On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 21:55 +0530, Gautam John wrote: > "Mirroring" is the term for normal copying or backup operations, and > in this case real though extremely small mirrors are employed. > Information travels along fiber-optic cables as little pulses of > light, and as these travel through the Chinese gateway routers, > numerous tiny mirrors bounce reflections of them to a separate set of > "Golden Shield" computers.
WHAT was this writer smoking? "numerous tiny mirrors"!? next we'll here about the "millions of tiny elephants carrying individual photons across". you would indeed need something strange with numerous tiny mirrors if you were actually trying to intercept a fibre optic signal. and it would be really hard to do, optic cable splicing is not a good idea. but the chinese government is not intercepting signals. they are going through its routers. having a router route packets in duplicate is trivial (though more complicated at the heavy duty scale china does it at) and certainly does not involve "numerous tiny mirrors". similarly, the "internet choke points" are not due to some nefarious design of the chinese government. that's what happens in most places outside europe and the US, where physical limits of fibre capacity and poor market structure determine how fibre is physically laid. very few landing points for fibre in india too, with undersea cables just as vulnerable to choke points in the suez as china is to choke points in near taiwan, and also nothing to do with shady govt plans. his description of the practical effects of the "great firewall" are accurate, though, including the penalty time-out, as i discovered and discussed on silk when i was in shanghai a couple of years ago. -rishab
