The Great Firewall of China (officially known as “Golden Shield“) is lovely creation that tries to maintain a “harmonious” Internet experience. When I was in Beijing, I I noticed that it used a combination of DNS filtering (tibet.net, the official website of the Tibetan Government In Exile, does not resolve), and packet filtering on keywords. (“The connection has been reset.”). Tor got around it easily, but that may or may not be the case today. Like every other attempt to stamp out “undesirable” content, the ways to avoid detection were well known. How often they’re actually employed, is another question.

So what use is the Great Firewall beyond being an somewhat effective tool of oppression? Marco Donnarumma has the answer. He uses it to make music. The IP addresses of the twelve “most screened” websites, are fed into a MIDI synthesizer. A single note is transformed by four voices based on the four bytes of the IP address. The notes are ordered by the number of pages blocked on each site.

Via Unknown 8bit.