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.'"

Comments

vpn

[__aardcx5948]

I was in China for 2 trips. used a US vpn both times, had no issues.

Recently attempts are made to block UDP VPNs

[sc0rpi0n]

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.

Ignore this story

[Anonymous Coward]

This story hurts China's tender heart and makes pandas cry. Stop being so mean.

Re:So it's just like...

[wisnoskij]

Well then you have never gotten caught or tried then.
Actually, I would say that the punishment in the US is far more severe for piracy than the Chinese punishment for censorship laws.
That said, its seems that using proxies to bypass the firewall just for normal every day activities is not even really considered illegal in and of itself. The general answer to the question of, "what is the risk/punishment" is there is none.