The great firewall of China

The great firewall of China may be just an illusion in technical terms. This article describes the details of how things work.... Basically when "banned content" is detected, both ends of the connection are sent a flood of tcp reset packets. Which (if both sides are designed to pay attention to) means that the two computers "hang up" assuming the other side reset the connection. But, while most current PC operating systems obey the reset packets.... it's not something that is imperative. (You might think of this as a targeted/surgical denial of service attack using TCP reset packets...) The article goes a bit deeper though.... What if the pcs ignored reset packets.... yes they could. There's no rule that a tcp stack HAS to obey a reset packet. IF the packets were ignored the firewall would turn out to be nothing more than an illusion technically speaking. Because the pcs on either end would continue communicating. Essentially ALL the packets are passing through the "firewall" unhindered, the resets are just being used to target and force the endpoints to drop "unwanted" connections. From the article...

Ignoring resets is trivial to achieve by applying simple firewall rules… and has no significant effect on ordinary working. If you want to be a little more clever you can examine the hop count (TTL) in the reset packets and determine whether the values are consistent with them arriving from the far end, or if the value indicates they have come from the intervening censorship device. We would argue that there is much to commend examining TTL values when considering defences against denial-of-service attacks using reset packets. Having operating system vendors provide this new functionality as standard would also be of practical use because Chinese citizens would not need to run special firewall-busting code (which the authorities might attempt to outlaw) but just off-the-shelf software (which they would necessarily tolerate).

Of course, there are OTHER blocks that the Chinese government has on sites, but according to the writeup, these static blocks are more expensive (tedious) to setup and maintain. So this method would not work for everything.