the great firewall of China

Based on what I have read, the Chinese government takes many radical steps to control online activism in China. The government has several methods that they use to cover everything  so that anything they want can be censored.  The great firewall of China project was established in the late 1990’s and enforced beginning in early 2003 as a project setup for online enforcement. Everything from IP address blocking to email disrupting is employed. Some of the methods used to regulate the internet are IP address blocking, where the access to certain IP addresses area denied. If the target website is on a shared server, then the whole server is shut down, so no websites from that sever can be accessed. The only way around this IP address block is by targeting the proxies, but again  these may also be shut down or blocked. Another method used is DNS filtering and redirection. This method changes the domain of the site, funneling the person into a new domain and by disrupting what websites are accessible. If the IP address is accessible, then the website can still be seen by using the IP address instead of the domain. Another method used is URL filtering, which will use select keywords in the URL to find sites and block them. The problem with this is that sites can be obtained by using symbolism in the keywords or by making sure not enough information is given away in the URL so that the site Is targeted.  Yet another filtering method is packet filtering, which terminates TCP packet information when certain keywords are found. This method is useful when searching results of a topic entered into a search engine. Ways of getting around this are reducing the amount of information that is entered into the packet by editing the TCP/IP stacks. The final method is to reset the connection or block the connection, where any attempts to retrieve information from a site will lead to a 30minute ban on attempting to connect to the web. This is usually circumvented by avoiding the reset packet issued by the firewall.