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?"

SSH

[betterunixthanunix]

I hear that the Chinese won't stop you from SSHing to a system outside of the country. You can turn SSH into an ad-hoc VPN if you'd like:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH_VPN [ubuntu.com]

The Parking Garage

[FormulaTroll]

Personal viewpoints on censorship aside, I'd be hesitant to break any Chinese laws while in China. Why, my dad just returned from a 14-year stint in a red Chinese prison...

Lived in China for years

[nhtshot]

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.

Re:Breaking laws

[tapspace]

Maybe not some "shady" roll your own linux vpn

I was in China for 10 months, and I used a "shady" roll my own linux vpn (I mean, I didn't roll my own software, I used OpenVPN), and it worked fine. It was faster and cheaper than my friends' solutions.

Obviously, it's a good idea to have a backup to access the web for debugging (openvpn.net is blocked in China, go figure!). Ixquick.com or Startpage.com are great for a super simple proxy fallback.