China: getting through the "great firewall"?

The best way is to known people on the inside, telling you what proxy's to use and what's the best VPN service to bypass the ever changing firewall.

There's no absolute truth, what works today can be blocked tomorrow. What's blocked today, can be accessible tomorrow. The tricks to by pass the filtering can be complicated, even upto changing network parameters on your computer. If that's not your thing, get yourself educated or be prepared to not have access.

Another parameter in the firewall bypass game, is bandwidth. Youtube is a bandwidth eater same for image intensive sites like facebook and BBC. If you're using free bypass tricks, expect not have much bandwidth aka a slow jittery connection.

Paid Proxy / VPN services can also have bandwidth limitations, it depends how much you pay for it.

In case you need a stable open connection, don't bet on 1 horse, get more connections with a last resort scenario, which is a satellite phone with data connection (expensive but works)

Most of all - get the maximum of info outside China. When inside you got to deal with government filtering.

Cheers!

Thank you very much.

The question is for someone who is not techncally minded, and who needs to function as an academic at a Chinese university. Google is a crucially important resource for her, but is generally not available (sometimes the URL redirects to Google Hong Kong, but more often to a totally useless Chinese substitute service). Bandwidth is not much of an issue, but my fear is that this is the result of Google themselves declining to submit to Chinese censorship and so not operating there at all.

So: any chance you could post simple instructions on a method that is likely to work?

VPN s are your best solution, but China has a very high end equipment from Cisco aimed at blocking the net and a number of people who are in the governmental unit in charge of net censorship. You are not shooting at a static target and if you arenot technically minded, I would have someone who is staying on top of this.

I would look at a pay VPN service like Witopia which uses IPSEC (rather than PPTP) and which offers it on a variety of ports which a number of different servers. If your friend is an academic researcher, I would rather use a university VPN which tunnels back to his/her school back home. That way if you are caught, if you have a legitimate explanation for the use of this technollogy. Remember that even if they can't decrypt your tunnel, they can probably spot it.

Google "proxy servers China"

all the info you will need
you change servers daily, sometimes twice a day.

Edited by: nwdiver

google worked fine for me in china. Facebook didn't and never tried you tube.

I'd also be concerned whether the chinese government take offence to bypassing their blocks. I'm guessing they do, but with such a big country its depends on how easy it is to find people using proxies. Its easier to just keep finding the proxies and blocking them.