The Dark Visitor

James Fallows of the Atlantic has an excellent article on the PRC government’s inability to present itself in a positive light.

This is inept on China’s part. Why do I consider it puzzling? Because of two additional facts I would not have guessed before coming to China: it’s a better country than its leaders and spokesmen make it seem, and those same leaders look more impressive in their home territory.

The article is very well-reasoned and insightful as usual.

The iaminchina.com site has an informative article on bypassing the Great Firewall/Golden Shield. It is a how-to on using Firefox with torbutton.

There are many ways to get around the GFW. Web-CGI/PHP based proxies all seem to work reasonably well (though frequently slow) and there are other anonymizer services out there such as Anonymouse and Ultrasurf.

James Fallows from the Atlantic has blogged about using commercial anonymizing VPN services.

James Fallows was interviewed in a Network World article today about his articles on the Great Firewall of China.  We blogged about the GFW previously.  From the article:

When it comes to the Internet, this haziness about just what is and is not permissible has two implications. At a purely technical level, it makes it harder to reverse-engineer the firewall’s filters. One day, you can reach all pages at the BBC. The next day they’re blocked. If you’re trying to game out the system, you’re stymied. And at a social level, it makes it hard for people to be sure that they’re ever operating in a truly safe zone, since the rules of enforcement might shift tomorrow.

FYI:  www.thedarkvisitor.com has been GFW’d since January of this year.  We still get occasional hits from the mainland though.  Mostly from English language browsers - probably in hotels.

I first became interested in Internet censorship after hearing Roger Dingledine talk about TOR and Kenneth Geers’  talk “Greetz from Room 101 (PDF)” at DEFCON XV.