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Accessing google scholar under extreme internet censorship: a legal avenue

Published: 11 December 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Internet censorship is pervasive across the world. However, in some countries like China, even legal, nonpolitical services (e.g., Google Scholar) are incidentally blocked by extreme censorship machinery. Therefore, properly accessing legal Internet services under extreme censorship becomes a critical problem. In this paper, we conduct a case study on how scholars from a major university of China access Google Scholar through a variety of middleware. We characterize the common solutions (including VPN, Tor, and Shadowsocks) by measuring and analyzing their performance, overhead, and robustness to censorship. Guided by the study, we deploy a novel solution (called ScholarCloud) to help Chinese scholars access Google Scholar with high performance, ease of use, and low overhead. This work provides an insider's view of China's Internet censorship and offers a legal avenue for coexistence with censorship.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Information Accessibility and Knowledge Creation: The Impact of Google’s Withdrawal From China on Scientific ResearchSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4774504Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Information accessibility and knowledge creation: the impact of Google’s withdrawal from China on scientific researchIndustry and Innovation10.1080/13662716.2023.229829331:6(753-783)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2024
  • (2020)ACER: detecting Shadowsocks server based on active probe technologyJournal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques10.1007/s11416-020-00353-zOnline publication date: 8-Apr-2020
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      Middleware '17: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware Conference: Industrial Track
      December 2017
      55 pages
      ISBN:9781450352000
      DOI:10.1145/3154448
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 11 December 2017

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      View all
      • (2024)Information Accessibility and Knowledge Creation: The Impact of Google’s Withdrawal From China on Scientific ResearchSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4774504Online publication date: 2024
      • (2024)Information accessibility and knowledge creation: the impact of Google’s withdrawal from China on scientific researchIndustry and Innovation10.1080/13662716.2023.229829331:6(753-783)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2024
      • (2020)ACER: detecting Shadowsocks server based on active probe technologyJournal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques10.1007/s11416-020-00353-zOnline publication date: 8-Apr-2020
      • (2018)Beyond Google PlayProceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 201810.1145/3278532.3278558(293-307)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2018
      • (2018)GATE and FENCE: Geo-Blocking Protocols for Named Data Networking2018 IEEE 43rd Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN.2018.8638053(580-588)Online publication date: Oct-2018
      • (2012)Legal Internet Access Under Extreme CensorshipContent Distribution for Mobile Internet: A Cloud-based Approach10.1007/978-981-19-6982-9_7(173-188)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2012
      • (2012)Background and OverviewContent Distribution for Mobile Internet: A Cloud-based Approach10.1007/978-981-19-6982-9_1(3-15)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2012

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