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?"

Comments

Good luck!

[grub]

At my workplace we have people who travel to China. On occasion VPN connections from China just stop for hours or days at at time. No hits at our VPN endpoint from China at all; the traffic is stopped upstream somewhere while everything else that is unencrypted works.

That's the only country we have people visit where the VPN can be problematic.

Screenshare

[bobdotorg]

Before leaving, set up a computer with decent upstream bandwidth and VNC / screen share. Pretty simple, and only shows a connection to that one IP address. If you use OSX it's a 30 second setup in sharing preferences, and I'm sure that there are windows and Linux equivalents. You may need to tweak the ports to get under the Great Firewall.

However, one significant drawback (with the OSX solution) is that audio is not streamed. Another is lag with slow / far connections.

But it will get you the full net.

Re:Screenshare

[the_one(2)]

A friend's friend for whom I set VNC up for it didn't work to well. The connection was heavily throttled and to slow to be useful.

Re:Screenshare

[dintech]

Yes, when I was in Japan the lag to Europe made logmein and VNC a bit of a chore to use. Some kind of tunnelling will make for a better user experience in my opinion.

remote desktop

[circletimessquare]

if on windows, set up your home computer to accept incoming rdp requests (and configure your router to pass that port to the right machine), and leave your home computer on the whole time

login remotely, and surf anywhere you want

Re:Fear

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the western quality hotels provide access to unfiltered Internet and you are most likely staying in one of those.

Is that 'unfiltered' access also 'unmonitored'?

Happens exactly the same with the good ole' USA

[ArsenneLupin]

A friend of mine is working for a supplier of automotive parts with (at the time) two branch offices in Luxembourg, and one in the United States (Detroit).

All 3 are linked together with a VPN.

And just after the planes struck the buildings on 911, the VPN with Detroit mysteriously went down. Unencrypted connections continued working as if nothing happened (so it's not a case of a router being located physically in WTC, or whatever). A couple of days later, all was back to normal. No explanation ever followed.

Recent experience

[seyfarth]

I recently spent 1 month in China and was unsure of what to expect about internet access. It was better than I expected. I think it is not worth the trouble to try to dodge any firewalling. I was able to use ssh to connect to computers back home and generally able to surf the internet. I think youtube and google video were blocked, but for a short trip this is not much to worry about. I was able to use gmail and google. The news under google/ig sometimes linked to blocked sites. However, there were always related links with the same information which were not blocked. So, for me, the only problem was not viewing videos for a few weeks. This did not matter to me, though I think there are alternative video sources which are not blocked.
The net result is that access is nearly unfettered, so it is probably pointless and perhaps unwise to try to subvert the firewall. Freedom seems to be increasing in China. Enjoy your trip!

Re:Fear

[Rotworm]

That's one reason the /. crowd might differentiate. An equal perspective is the one from the origins of Gnu or the Internet: that we should exert democratic control. A Slashdotter who believes in democratic ideals wouldn't differentiate between the DMCA and the laws of a heirarchial, albeit sovereign, nation.

Most people [...]

Are you sure? What makes you think that?

NX Client for Secure Remote Browsing

[argontechnologies]

If you have a linux box in the US, install NX Server (free) on that box, then install NX Client on your laptop or USB memory stick with whatever distro you want to use. Secure remote browsing done easy. Marco

Extreme Cynicism alert

[GlL]

I wonder if the AC who posted the question might be a lazy network tech in China trying to close holes?