At our gate in the Taipei airport, John and I were furiously writing and uploading photos for our last Taiwan entry, just so we could be finished with Taiwan before going behind the GFC. Our flight was called. John had to click "publish" before he had a chance to put in all the photos.
The more I thought about the situation, the more outraged I became. I vowed to break through the GFC. For non-techies, there is a plethera of anti-censorship services that use tunneling (VPN) or proxy technology. We could always pay for a service, buying our way to freedom. This would be a very good use of our money.
The challenge is that the GFC blocks the websites of anti-censorship services and all information about those services. In between all the CNY festivities, I was searching desperately. Eventually, my breakthrough came when I happened upon an unblocked website of a service that offered a two-day trial.
During those two days I must have tried out 20 to 30 different services. In the end I found a number of free services that are working in China (as of Feb 2012) at least some of the time: SecurityKiss, ProXPN, Psiphon, UltraSurf, Freegate, GPass, GTunnel, FreeU, DynaPass, over half which are supported by the Falungong (I am mentioning this without passing any judgement). The important thing is that we are once again a part of the free world. It is so true how we take freedom for granted until we do not have it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Most Recent Post
Sardenia: Sassari
From Castelsardo, we went back to Sassari, the second largest city in Sardinia, an inland city, a university town, not so many tourists. On ...
Most Popular Posts of Last 30 Days
-
When Indigo airlines canceled our Colombo-Hyderabad flight, we took India and Pakistan off our itinerary. Considering we are in the 10th yea...
-
From Ajaccio we took the once daily, weekday only, overpriced bus to the village of Piana. I had wondered whether this special visit was wor...
-
The main reason we braved rainy Keelung was to hike two trails off the Pingxi Branch Rail Line. The rain finally stopped on the day we were ...
-
From Yining, China, we began a somewhat difficult two-day journey to Karakol, Kyrgyzstan via Zharkent, Kazakhstan. The easy route would hav...
-
We liked walking around Tunis looking at the many interesting buildings both in the medina and new city, this time as much as the last time....
-
Another daytrip from Alghero is to the town of Bosa. The bus went on a coastal road that is regarded as the most scenic road in Sardinia. Th...
-
Jiaoxi, 10Km north of Yilan, is a hot springs spa town, the first of many on this tour of east Asia. Our interest is in hiking. We made tw...
4 comments:
For a network geek like you, Sun-Ling, this VPN/proxy challenge must've been child's play.
Exactly....And since that post she's conquered some unusual internet connection schemes at 2 hotels.
-john
Now that I am out of Iran, I can see this. I should have done my homework before going to Iran. I tried to break through their censorship while I was there. I was only partly successful. Anything that can be accessed via HTTPS was easy to get to - such as YouTube, Facebook, etc. Just go through an HTTP proxy that does SSL (get them from google-proxy.net). For unencrypted sites this does not work. Iran also blocks VPNs. I found a VPN that somebody said worked in Iran but it was so slow as to be completely unusable. After a while I just gave up because I did not want to spend my limited time in Iran sitting in a hotel room trying to circumvent their censorship. I should have done more homework in advance :-)
I wonder how the computer scientists who develop censorship technology see themselves.
You were not going to there for very long. It was no biggie. Nonetheless you must felt outrage. No matter how much we complain about the going-on's in the US, we have freedom of press, speech, information....
Post a Comment