How Some Chinese Users Bypass The Great Firewall 58
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.'"
Re:So it's just like... (Score:0, Insightful)
Technical professionals? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:So it's just like... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is true. If people were actually punished in the legal sense for accessing information blocked by the firewall there would be a ruckus. Not a huge one, but big enough that it keeps government from acting brashly. It's the sending of information, writing blogs on banned topics, weibo-ing controversial things, etc. that could get you in IRL trouble.