Question for those who might know: how common is it for the ordinary mainland Chinese person to attempt to circumvent the great firewall? Do people there actually care about what they might be missing, as this incident implies?
Doesn't Chinese techies circumvent the great firewall of China constantly? Also, I think there was an article recently about how the government officials turn a blind eye at breaches that didn't involve political matters.
No, they aren’t. Foreigners in China often get around the Great Firewall through foreigner-specific SIM cards or VPNs. A tiny, tiny amount of locals is able and interested in avoiding the Great Firewall. But for the vast majority of Chinese, the Great Firewall is never overcome; few even feel motivation to evade censorship. Compare that to a situation like Belarus where nearly every computer-literate person is aware of what to do.
Hi HN,
A native Chinese living in China mainland here, may I ask for your help:
If you are a hacker, online freedom NGO or a team in any form, would you develop software or technology to help us bypass the Great Firewall in China? I mean a real total solution beyond tips or workarounds.
Dictators always want to control the free flow of information, seems they’re one step closer to the target. Please do something to stop that. No matter it’s China, Iran or who-knows-who-is-next.
TL;DR version:
GFW is not new, but recently it becomes severely tight up. Things got worsen months ago, GFW got technical upgrade which enabled it to interfere even OpenVPN and SSH tunnel which had worked fine for a long time. I had used openvpn and astrill for 2 years, worked perfectly okay (to bypass internet filtering instead of privacy concern), GFW could not do anything to them but after the tech upgrade, no matter how I config protocol, port, TLS, MTU, no matter where the server is, the VPN connection could not be established or last no longer than 5 minutes. Tor? Too slow.
We guess the big brother has been collecting commercial VPN services’ data or GFW gained ability to operate based on packet behavior.
I’m not saying my whole life is total f*cked because of that but the truth is that I’m and so many people here are really angered and frustrated. It’s not because facebook or youtube, it’s about us connecting with the world. Our right to watch, know and learn from YOU and the outside world is abruptly violated.
Sometimes I even wondered there’re people like Anonymous who would bother to take down some websites (I personally think that’s controversial way to express or protest), why not leverage you tech skills, teamwork and passion to do something to the GFW? Track the GFW nodes down? Analyze how it works? Counter interfere it? Develop a new tech solution?
And Finally Unblock Us?
Thanks for your patience and hope I’ll still be able to come back to you.
I don't know, but it is clear that the Chinese firewall is about preventing Chinese people from accessing the wider internet, not about preventing non-chinese people from accessing the Chinese internet.
So I'm curious are Chinese hackers allowed past the great firewall and allowed to roam freely on the internet? I wonder how that sort of freedom is managed, like I'm imagining a hacker stumbling across a hard drive full of Tianamen Square coverage or Uighur documentation or whatever the suppressed story is. Is that class of individuals given free license online and basically trusted not to go snooping around or cover their eyes when they find stuff they shouldn't be seeing?
I think an interesting question is how likely it is that some of the great firewall is compromised.
(It could be by some party outside of China, or by some group inside of the Chinese government that does not have an official mandate to use it for things like the Github attack)
I don't agree with this statement at all. China has a lot of highly educated (and in practice, unemployed) young people. Many of them are in IT. In my opinion, it's ludicrous to think that large numbers of people don't circumvent the great firewall routinely (perhaps even for simple privacy issues devoid of any seditious intent).
Look at America. Lots of people use privacy-enhancing technology, even in illegal contexts, without really understanding it or the issues that surround it.
Regarding censorship: if the Chinese firewall was really about censorship and not about foreign monopolies, China would be prosecuting people for going around it. And they don’t - VPNs are commonplace, government doesn’t care.
A million people probably have at least 10x more relatives and friends on the outside. Ways of breaching the great firewall are well known even within China. Shouldn't there be...numerous reports of missing persons if this is the case?
This sucks for travelers and ex-pats, but for China's future this is a very, very, very big deal.
I lived in Shanghai last year, and Chinese Internet surveillance is unreal. I could use gmail chat to talk about tiananman square, but as soon as I did all of my Google apps would suddenly be unavailable. I can only assume that when i used certain keywords my every chat was being monitored. A VPN was the only way I could access YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and even some Google searches.
But reality is 90% of the young population of Shanghai didn't really care what the "great firewall" did, because EVERYONE used a VPN. I saw more people watching YouTube in China than I do in the states, even though Chinese versions of these platforms exist. Some platforms, like RenRen (Facebook-like but more similar to Russia's VKontakte) were popular, but most just used the US-built versions. Now most of them won't be able to.
This absolutely terrifies me. I was literally minutes away from being on a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing that killed "x" people. Chinese authorities cite incredibly low numbers for a train traveling at 300 km/h. Most non-state observers cited hundreds of deaths. China slowly grew its number from 20-40.
It's illegal for foreigners to talk about the "Three Ts" with Chinese nationals - Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananman Square. But previously the youth learned through their VPNs letting them access the outside world. With that shut down, the government might as well be burning books.
As far as I'm aware, bypassing the firewall is not illegal, just highly discouraged.
We openly bypassed the firewall to access Google Analytics data through VPN and nobody batted an eye. China can't afford to crack down on that without scaring off pretty much every foreign company looking to do business on the mainland.
That's sufficient, really. China's firewall can be penetrated, it's just too much of a bother for the average citizen - which suffices to maintain stability.
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