Great article about China warning Google about what's going to happen if they don't stop making "false accusations".
and another one about "China-US economic cold war"
China warns Google!
June 14th, 2011 Posted in Gmail and Google, Internet Censorship
Jun, 14 2011
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May, 27 2011
Here's a link to a very interesting article I read today. It's about the Chinese Internet being disrupted. Ok, I know this is normal. But what I didn't know is that in some universities, there are Internet connections that are not blocked by the great firewall. They made an interesting point, saying that The Chinese government realized the need for an intellectual elite, and therefore allows many university students the ability to surf "the western Internet".
However, just yesterday many universities all over the countries experience problems with their un-firewalled Internet. Google and Gmail wasn't working.
It also mentioned something about hitting "critical mass" for the amount of blocked web sites requested.
Anyway, I won't recite the article, you can read it HERE.
It's pretty long though. If you're not interested, I pretty much summarized it.
Access Facebook in China
May 18th, 2011 Posted in Access Facebook, China, Internet Censorship, News, Securitales, Unblock Facebook, VyprVPN, Web Based Service
May, 18 2011
July 2011 – You'll notice a lot of links that aren't working here on the site. It seems that in recent weeks, The Great Firewall has had some serious updates, and many of the VPNs featured/reviewed are blocked (at least the sites are). This may not be for the entire country, but at least here in Fujian, many have been blocked.
Securitales is a Web Based Service that is not blocked. A web based service is different from a VPN, but can also unblock sites in China. The advantage of a Web based service over a VPN is that you don't have to download anything onto your computer. It works on iPhone, iPad and other smart phones as well as laptop and desktop operating systems like Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The most important thing right now is that it's NOT BLOCKED.
Check out Securitales at www.securitales.com.
Being able to access Facebook in China is not as easy as it used to be. I've been in China for more than five years now. I was here before Facebook was blocked, and it's been a slippery slope for the scope of the Internet in China for as long as I can remember. Every year there are fewer and fewer sites accessible from behind The Great Firewall. What's worse, there are way to access blocked sites in China, but these are slowly getting weeded out by the Chinese government, and while just a few years ago there were hundreds of ways to access Facebook in China, there are now just a few.
Back in 2009, I remember using a bit of software called Freegate to access Facebook in China. It was free, and was passed around between me and a couple of my colleagues at work. Their official site was quickly blocked in China, but I was lucky enough to have a group of friends to pass the software to me.
Just a few months later, Freegate was useless.
Then I started using a site called Privacy Tunnel (or something like that, I can't really remember). It was a free proxy that was (again), introduced to me by a friend of mine. Proxies reroute your information to a server somewhere outside of China and change your IP address – this is how you're able to access Facebook in China though a proxy.
At that time there were tons of free proxies available, and as soon as one got blocked, more seemed to pop up. You could always find fresh ones in forums and by word of mouth.
But China's been working hard at blocking proxies, and I can only think of a few that still work today….NONE of which are free.
Then I discovered VPNs. I had never heard of VPNs before 2010 when I got tired of spending HOURS on the Internet looking for ways to access Facebook in China. I found the cheapest one possible (12VPN) and went for it.
I couldn't believe how much more convenient it was. Instead of having to type my URL into the proxy browser, all I had to do was connect to the VPN (after downloading and installing it on my computer), and then I could surf the Internet without thinking about it. At that time is was 30 dollars for a year of service, and I couldn't have been happier.
But the game has changed in 2011.
Some big stuff went down in Egypt – The Twitter Revolution. And there was a small movement in China that tried to follow.
Facebook and Twitter were deemed heroes in The West as catalysts for political change. So you can guess how the socialist government of China felt about that.
The immediately blocked some of the biggest names in VPN providers – StrongVPN, 12VPN, Witopia, and Freedur.
Not only that, but they blocked PPTP and L2TP VPN protocols which are used on mobile devices like smart phones (iPhone/Android) and tablet computers (iPad/Android).
Most VPN services soon recovered, with higher prices, special China packages, and frequent updates to their SSL/OpenVPN. But the game wasn't over. If you've been to Unblock Facebook in China .info before, you know that things change frequently. It seems that right when I updated the site to include all the VPN services that had recovered nicely from the March 2011 blocks, VPN sites started going down again. Two of my favorite VPN services are currently blocked in many parts China (StrongVPN and 12VPN). The SSL/OpenVPN still works great for both, but the sites are inaccessible, making it impossible to sign up.
So how can you access Facebook in China now?
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Well there are other VPN services available. I've tried many. The only one I can really recommend, that's not blocked of course, is VyprVPN. It's a bit on the expensive side, but it works, and it's fast.
There's also a web based proxy service called Securitales. This works well also.
Which one is better?
Why you should use VyprVPN
- It's faster
- It's more secure
- It's more convenient
- You can watch Hulu/Netflix/Pandora/BBC iPlayer
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Why you should use Securitales
- You can install it on iPhone, iPad, Android, and mobile devices
- There's nothing to install so you can use it at work and on school computers
- It's cheaper ($70/year)
Remember that not just Facebook is blocked in China. Youtube, Twitter, Blogger, parts of Wikipedia, Google images, and thousands of other sites are blocked for seemingly no reason.
* Want to protect your Gmail account from getting hacked?
* * Did you know that Hotmail and Yahoo were both victims of Chinese hackers this year?
* * * What will you do if your email service is blocked in China?
* * * * How will you make phone calls if Skype is blocked?
You can forget about all these problems with a VPN or Web Based Proxy.
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https://www.goldenfrog.com/vyprvpn
May, 05 2011
Here's another interesting article about Google in China. I think the most interesting part of the article is that they summed up Google future options in china pretty well
- Promote Google strongly in China but continue to sit in Hong Kong.
- Do something completely different (e.g., a new Chinese search engine).
- Re-enter China.
- Do nothing.
Says it pretty well huh?
Seems like this year, with all the turmoil, and now with the new department for monitoring internet censorship and all internet related topics there's going to be some big changes in the next move. According to this article, even Facebook is making some moves in the Chinese market. Wow. I wonder what Mark Zuckerberg's Chinese name is.
Anyway, some interesting stuff about Google losing face in here. Check it out.
Should Google Escape the Death Spiral in China by 'Losing Face'?
China raises the bar on internet censroship
May 5th, 2011 Posted in Gmail and Google, Internet Censorship
May, 05 2011
Here's an interesting article I found about China's internet censorship as of May 2011. It turn out that internet censorship in China isn't strict enough yet, and they've created a new department not only to monitor micro blogging, blogging, and web sites available on the Chinese Internet, they're also going to be monitoring gaming, VoIP calls, and video blogging as well.
I'll tell you, if you want to piss Chinese people off, take away their computer games! Could you imagine a hoard of World of Warcraft fans gathering in the streets shouting "We want Warcraft", "Give us Orcs or give us death".
Wouldn't that be the day.
Here's the article
China's New IT Authority Could Raise Censorship
Apr, 12 2011
July 2011 – You'll notice a lot of links that aren't working here on the site. It seems that in recent weeks, The Great Firewall has had some serious updates, and many of the VPNs featured/reviewed are blocked (at least the sites are). This may not be for the entire country, but at least here in Fujian, many have been blocked.
Securitales is a Web Based Service that is not blocked. A web based service is different from a VPN, but can also unblock sites in China. The advantage of a Web based service over a VPN is that you don't have to download anything onto your computer. It works on iPhone, iPad and other smart phones as well as laptop and desktop operating systems like Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The most important thing right now is that it's NOT BLOCKED.
Check out Securitales at www.securitales.com.
I don't know about you guys, but I can't access Gmail, or Google for that matter! I'm not going to say that the whole of China can't access Gmail, but I've got two internet access points here, one at the office, and one at home. Either both are on the fritz or China's at it again. I'm using Firefox at home, and anything I type into the Google search bar gets shot down with a "the server request is taking too long"..but this may be a problem with my personal computer – I've got more viruses than the average person. The school computer is generally virus free but I think they restored it from the 90's so that's nothing to get excited about either. Regardless, I'm SOOOOO glad that I have a vpn, because without it i'd have to start using Yahoo for searching.
That's the funny thing, is that I can't access my Gmail account, but Yahoo and Yahoo mail is not a problem. I started using it to search the other day, and didn't realize how slow Google actually was. Have you heard about "throttling"? It's where they limit bandwidth of an internet connection, in this case to make the site slow on purpose. China does this when they can't block a site completely, but want to discourage users from using the site. They used to do this with Wikipedia a few years ago, and they do this with Google and Google pages now. As a webmaster, I use things like Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. All blocked in China. Or slow to the point of being useless.
Apr, 06 2011
I've just complete quite a few site updates. After that crazy period when vpn companies were dropping like flies I did a lot of quick-fix site changes including putting big signs in bold and crossing out prices and stuff like that. Ugly.
But now I'm working with a new blog editor so I'm going to try and pimp stuff up with a bit of color, font, and text size changes. HTML is such a pain sometimes, but the new blog editor makes it a bit easier.
Part of the update was including 12vpn back on the roster. I know, they've gotten pretty expensive compared to what they used to cost, but their service is still as good as it was before, and seeing as they're now back online in China, and users in China can use their service, I think it's important to note their awesomeness.
Is anyone having trouble accessing their paypal accounts with a vpn? Some guy left me a not saying he's having issues but I can't tell if it's spam or not. I've never had a problem,
Funny thing about having a blog is that you get SOOOOOO much spam. Sorry if some of your comments get lots, I get hundreds of pieces of spam every day.
Will keep you guys updated.
A very flawed (though sounds nice) arguement about why vpn’s are sure to survive as soon as the Chinese government realizes they’re wrong
The VPN-debate: why China’s internet censorship needs to fail
A great idea to make money but also ridiculously flawed logic article
Just keepin ya up to date
Mar, 18 2011
Just yesterday I thought Strongvpn and 12vpn were doing great because they survived 'THE Block', but as of tonight, march 18 at about eight o'clock I was unable to access either of them. My vpn is still working, so that's good news if you've already go one or are planning to buy one – i.e. if they block your site at least you can still use your vpn to get around. But it's just frustrating to see that China's firewall is winning the battle. I'll give it a bit of time before I go and Change my entire site, but for now, if you run across this blog – Astrill and Purevpn are still up. I'm getting hot and heavy for Astrill – cheap vpns, nice site design, OpenVpn/SSL options, and most of all, accessible. Check em' out before it's too late. Oh and heads up for Mac users – PureVpn only has SSTP for Windows 7 and Vista so go with Astrill. Astrill Vpn Pure Vpn
Mar, 18 2011
In the past couple weeks I had noticed a huge difference in my internet connection. Gmail just couldn't load correctly and I had to use the basic HTML format. I couldn't search on Google properly, and my vpn just would connect to newark like it used to. I flushed my DNS a million times, restarted, deleted, reformated. Anything and everything I could do I did. Being such a retard at these things, I simply blamed myself or my virus ridden computer. I never thought (why not?) that it was the Chinese gov't at work. How I didn't come to that conclusion is a mystery becaue they're usually to blame for this kind of thing. I was checking some of my stats at the 12vpn site and I notice that they weren't offering service to China anymore? WTF? And now it's 129 dollars for a year instead of the mere 70 it used to be? And no lite service? So I sent them an email to see what's up. It was a combination of things. For one, with the tsunami in Japan, a lot of the bandwidth here is f*ed up. They even mentioned something about internet restriction in the US to free up bandwidth for Asia. Isn't that nice. But I also discovered that China blocked all kind of shit over night, totally shutting down the Witopia site and crippling a few others. Some companies are kind of on their last legs (at least in China) as they switched to backup servers – the only backup servers they have. The block of PPTP and L2TP means that vpn's on mobile devices are pretty much useless now, and although I've read quite a few confident posts from other's in China that the blocking of protocols like SSL and SSTP is pretty much impossible, I think that the Chinese gov't will do anything and everything to get it's way and totally cut off vpn's in China.