What is the GFC?
The Great Firewall of China (GFC) is a system set up by the Chinese government for censoring the Internet. It is comprised of many techniques, including IP address blocking, DNS redirection, and keyword filtering. Keyword filtering can be done to prevent the transmission of blacklisted keywords or to flag pages for manual inspection. It can be implemented in specific programs (e.g. QQChat, a popular chat client), blog sites, e-mail, or in Internet routers. All of our results are specific to HTTP keyword filtering by Internet routers. This filtering is applied to World Wide Web traffic. We chose to focus on a specific mechanism and learn as much as possible about that mechanism alone. For more general information on other mechanisms, we will refer you to The Open Net Initiative.
