Your friendly local internet censor is having a field day prior to the anniversary of Tiananmen with Hotmail, Flickr and Twitter blocked just to name a few!
Can anyone recommend websites, proxies etc to get through? www.vtunnel.com works for hotmail. Any others?
chinasmack is blocked too. Not the BBC though. There is an interesting slideshow to watch: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8078746.stm but it's probably only a matter of time before it is cut off as well.
If you're willing to pay for it a VPN is much better than a proxy.
Proxies are generally not encrypted and either work through a URL like www.vtunnel.com or have to be configured inside your browser.
A VPN encrypts and sends all of your internet traffic through a server in another country and the packets cannot be inspected by the great firewall. Moreover, the protocols won't ever be blocked because they are essential for business and banking.
As well as encrypting the traffic they actually speed things up surprisingly. In normal circumstances encryption slows things down but one of the reasons the internet connection to the outside world from china is so slow is because of the great firewall. when using encryption over a vpn the firewall doesn't try to inspect the data packets and traffic passes through quicker.
www.worldvpn.net
www.witopia.net
www.strongvpn.com
Hotmail is working again... Flickr is still blocked, so is Twitter (thank God).
i remember hotmail being blocked around the 50th national day when i was in beijing in 1999. It seems to be routinely chosen for blocking. Its also diabolically slow. I can't recommend gmail enough.
The most convenient way to solve this annoying problem is by using Firefox and then using an addon called "Gladder". It was designed by a Chinese for this very purpose. It's so easy to use. Once you get to a site that is blocked, just click on the status bar button and it will automatically use a proxy to unblock. The addon uses a list of proxies that work in China. If for whatever reason one of the proxies doesn't work, you can simply press the "change proxy" button and another proxy will be used from the addons database. No fussing around trying to find proxies that work. Every time you come across the site again, it will automatically unblock it for you (and if for some reason the gov unblocks the site itself, you can always remove the site from the Gladder unblock list). You can download the addon (if you're using Firefox) at:
remember that unless a proxy uses SSL it will not be encrypted so even though you are going through a 3rd party server to view a site you are still allowing your ISP, and by extension the powers that be, to know where you've been. That doesn't happen with encrypted proxies or VPNs.
Every proxy I have ever tried has been shit and slow, with the exception of www.sneakme.net
You just have to get used to the ads.
@tabledancer The proxy in firefox didn't work.
@greg Are you a secret VPN salesman? :)
:-) no i'm not a vpn salesman.
But like misseward I got tired of how slow and unreliable proxies are and have never looked back.
