Debate on the Internet kicked up this week on whether Apple iPods are being manufactured under “Dickensian” sweatshop conditions in the People’s Republic of China. Human rights and corporate ethics watchers cried foul about low wages and bad living conditions. Foxconn (the China subcontractor) and Apple have been playing defense saying it abided by labor guidelines. What is the truth? Well it lies somewhere in between.

But more interesting is that the best balanced on-the-ground investigative journalism on this was done by PRC reporters and is being actively discussed in the open on Tianya.cn. ESWN has an English translation of the original Chinese piece which is titled, “Foxconn workers: As little as 340 yuan a month and 700 persons living in one house. NetEase Technology Report.”

For folks used to China’s so-called “totalitarianism,” this may come as a surprise, but it’s not unusual - investigative journalism in China happens a lot more often than you would think.

After the press conference was over, this reporter declined the offer of a ride provided by Foxconn to the train station and went instead to speak to ordinary workers in the technology park.

In fact the above headline is a bit sensational - while the reporter did find sketchy and smelly living conditions and low wages, they did not find a dorm with 700 people - a claim made by a worker who was interviewed. Nevertheless, the article has a whole lot more useful reporting than the speculation and second-hand churn in AppleInsider and Ars, both of which I respect.

The bottom line - there are violations in working hours, the pay is slightly under the minimum; some workers moved out of dorms to their own apartments, but they get healthcare and free lunch. Given the chance of working longer hours, the workers would actually want to do so as long as they are paid.

“When I joined Foxconn in 2004, those were good days for the first two years.” When Little Zhang thought about the overtime work, his spirit was lifted. “At one time, my highest monthly wage was 1,600 yuan.” “In those days, I could work three hours of overtime per day. With two more days on the weekend, the wages rose up.” Little Zhang counted with his fingers. “Saturday and Sunday are for double pay, at 6.70 yuan per hour. On both days, we worked 11 hours, so that we made more than 100 yuan.” In Little Zhang’s view, that is a very good wage. When the writer asked whether continuously working like that for one or two months would be physically impossible to cope with, he impatiently rubbed his thumb and index finger together and said, “Who cares as long as the money is there!”

In a commentary on the Apple conundrum, BusinessWeek reporter Arik Hesseldahl has suggested Apple go ahead and open its own factory in China, and raise the standards, like Motorola and Plantronics have done. It is not a bad idea for companies to do this - take fate into their own hands and create a core in China for the long term. For certain technology products this is possible. However, it’s hard for Apple to go this route.

Their entire existence is in finding contract manufacturers that they can switch out very quickly to meet demands of their lifestyle marketing designs and innovations done in California. (Buy a new iPod or MacBook, and you’ll see that heralded on the packaging.) It’s why they can lead the industry with iMac flavors, iPods, MacBooks, etc. The recent shift of the Mac line from PowerPC to Intel Core Duo processors would have been much more painful with company capital sunk into product line manufacturing. Instead, Apple finds companies like Alpha-Top and Flextronics in Taiwan to do the job using the economies of scale advantages they have in mass producing laptops and other consumer electronics.

But Apple has typically enjoyed from 30-50% margins on their products. That’s much higher than other industry norms. Stepping up working conditions at Foxconn to comply with Chinese labor laws (which are already very modest) can be accommodated by that cushion. Shareholders will be happy, Steve Jobs can sleep better, and Chinese workers will be happier. Win-win-win?

I found myself flinging cows over and over again at Cow Abduction. There’s something zen about it…

An interesting article on Danwei blog detailing the booting of Philip Cunningham from the exclusive CPOL mailing list, set up by Richard Baum of UCLA to discuss China politics. From Danwei’s Jeremy Goldkorn:

…here is a different critical take on Chinapol and its problems, from journalist Philip J. Cunningham, who was unceremoniously booted off the Chinapol list. This is his story about his excommunication.

Though Phil’s comments are bordering on the “screed” category, I do agree that CPOL suffers from what is typical of many forums - the extreme viewpoints start with snarky comments and often takeover the bandwidth while the middle (ie. the majority) sits and watches on the sidelines. On rare occasion, an interesting discussion breaks out. (Full disclosure - I am on the Chinapol mailing list.)

Cunningham’s main gripe:

Some of the best minds in the China field are stuck in an outdated paradigm of America-good, China-bad.

I’ll reserve my comments about the actual argument for later, but he’s more right than wrong on this not particularly for the list membership, but for the politicians, think tanks and watchers in DC. And that does have a trickle-over effect to supposedly “left” academia.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have done some analysis on how the PRC’s Great Firewall (GFW) handles the “blocking” or interruption of web page loading midstream when it detects sensitive keywords related to the day after June 3 and certain religious groups. What they discovered is quite surprising, because it indicates that the mechanism is simple, clever, but at the same time, quite straighforward to circumvent. Read on for a layman’s explanation of the technical paper.

For the non-techie, the simple explanation is that the GFW sends a “TCP reset” packet to both the web server supplying the suspicious page and to the client (ie. your computer) loading it. It’s the equivalent of an “emergency stop” packet usually reserved for situations of bad connectivity so that both sides know to disconnect abruptly.

It appears the GFW in PRC cleverly uses this technique so that it can stymie the loading of pages, and so it does not have to actively make subsequent decisions to drop packets by correlating them to previous ones. In techie terms, having to store the history of what has been sent and received is called “state information” as in the technical state of affairs the router must accumulate. (This is not to be confused with State information as with “state secrets” or “enemies of the state”!)

I say it is clever, because this means you need far fewer computers, processing power and memory to implement effective blocking. In fact, GFW operators could use off-the shelf Cisco (or whatever) routers with no modified firmware whatsoever, and just have a set of machines sit on the side detecting keywords, and sending out “TCP resets.” Simple, effective, and with a low impact for network engineering.

Well the researchers realized that because this “TCP reset” was the sole mechanism for cutting off loading the content, the page information (including sensitive information and all) was still being sent through all the way to your client computer in the PRC! But because of the “TCP reset,” the client was simply shutting down reception of such packets so the Web browser never got the content. That is, they were actually travelling down the cable (or over Wifi) to your locale in the PRC, but the computer was ignoring them.

So in their tests, they said - what if we simply instructed the computer to ignore the “TCP reset” and keep loading. Would it work? The answer is: yes. From their blog:

…the keyword detection is not actually being done in large routers on the borders of the Chinese networks, but in nearby subsidiary machines. When these machines detect the keyword, they do not actually prevent the packet containing the keyword from passing through the main router (this would be horribly complicated to achieve and still allow the router to run at the necessary speed). Instead, these subsiduary machines generate a series of TCP reset packets, which are sent to each end of the connection. When the resets arrive, the end-points assume they are genuine requests from the other end to close the connection — and obey. Hence the censorship occurs.

However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall’s reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We’ve done some real experiments on this — and it works just fine!! Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall — just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9¾.

Cool results. One problem - you need both the Web server and the client to ignore “TCP reset” packets to make this workaround effective. The researchers have suggested that making this behavior modification to the “TCP/IP stack” of networking code in routers and operating systems was desirable anyway, and they’re probably right. But that’s quite a tall order to get Microsoft, Apple, Palm, Symbian, and all the other folks with IP networking in their OSes to change. (But interestingly, with open source software like Linux, a patch and recompile of the kernel to do this is quite simple.)

Nevertheless, this does provide some insight into how the GFW manages to be effective in keyword blocking given how much traffic the PRC Internet chokepoints have to handle. It’s the network filtering equivalent of Occam’s Razor - the simplest and most straightforward (and low impact) implementation is the most likely.

Researcher Richard Clayton was hopeful about the impact of this discovery:

…the key point is that changing the TCP/IP stacks to ignore the firewall is almost a no-brainer for the vendor. There are excellent technical reasons for discarding the firewall’s resets as a matter of course. If stack builders did this as standard, then an entire Great Firewall of China mechanism entirely fails to work. That can only, in my view, be a good result.

[Hat tip to: Bruce Schneier]

CNET has a story about the Maxthon browser, which is a modification to Microsoft Internet explorer that provides features like tabbed browsing, ad filtering and, most interesting for China users, the ability to use proxy servers more easily. It was formerly known as MyIE2, and was a simple mod to MSIE. Competition/innovation in the Web browser space is a good thing.

I’m a bit dubious about this claim however:

According to Maxthon research, about 14 percent of the Chinese Web population has used the browser and 17 percent employs it for Web search.

Any stats from “Maxthon research” cannot really be taken at face value. Any China users care to comment on how widespread the browser is in the PRC, or whether you’ve used it yourself?

Who would have thought there would be 15 paragraphs written about an “intentionally blank page,” yet here we are:

An intentionally blank page is a page that is devoid of content, and may be unexpected. Such pages may serve purposes ranging from place-holding to space-filling and content separation. Sometimes, these pages carry a notice such as, “This page is intentionally left blank.” The phrase is a self-refuting meta-reference, in that it falsifies itself by its very existence on the page in question.

Who would have though existentialism would manifest itself so curiously.

This is part of an ongoing quest to highlight the unusual, quirky but fact-based articles in Wikipedia. 

I found ths map a particluarly interesting way of looking at the browser/OS/portal wars, with Microsoft at the center. Credit to: MShiltonj.

I would do some things differently - the map may give the impression that Microsoft holds a dominant position in certain areas such as iTunes/iPod and searching, when it does not. I would find it interesting to add other things outside of traditional “software” like media (the music/movies side) or gaming (Sony Playstation, Nintendo, Xbox).

I also would not call MSIE6 a “retreat” as much as a comfortable spot that Microsoft has not had to do anything to address until Firefox came along. MSIE 5.x on the Mac was a very bad product, I will agree.

Now what would be cool is to make it a clickable map that links to Wikipedia articles for each term…

Boingboing has a story about how some newsrooms in the United States have restricted Internet access using filtering such as Smartfilter or Surfcontrol. Among the newsrooms mentioned - LA Times and CBC (Canada). Goes to show you - tools for getting around censorship are not just for folks in China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Tunisia. I gave a talk earlier this year at the Foreign Correspondents Club about practical security tools, and I emphasized it even then - these are tools for all journalists, not just for those working in locales that are non-democratic or have a weak rule of law.

There is a reason why medical, legal and journalistic work are clinical professions - practitioners require complete access to “direct observation” of evidence to perform their jobs.

A doctor needs access to view unclothed patients without being labeled a sexual pervert; a lawyer needs to consult with a client without being called an accessory to the crime; and a journalist needs an unfiltered information feed, without being called a loafer, slacker or prurient observer.

Ironically, there are likely sites that can be seen from the newsroom of China Daily, but not from the LA Times.

Nart@CitizenLab of the University of Toronto has the first detailed investigation into the filtering of the Tom-Skype VoIP/chat client in China. As you may well know, Skype has partnered with Tom.com to distributed a cobranded version that supposedly filters the text chat for sensitive words.

From Nart’s first tests, it seems a very short list of words are filtered, and only “f*ck” has been able to trigger the filtering. Other famous censored terms/words/subjects in Chinese seem not be be affected. Another case of intentionally lame filtering simply to appease the authorities, or something else going on?

I just stumbled upon a neat online project btween2cultures that uses Flickr to display pictures from China and the UK to contrast visual interpretation from the two cultures. Check it out.