China's Great Firewall Tests Mysterious Scans On Encrypted Connections

[bill]

The Chinese are up to some weird stuff again...

China's Great Firewall Tests Mysterious Scans On Encrypted Connections

In the cat-and-mouse game between Chinese censors and Internet users, the government seems to be testing a new mousetrap–one that may be designed to detect and block tunnels through its Great Firewall even when the data in those tunnels is aimed at a little-known computer and obscured by encryption.

In recent months, administrators of services with encrypted connections designed to allow users secure remote access say they've seen strange activity coming from China: When a user from within the country attempts to reach a server abroad, a string of seemingly random data hits the destination computer before he or she can connect, sometimes followed by that user's communication being mysteriously dropped.

The anti-censorship and anonymity service Tor, for instance, has found that many of its "bridge nodes"–privately-placed servers around the world designed to connect users to the rest of Tor's public network of traffic re-routing computers–have become inaccessible to Chinese users within hours or even minutes of being set up, according to Andrew Lewman, the project's executive director. Users have told him that other censorship circumvention services like Ultrasurf and Freegate have seen similar problems, he says. "Someone will try to connect, then there's a weird scan, and the bridge stops working," says Lewman. "We see weird things all the time, but this is a semi-consistent weird thing, and it's only coming from China."

[Rumbas]

Wow, strange things happen over there. Before we know they control everything