Getting around the Great Firewall of China
In China, thousands of people are employed to maintain a control strategy that limits access to certain types of information on the Internet. Dubbed the Great Firewall of China, the system also monitors the contents of e-mails and individual internet traffic unless you take steps to prevent it.
Below you find articles that tells what you need to know about the system, and advice and links to programs you may want to install on your computer before you go to China.
"The Connection Has Been Reset"
This article by James Fallow in the March 2008 Atlantic gives a good and lively introduction to the basics of Chinese Internet censorship and what the Chinese authorities to achieve by having it.
Learn
- how the Chinese monitors all Internet traffic in and out of the country
- how a Domain Name System (DNS) block works
- how transmissions are interrupted by a "Reset" command
- what a URL keyword block is
- how progressively longer time-outs are used to deter users from acessing web pages that are judged unsuitable
- how to bypass the Great Firewall with proxy servers and virtual private networks (VPNs)
- how to encrypt web-based mail systems by typing "https://" instead of "http://"
Beijing Olympics Advice from ex-CNN journalist
Rebecca MacKinnon, former Beijing Bureau Chief of CNN now teaches digital journalism at Hong Kong University. In an interview with former journalist and current China entrepreneur Thomas Crampton she gives practical advice on
- how to get behind the Great Firewall
- how to keep communications private
- how to protect sources and fixers
- how to scramble your data
Read the story on Thomas Crampton's blog
Visit Rebecca Mackinnon's webpage with advice to journalism students going to work from mainland China
Watch the interview on youtube below
Links to VPN's and web proxys
Witopia - paid for service that offers a personal virtual netwrk for 40 US Dollars a year
Anonymouse - a free web proxy that allows anonymous Internet searching
www.hidemyass.com - a free web proxy that allows anonymous Internet searching
More suggestions for VPN's and web proxys at Foreign Correspondents Club in China's web page on Internet security
Other ways to get around the Great Firewall
The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has published a small booklet called "Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship."
It has five ideas for bypassing some of the Internet controls when searching for information:
- Cached pages
Many search engines provide copies of webpages, known as cached pages, of the original pages they index. When searching for a website, look for a small link labelled "cached" next to your search results.
Since you are retrieving a cop of the blocked page from the search engine's servers, and not from the blocked website itself, you may be able to access the censored content. However, some countries have targetted caching services for blocking.
- Translation services
There are many translation services available on the Internet, often provided by search engines. If you access a webpage through the translation service, it is the translation service that is accessing the blocked site. This allows you to read the censored content without directly connecting to the blocked website.
Example: babelfish.yahoo.com
- RSS aggregators
RSS aggregators are websites that allow you to bookmark and read your favourite RSS feeds. RSS aggregator sites will connect to the blocked websites and donwoad the RSS feed and make it available to you. Since it is the aggregator connecting to the website, not you, you will be able to access the censored content.
Example: www.bloglines.com - Alternate Domain Names
One of the most common ways to censor a website is to block access to its domain name, e.g. news.bbc.co.uk.
However, sites are often accessible at other domain names such as newsrss.bbc.co.uk. Therefore if one name is blocked try to see if the content can be accessed at another domain.
- Web accelerators
Web accelerators cache web pages and make it appear as if your Internet connection is faster. Since you are retrieving the website from the cache and not from the blocked website directly, you can access censored content.
Example: webaccelerator.google.com
