Here's an interesting article on China's recent (and future) activities in The Philippines, and how Filipino Americans are reacting.
Jun, 29 2011
No Comments »
Jun, 22 2011
China NEWS!
China, Google, and Maps
China's Version of Google Maps (article)
Google Maps in China (article)
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?
.png)
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
.jpg)
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.
.png)
https://www.goldenfrog.com/vyprvpn
Apr, 07 2011
Hey I just found this article about the Night Dragon – Chinese hackers getting into Western Oil companies computer systems and stealing gigabytes of sensitive info. Scary stuff.
How is Astrill vpn workin out for you guys?
Gmail is f*ed as ever. I'm to the point where I never turn my vpn off at all. Any time I update the site or check my mail China's got something to say.
Here's another very interesting article on censorring phone conversations. The guy says "protest" twice and got cut off. Ridiculous. Sorry, it's on Blogger so I'll paste the good parts here.
From Reality Lenses
You thought that the tension between China and Google couldn't be higher? Think again. Google is still fighting for freedom and transparency, while China is doing the exact opposite:
(Ars Technica) — Google has awarded $1 million to Georgia Tech researchers so that they can develop simple tools to detect Internet throttling, government censorship, and other "transparency" problems.
That money will cover two years of work at Georgia Tech, with an additional $500,000 extension possible if Google wants an extra year of development. At the end of the project, the Georgia Tech team hopes to provide "a suite of Web-based, Internet-scale measurement tools that any user around the world could access for free. With the help of these tools, users could determine whether their ISPs are providing the kind of service customers are paying for, and whether the data they send and receive over their network connections is being tampered with by governments and/or ISPs."
(NYT) — If anyone wonders whether the Chinese government has tightened its grip on electronic communications since protests began engulfing the Arab world, Shakespeare may prove instructive.
A Beijing entrepreneur, discussing restaurant choices with his fiancée over their cellphones last week, quoted Queen Gertrude’s response to Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The second time he said the word “protest,” her phone cut off.
He spoke English, but another caller, repeating the same phrase on Monday in Chinese over a different phone, was also cut off in midsentence.
A host of evidence over the past several weeks shows that Chinese authorities are more determined than ever to police cellphone calls, electronic messages, e-mail and access to the Internet in order to smother any hint of antigovernment sentiment. In the cat-and-mouse game that characterizes electronic communications here, analysts suggest that the cat is getting bigger, especially since revolts began to ricochet through the Middle East and North Africa, and homegrown efforts to organize protests in China began to circulate on the Internet about a month ago.
Enjoy
Mar, 30 2011
Well, it’s March 30th, just over ten days after the vpn blocking bonanza on the sixteenth of this month. I’ll admit, I joined in frenzy.
OMG! NO MORE VPN’s!
Well, it turns out to not be so bad. Most of the companies that were blocked are back online and pretty much the same as before. As far as I know Witopia is still down, but as usual, there are reports in places that it’s still accessible.
12vpn has finally come back online with a new get-up, a new price, and a US only option. Unfortunately their previously crazy cheap prices are no-more.
There are now rumours that China is using invisible ninja’s to access our gmail accounts. OH NO! I guess they’ll find out all the secrets I’m hiding in my Gmail account!
Not.
Oh no! I’ll warn my JR buddies to use hotmail instead.
Not.
Li Wufeng, chief of the Information Office Internet Affairs Bureau of China’s State Council, said there have “never been any issues involving the access of legitimate VPN services that are used by companies to enhance security”
I wonder how they distinguish the difference…
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.