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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."
It is worth noting that the report was released in 07 and "Some of the data is now out of date"
They fitted George Orwell's coffin with rollers so he could turn over more easily years ago.
Dont even want to be free from the firewall, because it might break their perfect-image that they are so great. They get taught from birth that they live in the best place on Earth and believe this to the fullest. Say anything bad about China towards a Chinese who never left the country and no matter how much evidence you give them and facts you feed them they won't believe it.
I showed some Chinese websites about Tianmen square, video's, the wikipedia, but all they said that is was fake material made by people who hate China. Some that did know about it was fully on the side of their government and it was just "keeping order".
Let them take care of it themself if they want to see the truth and not be oppressed but the way it is they want it and like it.
And if you are a foreigner who needs the a unregulated internet connection, avoid countries like China, maybe if all tourism stops they might considering being less oppressive.
I went to China for vacation November 2008. It was crazy watching the U.S. election from the Yengtze river.
Being the dork that I am I spent a good chunk of time playing around with the Great Firewall of China. One thing that baffled me was the ease of which I could find "censored" material. For example the wikipedia page for the Tiananmen Square protests was accessible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989).
Searching Google images for "Tiananmen Square" came back with hundreds of tanks, bloody civilians and the like - no different than in the U.S.
Yet some things were banned. I found that all the free http proxies that I tried were banned. I couldn't get to wikileaks.org. And I couldn't get to the Tor website to download the installer.
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? I ended up asking a buddy of mine in the U.S. to send me the Tor program via gmail, but not everyone has that option.
I was only on a very slow 8k/sec connection so at times it was difficult to tell if a site was banned or if it just was really slow. I could only really tell by running a trace route. It would always time out at the same router, presumably the router that bridged between inside and outside China.
In case anyone is interested here is a tracert going to a banned site.
C:\>tracert wikileak.org
Tracing route to wikileak.org [72.1.201.156]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 490 ms 298 ms 298 ms 220.192.136.4
2 298 ms 299 ms 299 ms 220.192.136.251
3 298 ms 280 ms * 61.242.160.182
4 280 ms 342 ms 296 ms 211.94.54.205
5 432 ms 439 ms 439 ms 211.94.56.105
6 438 ms 459 ms 459 ms 211.94.55.5
7 358 ms * 1107 ms 211.94.39.98
8 499 ms 480 ms 479 ms 211.94.55.250
9 * 1108 ms 479 ms sl-gw22-ana-1-0.sprintlink.net [144.228.79.177]
10 498 ms 500 ms 518 ms sl-crs2-ana-0-1-2-2.sprintlink.net [144.232.1.12
2]
11 518 ms 519 ms 539 ms sl-crs2-fw-0-13-3-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.1
97]
12 536 ms 538 ms 558 ms sl-crs2-kc-0-0-0-2.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.14
1]
13 537 ms 558 ms 538 ms sl-crs2-chi-0-8-0-3.sprintlink.net [144.232.18.2
14]
14 528 ms 539 ms 539 ms sl-st21-chi-11-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.21
]
15 537 ms 539 ms 540 ms sl-bigpi4-209998-0.sprintlink.net [144.223.6.30]
16 536 ms 559 ms 539 ms rc2ch-pos10-0.il.shawcable.net [66.163.65.41]
17 537 ms 719 ms 539 ms rc1ch-ge1-0-0.il.shawcable.net [66.163.65.1]
18 556 ms 560 ms 559 ms rc2sh-pos13-0.mt.shawcable.net [66.163.77.13]
19 558 ms 557 ms 559 ms ra2sh-tge10-1.mt.shawcable.net [66.163.66.78]
20 597 ms 578 ms 580 ms rx0sh-hydro-one-telecom.mt.bigpipeinc.com [66.24
4.255.38]
21 578 ms 559 ms 559 ms 142.46.128.14
22 779 ms 779 ms * tol-gsr.telecomottawa.net [142.46.130.10]
23 * *
I know how it feels like being cyberstalked. Kinda pathetic. But hey, how many of them are really slashdotters caring about the karma stuff? ;)
As a Chinese, I'm not offended by your viewpoints or position, in fact I quite understand it. However, I remain somewhat skeptic about the factuality of your post because I don't know any established Chinese law regarding the regulation of encryption technology used by individuals (IANAL of course). Can you give me a pointer to some legal material that supports your post? I believe I use encryption of one kind or another on a daily basis (SSH and HTTPS come to mind, as well as the encryption facilities built into bittorrent).
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
In China and Chinese-ruled territories use or possession of encryption technology without permission from the Chinese Communist Party (aka PRC government) is an offense against the State/CCP. For those forms of encryption that the Party does permit to be used, eg. in online shopping, the Party must have the decryption keys.
You have either been misinformed or are deliberately making stuff up for some reason. I have ran sshd and apached (with encryption) on my own computer for years. I use GnuPG to communicate with my friends. But I have NEVER been required to acquire permission from the "Party", nor have I given my decryption keys to anybody.
As much as I despise my communist government, spreading blatant lies like this is not going to help bring about its demise. If anything it only makes more of your "mindless hordes of ultra-nationalists", because your so-obviously-made-up description of china can be translated and circulated on the chinese bulletin boards as "proof" that westerners want nothing but the "down-fall of China", and how "ignorant" they are of "the great achievements made by the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist party". Yes I know this is very laughable, but that's the sad truth, and it has happened very often in the past few years. Things like this can easily be used to provoke nationalist and anti-western sentiment in China, which will make the work of those brave individuals who tirelessly try to promot the values of human right, freedom, democracy, etc. (the "symbolic" values of the western world) in China more difficult than it already is.