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Jun, 22 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, 11 2011
I haven't been able to access my Gmail in China for about a week now. Now before I say that Gmail is blocked in China, I realize that different places in China produce different results for different people, different computers, and different operation systems.
I've kept up on lots of the VPN services that unblock sites in China, and even those are a bit shaky – it seems that what works in Guangdong doesn't necessarily work in Xinjiang. But that's another story.
So a lot of users report that they can access Gmail from China in one place, but not the other. I'm just one of those guys. For example, with my home computer, running Windows XP SP3, using the Firefox 4 Internet browser (English version), I have about a 30 percent success rate as of May 2011. That means that I'm able to access my Gmail account in China only 30 percent of the time (when I'm not using my VPN). Of that 30 percent, only about ten percent of the time am I able to access Gmail in it's full form. Most of the time I've got to view it in basic HTML just open my mail.
At my job it's a totally different story. When I check my Gmail (or attempt to, per say) on the computer at the office, I get about a 5 percent success rate, if that counts for anything at all. All of the time I've got to use HTML mode, and most of the time I can't even get Google to search properly. They are using a Chinese version of Internet Explorer – may IE 6 or 7 I'm not sure. It's miserable. The good news is that I've got to check out Bing and Yahoo sometimes – an I've found out that my site is pretty much invisible on those search engines – bummer. It must be because they censor their search results, because a lot of the articles I've written over the years are also unavailable.
So I use my VPN most of the time. For me, it's matter of convenience. If I have to wait for five minutes for the page to load every time I access Gmail in China (which would be several times a day for me), it would add up to HOURS of waiting time per year. Maybe even days – just waiting for my stupid Gmail account to load. So I just connect to my VPN account and it a few seconds I can access my Gmail account normally.
You can check out some of the VPN services I recommend HERE or browse the site.
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'?
May, 02 2011
China's at it again. I just can't get on my Gmail account without using my VPN. Seriously, block it or not. I'm tired of this temptation to access my gmail in China without the VPN…. and I wait, and wait, and wait. Until the stupid thing tells me to load it in Basic HTML. I'm seriously thinking of switching to Yahoo one of these days. If only Gmail and Google weren't so damn cool. Anyone else having problems with Gmail in China?
I couldn't access Astrill today either. I don't know if this is a permanent or temporary thing.