Ask Slashdot: Ideas and Tools To Get Around the Great Firewall?

New submitter J0n45 writes "I will soon be traveling to mainland China. While I'm only a tourist, I will still be working freelance for a company back home. I know for a fact that a large amount of the websites I need to have access to on a daily basis for business reasons are censored by the Great Firewall of China. I have been using the Tor Browser for a while now for personal purposes. However Tor has been blocked by China. I was wondering if a personal proxy (connected to a computer back home) would do the trick. Would I be too easily traceable? Basically, I'm wondering if I need to try random public proxies until I find one that works or if there are any other options. What does Slashdot think?"

Comments

Breaking laws

[Mkaks]

- While I'm only a tourist, I will still be working freelance for a company back home.
- are censored by the Great Firewall of China

What does Slashdot think?

That you are
1) Breaking immigration laws by working while on a tourist visa.
2) Breaking laws by trying to get around the web censors and doing something not allowed.

Honestly, if you are just going to China to break their laws, why not just stay at home? If you still want to continue then don't break immigration and other laws in the country you are visiting. It's not only illegal but greatly distasteful towards the host country. They are welcoming you as a visitor and yet you are just going to be breaking laws.

Re:Breaking laws

[ottothecow]

Can't he just use a corporate-style VPN?

I was under the impression that China was perfectly willing to let this go so that American business travelers had no trouble doing business with them. Maybe not some "shady" roll your own linux vpn...but some Cisco product? Why not?

Re:Breaking laws

[Overunderrated]

Honestly, if you are just going to China to break their laws, why not just stay at home? If you still want to continue then don't break immigration and other laws in the country you are visiting. It's not only illegal but greatly distasteful towards the host country. They are welcoming you as a visitor and yet you are just going to be breaking laws.

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
  Martin Luther King Jr.

Re:Breaking laws

[Anonymous Coward]

I came here to say just this...

Sure you may not like their laws. But you should at least respect what they want? You are a guest there. This is different than being oppressed by those laws. You are basically going there with the explicit intention of breaking their laws. You should hope they dont figure out who you are and just deny you entry once you hit their shore...

Re:Breaking laws

[TheCarp]

Irrelevant to the discussion. He wasn't asking if he should do it, or why it would or woul dnot be disrespectful.

Frankly, I am in the camp who says... if a country doesn't respect free speech, then why respect them at all? Good for him disrespecting them, they don't even respect the free speech rights of their own people...fuck their government.

Re:Breaking laws

[ThunderBird89]

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

  Martin Luther King Jr.

And one has a vested interest in remaining under the radar of Chinese law enforcement. Or any other country's law enforcement, for that matter, especially a foreign country's.

Re:Breaking laws

[causality]

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

Ah, a very ironic statement, considering there is hardly anything moral about accessing the internet these days...something tells me this statement was for a far loftier purpose than ensuring that porn habits are fed while traveling.

Porn is much, MUCH loftier than the desire to censor it.

Re:Breaking laws

[Creepy]

Not sure about multiple VPNs, but I have coworkers that were able to connect to my work VPN just fine from their hotels when in China. A proxy would work, as well, but you'd want to use https for an encrypted connection. Either way requires a certificate, and the only free way to do that that I know of is create a self-signed certificate and give your browsers exceptions (I haven't looked into this in years, maybe there are free options).

Also AFAIK tourist visas don't stop you from doing business at home, you just can't do business in/with the country you are in. If the original poster is correct and I am wrong, I know of hundreds of people that have broken various laws, including me, by replying to business emails on vacation in foreign countries (when you're the first point of contact and nobody else can do what you do, there rarely is a true vacation).

Hi, I'm visiting the US soon...

[Richard_at_work]

And although I will be going as a tourist, I still need to be able to regularly import large quantities of heroin and cocaine. However, this isn't allowed according to US law, so can anyone suggest how I can circumvent this law largely because I don't accept it and want to carry on with my massive heroin and cocaine habits while there...

Local laws, whether you believe they are right or not, follow them if you want to stay out of jail.

Re:Hi, I'm visiting the US soon...

[Hatta]

Yes, yes it is. The war on drugs is a war on personal freedom, just like any censorship regime.

Re:Sure - don't go

[osu-neko]

Let's be real - China is a Communist dictatorship, period.

Well, let's be real, then. The Chinese Communist Party is "communist" in the same way the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) is "democratic".