a few minutes, everything was blocked again including ones that had previously worked.