UC Davis

Internet censorship in China has been an infamous topic in the last few decades of cybersecurity research. Academia has put a significant effort into investigate how this censorship works. The most outstanding censorship method was the Great Fire Wall of China (GFW). This study will dive into the GFW and provide a comprehensive understanding of the GFW by examining its historical evolution, cultural context, and technological mechanisms. For the experiment part, we used traceroute and DNS queries to collect the current GFW blocking situation and find out that DNS poisoning, TCP reset, and CGNAT still exist at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, The time trend of accessibility and inaccessibility of the top 10,000 domains on each DNS server shows a tidal distribution. This study also explores how differing ideologies and cultural values have shaped the governance of the Internet and influenced public perceptions of censorship and how this GFW could evolve to become a common practice in cyberspace. This study also uses GFW as an example to call for awaking from the information cocoons and emphasize how significant the cyberworld has influenced society.