Bloggers and journalists in China are using a novel approach to bypass Internet filters in their country – they write backwards or from right to left. The content therefore remains readable by human beings but defeats the web filtering software.
China is known to implement ‘packet filtering’ – a technique that detects TCP packets containing controversial keywords like Tibet, Democracy, Tiananmen, etc.
To dodge these censors, Internet writers in China are writing backwards when posting to web forums and blogs. They do it using this web tool that flips sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally. Source: WSJ.
Related: Find if a Website or Blogs is Blocked in China
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/bloggers-write-text-backwards-bypass-internet-censorship/3800/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
A very clever solution - necessity is indeed the mother of invention.
Do bloggers really have to do this..? They could simply write the text in a image editor and post it as a image. Then it cannot be filtered.
very true, image text is better
Neat! it’s easy steganography (data-hiding), and implemented in JavaScript– so, as the guy says, just do Save-As and you’ll have it around. And it’s all under the guise of being just about trying to make layout be in right-to-left columns, as Chinese was traditionally. And that just happens to make it harder for censor-bots to scan. Fancy that!
If ever Special People Happy Government figures this simple steg stuff out, there’s a million more ways; see the excellent book “Disappearing Cryptography”.
How difficult will it be for the Chinese government (or any hacker) to develop filters that also scan for backwards text or other pattern shifts? If the pattern shift is simple enough for humans to read, it will probably be simple enough to check in a filter. The image text suggestion might be tougher to catch in a filter. But maybe the Chinese government could snag images and route them to a mechanical Turk device.
Turkey is working with China? No way!
@Gideon
Completely agree with you..
@Arun
Posting images has some other problems like clarity,visibility etc.,.So this becomes risky!!.
Very creative! Other stuff could be to bloggers to send encrypted text to browsers along with Javascript to decrypt the message & show in browser.
I’m sure now that you’ve told the entire internet about it, the Chinese government are updating their packet filtering rules as we speak. It would be trivial to write a rule to find this.
Written by Joe on 07.07.08