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The Best Way Through the Great Firewall of China
eldavojohn writes "The MIT Technology Review brings news of a new report from Harvard assessing circumvention software. The best tools they tested (and they actually did test them in cybercafes in China) were Ultrareach, Psiphon, and Tor, while Dynaweb and Anonymizer also scored well — of course, the huge downside is the long loading times. The report also includes responses from developers of the tools."
Also, one of the "downsides" they fail to report is the fact that if you get caught you'll go missing and end up as an organ doner.
A friend of mine lives in Beijing, apparently the great firewall is load of PR fluff, which anyone -- including barely tech-literate people -- work around by using public proxies.
Granted, it is lame, it does have a chilling effect on free speech, but mostly it's just a PR stunt by the Chinese government.
If I recall correctly, Chani (of KDE fame) once blogged about having difficulty even using SSH from inside China.
JAP -- german government or better said their intelligence service has a direct interface to it... so what is better chinese or german gov watching your porn downloads?
It depends on where your nationality resides. It is accepted and assumed that Americans/The West (TM) will use encryption because they see us as being very concerned about privacy and protective of our business secrets et al. So if you're American/European and over there, you won't have any trouble using encryption/SSH2/etc. A Chinese citizen, on the other hand, would have more trouble getting away with it.
I think the point he's making is that he doesn't trust anybody to use his internet connection.
Sharing domestically, he could be charged with kiddie porn.
Sharing internationally, he could be charged with treason/terrorism.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
firefox has a setting to route DNS requests through the socks proxy as well.
network.proxy.socks_remote_dns
I just left Beijing in November (each province and city has different protocols and sites that are to be blocked - its not just one Great Firewall) and can pass on what I have seen.
Most people (foreign and Chinese) just use an ever evolving list of proxy sites for "that one site" that is being blocked for whatever reason. I remember having to finally give up on http://postsecret.com/ as Chinese censors had seen the name and apparently added it to the list sight unseen. http://flyproxy.com/ was the most used and usually quite fast and able to handle most flash/cgi.
TOR and all that are great but who is running the nodes? If you dont think China is combing through traffic of people TRYING to hide you have another thing coming (I dont feel like combing through but there was a /. article some time ago discussing that Fort Mead MD seems to have a hugely disproportionate amount of TOR nodes so it seems the NSA is on the same page). China is all about stability and.... actually no, thats it, stability. As long as you are using proxyserver of the month for negligible things there will never be a problem. If you are using TOR/Anonymizer/etc to attempt to break down the walls and change the government - aiya - watch out.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
"This presents an interesting chicken and egg problem with circumvention software. How do you get the software in the first place if it's source of the software package is censored?"
apt-get install tor privoxy
I've been in countries where use of any method to circumvent state censorship is criminal, all known proxies are blocked, all proxifying/anonymising software websites are blocked, tor.eff.org is blocked and so on. But there are Debian mirrors hosted by the state funded university. No more censorship :-)
Pet peeve of mine: phased != fazed.