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Tunneling Under the Great Firewall?
An anonymous reader writes "I am traveling to China in the near future, and needless to say as a Slashdot reader I am going to require access to the Internet. The whole, unadulterated, unfiltered Internet. Also needless to say, I am very leery of the government there (my lack of a nickname on this submission being testament to that). I will only be there for a few weeks, and will not be using the computer for much of that time, so I don't want to shell out a lot of money to a VPN service. However I also don't want to be hindered by extremely slow speeds such as those provided by the Tor network. I have experience implementing Web servers and work fairly often with Linux; however, many of my friends who also face the same dilemma don't. What would be the most cost-effective (free is best) method for me to subvert the Great Firewall during my travels while maintaining sufficient anonymity and enjoying sufficient speed?"
This fear of China is just WTF. "my lack of a nickname on this submission being testament to that", VPN's, Tor, all of that just to browse the regular Internet. Anyone who writes these things obviously have not been there or in the other Asian countries.
Most of the western quality hotels provide access to unfiltered Internet and you are most likely staying in one of those. Besides, the Chinese and Asian in general are quite relaxed people. Just think if American cops would be this patient and try to help the guy.
Seriously, the Chinese, Asian and rest of the world hate and fear by Americans is getting beyond ridiculous.
I suggest that you play nice with China's laws if you are going to China. Trying to bypass their firewall as a foreigner traveling there is more likely to attract the sort of attention you don't want than anything else. As you said, you're just going to be there for a few weeks. Do you *really* need to search for the kind of stuff they filter out while you are there?
My wife travels regularly to China for work. We are very careful about our conversations on the phone when she's there, and about the emails we send when she's there. I sure as hell would never advise her to try to bypass their firewall.
If you are a Chinese freedom activist, by all means, you know what you're getting into, bypass away. I support the people of China in their efforts to access the whole internet, to speak their minds, to be as free as they care to be.
If you are a Westerner visiting, I'd suggest you just hold your horses there bucko and deal with the internet you can get from your hotel room and don't make yourself look more suspicious than you actually are. You really, really don't want anybody to think you are doing anything against Chinese interests while you're there. Seriously.
I'm not sure if this is what your referring to but I use a SSH socks proxy and tsocks under linux quite a bit to allow proxy unaware apps to be use it (like RDP). The only issue I have with this setup is DNS. Since it primarily uses UDP not TCP for lookups they are all performed against the locally configured name servers not the remote. I haven't found an elegant solution for this yet but your network.proxy.socks_remote_dns config may help a lot (I've never heard of that before).
For the original submitter, I understand your reluctance to being restricted and object to the idea of the great firewall as much as the next guy, however is completely open access really worth breaking the law there and potentially being imprisoned in China. Also keep in mind that while you may object to the concept of the firewall but you are a guest in the country and breaking any countries laws while as such is really disrespectful. If you really don't like the law don't travel there, if your trying to make some sort of political statement (which I doubt) then best of luck to you... China isn't well know for being good sports about that sort of thing.
What you are asking is illegal there. If you get caught bad things will happen to you. Is it really worth the risk for a couple of weeks? Are you THAT addicted?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hey, if all information wants to be free, it will be free for everyone, including the "bad guys".
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." - Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"
If you use a SSL proxy, make sure you note the fingerprint of the one you want to use BEFORE you go. Compare it when there to make sure you don't get a man in the middle attack.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
But when the law unfairly restricts your natural rights, then the breaking of that law is completely justified, hell, armed revolution in the case of China is very much justified for the Chinese people.
That said, I'm not sure if I'd really do it in China as a tourist, not that they'd probably do much (China gets western businessmen all the time) but I just wouldn't want to take the risk unless.
But really, if a law is unjust and violates natural rights, you have every right to break it, some may say you even have a responsibility to break it because by not breaking it you in essence prop the law up.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
While not necessarily the best tone in the world, I actually agree with DJ Jones here.
Here's your decision tree:
1) Is the website you want to see worth defying the laws of your hosting nation?
2) Is absolutely no way you can do without it until you come home?
3) Do you have some kind of diplomatic immunity, wealthy connections, etc that can extract you from a sticky situation?
You get the picture.
Imagine this post on the Arabian Slashdot:
I am getting ready to travel to the United States and don't want it to interrupt my terrorist training. Can you guys recommend a way around the DHS's websniffing protocols, eavesdropping, cellular tracking, etc?
And what would your advice be??
Opportunistically, if you gave advice about methods, would you feel bad if he landed in Gitmo?
Think about the implications. After all, it is only the internet and you don't live there. Think deeply.
I vote for this strategy because then no contraband will ever be present on your computer in China. Nothing on the computer, nothing for authorities to find in your cache or via deleted file recovery.
While the traveler is in China it's probably not a good idea to risk legal issues with the Chinese government.
respect and saving face is a huge part of the culture
And in other places they eat live eels. There's a lot of stupid shit in the world.
While what you say may be true, to say it like that is like saying we should give them a pass for their obnoxious behavior simply because they're used to it... Shall we give racists in our home countries a free pass on their idiocy simply because it's cultural for them to be hating?
flip the tables and say some guy wanted to view CP in the US
Oh please do drag that stupid CP argument out here so we can kick it to death.
The US allows brutal degradation of actresses for porn, depictions of rape and murder, actual footage of such (usually), depictions of infants being cooked and fed to dogs, etc, etc, etc. And in the middle of that they want to draw a fence around CP.
Many token arguments are made, such as it encouraging real abuses, but they could be made for any of the rest of that cesspool. Ultimately they all fail to the brutal reality that censorship and FUD aren't security. The blind panic around CP is growing old, we can see it's not actually doing anything to protect anyone. And the censorship not only wouldn't help, and is immoral to implement, but is impossible.
I'd support someone looking up communism when it was the panic word. How could I draw the line at some other panic word? And even if I could, how could I know I wasn't just panicking? So no. For practical and ethical reasons we can't censor even if the content disgusts, scares us, or reveals our war-crimes.
circumventing the laws of a nation of which you are not a citizen is not only illegal
Tautologically, circumventing any law is legal. And just as meaninglessly, breaking a law is always illegal. But is the law right? Is the nation valid?
That is exactly why I won't visit the USA.