bypassing the Great Firewall of China

The Great Firewall of China is also known as Golden Shield, it is installed on the international Internet gateway of mainland China, censors international communications over the Internet. People in mainland China cannot visit censored website. This article describes some ways to work around the firewall, so people can bypass this firewall and visit censored website inside mainland China.

The Great Firewall

Main article: Internet censorship in mainland China

Linux

Debian GNU/Linux step by step

1. Run "apt-get install tor" as root to install Tor
2. If you are using Firefox 1.5, open Preferences in Edit menu, click Connection Settings... button, select Manual proxy configuration, fill SOCKS Host as localhost at port 9050.

And it should work. But this is not perfect, since for sites not censored, the speed would be really slow via Tor proxy, so we can use a PAC script, so only apply Tor proxy for censored sites.

To use PAC script, create a file called proxy.pac at your home directory, or somewhere else, write following in the file:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
	if (dnsDomainIs(host, ".google.com"))
	{
		return "SOCKS localhost:9050";
	}
	if (isInNet(host, "66.102.15.101", "255.255.255.255"))
	{
		return "SOCKS localhost:9050";
	}
	if (dnsDomainIs(host, "zh.wikipedia.org"))
	{
		return "PROXY 145.97.39.134:80";
	}
	if (isInNet(host, "211.115.107.162", "255.255.255.255"))
	{
		return "PROXY 145.97.39.134:80";
	}
	return "DIRECT";
}

The first if tells the browser to apply Tor proxy for *.google.com, the second for banned *.blogspot.com, the third for zh.wikipedia.org, DNS servers in mainland China will return a fake IP address, so this is a work around, the fourth if is for general wikimedia sites, including en.wikipedia.org, note the IP 145.97.39.134 can be changed, if .134 doesn't work, try .132, .133, .135 or something like. For other censored sites, add similar if entries to the file.

After the creation of the file, open Preferences -> Connection Settings dialog in Firefox, and select Automatic proxy configuration URL, fill the location to the file, for example, if you put proxy.pac at /home/user/proxy.pac, fill "file://localhost/home/user/proxy.pac" here.

See also

• Internet censorship in mainland China

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