18 years ago today the Communist Chinese crushed the pro-democracy movement’s demonstrations in Tienamen Square. Gateway Pundit has pictures and links.

On the surface we see China as a country that makes cheap goods for us to buy at WalMart. And while that isn’t a bad thing, we still need to remember that their government is is a repressive regime and no friend to Liberty.

Read this interview with Tao Jun, Student Leader of Tiananmen Square Democratic Movement

The fire for freedom and democracy is always burning within Tao’s heart. In 2000 he established Maihua Net during his spare time to make public his articles, poems, and commentaries. However, one of his articles entitled, “Who Will Supervise the General Secretary,” touched the sensitive nerve of the authorities. In April 2001, he was put in a criminal detention in Shekou. Not long after being placed in detention that the authorities sentenced him to three years imprisonment for “crimes of inciting subversion of the state power and of overthrowing the socialist system.” Consequently, he spent three miserable years in Futian Detention Center and Shaoguan Prison.

Hat Tip to Michelle Malkin

Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the discovery that the firewall system being used by China could be circumvented by both ends of the connection ignoring the TCP reset sequence. The paper was presented at the 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, which sounds like an interesting gathering. It’s refreshing to see people working towards more privacy in a world where minature cameras and tracking devices abound.

The discovery is interesting, but in my opinion not very practical since you need to get both ends of the connection to ignore resets. A better method would be to tunnel the traffic over ssh to a server outside China using techniques like those described on this blog — you setup a ssh tunnel to a system you have access to and forward a local port across the connection. You then direct your web browser, Firefox of course, to use the local side as a SOCKS proxy and presto! Your packets are encrypted up to the point where they leave the ssh system. It is a little easier to do under Linux, but using putty you can set it up under Windows as well.