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How Some Chinese Users Bypass The Great Firewall
CowboyRobot writes "The ACM has an article describing the history and present of the Great Firewall of China (GFW). 'Essentially, GFW is a government-controlled attacking system, launching attacks that interfere with legitimate communications and affecting many more victims than malicious actors. Using special techniques, it successfully blocks the majority of Chinese Internet users from accessing most of the Web sites or information that the government doesn't like. GFW is not perfect, however. Some Chinese technical professionals can bypass it with a variety of methods and/or tools. An arms race between censorship and circumvention has been going on for years, and GFW has caused collateral damage along the way.'"
So it's just like the DRM arms race between content companies and technically capable pirates that has caused collateral damage (to legitimate users) along the way?
Weird.
I was in China for 2 trips. used a US vpn both times, had no issues.
Some Chinese technical professionals can bypass it with a variety of methods and/or tools.
I've met quite a few Chinese in online games and what they tell is that circumventing the firewall is as easy as using a proxy or VPN, is basically risk-free (to the end-user) and is really nothing special amongst their peer-group (age 15-30, educated, typically upper middle class). Every now and then their preferred proxy or VPN provider gets blocked and they have to look for a new one but that's a minor hassle and not a deal-breaker.
So the emphasis when reading the summary should definetely be on the variety of tools that are available to sidestep the firewall, not on the level of technical competence that is required to do so.
I've been living in china for a year by now. And I'm rather sorprised by how easy is to bypass the firewall. It doesn't take technical knowledge of any kind. You simply have to use one of the great number of programs that allow you to do it and that most chinese people tend to share using usb.
The firewall is mostly an annoyance than anything else, since the programs that bypass it use proxys which slow your internet speed and make it so that you cannot use it for activities that require decent bandwith. Still if you are pacient enough, it's like it's not there.
I keep in touch with some friends in China through Facebook, one of the sites the Chinese government doesn't like... And my friends are definitely not 'technical professionals'...
I live in China and noticed that since a few weeks (starting before the congress) the quality of OpenVPN UDP connections deteriorated severely. Formerly traffic worked fine, but now a ping over OpenVPN has significantly higher packet loss and latency than a direct ping to the same host, while these used to be similar. The connection often drops for 5-10 minutes, after which it is reestablished. A tunnel over ssh now performs a lot better than an OpenVPN connection.
Note that I am using my own servers and non-default ports, not established VPN providers that are easier to block. This behavior occurs on different networks from different ISPs. Additionally, L2TP connections now fail most of the time, while they worked a few months ago.
This story hurts China's tender heart and makes pandas cry. Stop being so mean.
Happens everywhere tomorrow
Thanks for this post, Slashdot. Quality of this article is much higher than the too often linked informationweek, computerworld or wired stories. More articles like this one, please.
http://www.cio.com/article/722182/Stop_the_ITU_Taking_Over_the_Internet_Warns_the_European_Parliament http://www.dtic.mil/biosys/hscb-mp.html
Speaking to friends who work and live in China it really isn't that hard to get around the GFW. China are using it to keep the masses controlled and limit their access, but at the same time, leaving it easy enough to get around that the "elite" are still able to use the Internet to its full potential. Making it possible for large companies to compete globally.
I RTFA, and was disappointed that it was more of a history lesson and "how the firewall works" with a small portion at the bottom which can be summed up to "encrypted proxy/vpn".
I was expecting some novel ideas of how to bypass the firewall.
Only read the 1st paragraph, but I was sold with that alone. Blocking twitter, facebook, youtube, .... I would miss wikipedia, however.
I live in China. I don't know anyone who has significant problems with the GFW. It is very easy to hop over. Personally, I use a paid for VPN. I used one for about 3 years without problems. It was finally shut down about a month ago, so I switched. Without a VPN, it is only mildly annoying. You can't get on Youtube and Google is very slow. Most things work normally. For instance, CNN works, but the video section does not.
Funny thing. If you are on the phone with someone and say "VPN", the call sometimes drops immediate. Works better in Chinese than English.
When you don't have a VPN, what is really annoying is are all the US sites that pop-up messages saying that their service is not available in your country. Grrr. Then sites like Microsoft keep bumping you back to their Chinese site and hiding "the show me the page in English" button. It is sad how the internet is getting to sensitive to location. The great thing about the internet was that you could be anywhere. Now companies want to figure out where you are based and serve you country specific content. If you have a Galaxy SIII that you bought in China, try going to the US app store. You can't. Even with a VPN or flying to the US, it will not work.
You'll notice several threads here of people saying "I live in China, there's no problem, but oh, actually in the last few weeks even my VPN/proxy has been flakey".
Those who follow politics will know that since at least September some pretty serious politicol turmoil in China has been leaking to the public.
Every year when the Chinese National Congress meets at the beginning of October the GFW gets much more draconian, usually loosening up after a week or two. This year, however, it has just gotten worse. My older realative who's lived in China all his life says in the last few days they even started blocking regular hotmail messages, and cut off cable TV. In his interpretation, there's a really serious fight going on between the "we've made a ton of money, let's keep things the same" crowd and the "lets go back to Mao" crowd.
Most of the blocks are by DNS .. Using opendns alternative ports solves this or DNS over TCP
No spammy adverts.
Clear references.
No popups.
PDF of the whole thing right at the top.
No, I don't want to e-mail, tweet or otherwise share this. I want the article available so I can cite it later in my meeting about doing business in China.
How convenient; Let's hide behind the world's largest firewall, keep our citizens and visitors under lockdown while we spy on them and simultaneously have the world's largest military hacker team penetrate and interfere with everything on the other side.
UN my butt; What's so united about this? China; Biting the hands that feed it since ____.
Seems to me that everyone should stop buying products made in China, and we'll see how that turns out for them.
Geesh!
Why are we giving these yellow fuckers the time of day? And then moan about it after the facts?
Let's take all our business to the brown fuckers of India. At least they have semi free speech like us.
Better yet, how about keeping the jobs right here at home. I'm sure some people would be interested in $2,000 iPhones.
I think this article shows why UN should not control the Internet. I much prefer US to control it. US is not perfect. However I would rather not let controls like China to meddle with the Internet.
How Some Chinese Users used to Bypass The Great Firewall
**millions of Chinese users grumble and wonder why their techniques don't work anymore.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
The summary is far too technical, perhaps someone can provide a car analogy.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.