There's no reason why these governments wouldn't require all traffic to go through a "transparent proxy". All they have to do is make a government CA in your browser mandatory (which many have already actually) and re-encrypt all connections while filtering them. Without it your connection simply gets blocked. Yes this costs a lot of resources but you're talking about something that would receive military-style budgets given it's purpose. In the end it's Cisco eating two sides of the pie and everybody else just wasting more money.

Proxy's and VPN's are businesses. They make a profit. Our VPN and that of our closest competitors alone serve 100.000+ users in censored countries. This is quite an incentive to keep things running, and cost really isn't an issue. At all.

Who will pay for Telex?

If it's recommended to work around this browser limit, why is the limit there in the first place? What's the trade off here?

Dude! they've copied the store, not the products. The products are real Apple products. This has nothing to do with manufacturing.

I've actually bought my Macbook Air in a "fake" Apple store. It's a real MacBook Air, it came with the 20 minutes of free lessons in OS/X, setup assistance, etc.

What the fake store did not have was 30-minute waiting time, unfriendly bouncers, an army of scalpers and other unpleasantness found at the real Apple stores here in Beijing.

The products are real. In fact, many of these shops are authorized re-sellers. (Apple has long had to rely on re-sellers in China - only in the last few years have they opened a few stores.) They just don't follow the rules as strictly as one may expect.

This is not new at all. In China you've had 4 Nokia shops in the same street for ages (0 to 1 being real, the rest fake). Even large stores like Carrefour and Wal-Mart have been copied.

I love Apple, but they weren't "first" at this one.

Didn't we have a similar story not too long ago?

Anyway, I think the consensus at the time was that there's a difference between falling on a rock hard bathroom floor versus a bush or even grassland.

Just because some Chinese uses Maxthon, doesn't mean they all do. In fact I've never seen anyone use it in the offices I've visited. Foxmail is huge, but Maxthon? Don't think so.

For most banks that matter, yes. For odd reasons the password field uses ActiveX.

Chinese websites don't support Firefox, so that's where it ends. E.g. to make payments with Alipay/Taobao you need IE specific ActiveX plugins.

(Actually they will have unofficial firefox and even linux plugins, but it's hard to find and troublesome to install.)

What an overly complex bogus system. It will require tons of ISP's to cooperate to get this to work. We might as well install an SSL proxy at the border and tell the Chinese the whole world is reachable over the proxy IP only. Take it or leave it.

Year after year we see all these awesome developments which probably cost a ton but I've never heard of one really taking off. Meanwhile the Chinese are simply using commercial VPN providers or brewing their own on $3/month VPS servers.

Just like the DNS filter being a bogus thing, so are many of the other anti-CP efforts, including actual laws. E.g. in Japan CP is banned since 1999 but only because of international pressure. Not because Japanese society was ready to ban it. The law is just theater. There are other cultures as well where CP, while illegal, is still accepted or at least tolerated to a point where Interpol's clout becomes meaningless.

Just publish the list and let societies extremists do their job. They'll accomplish what authorities can't - one way or the other.

Get a better filter. I use the same e-mail since 1998, it receives tons of spam daily, but I very rarely (like less than once a month) see any of it in my inbox. No false positives either. Seriously, this discussion is a waste of time. Get a better e-mail host, kick your sysadmin in the butt or stop trying to fiddle around yourself.