Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
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".
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Based on my firewall logs, they not only don't block port 22, they actively encourage it!
I used overplay.net's commercial OpenVPN. There's several competing services specifically tailored to bypassing the great firewall. Overplay in particular has a huge list of servers in different countries. Occasionally one would get blocked, but one of the others would always work.
Best $10/month I spent while I was there.
Regarding the locals laws, etc.. it's a definite gray area. The laws don't say you're not allowed to post or view certain things. The laws just say that the government is allowed to "normalize" (filter/censor).
I used a VPN for years and registered for my internet account using my passport. They knew who I was and could obviously see the VPN traffic. I never heard a word from anybody about it.
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).