Using Tor to Bypass the Great Firewall of China

As many people know the Internet is fairly heavily censored in China. This can be annoying when you want to catch up on the news, look something up in an online encyclopedia or even just search. Of course there are plenty of ways around this, even for those with little technical understanding. My favourite is to use Tor, which consists of a network of virtual tunnels which bounce your requests randomly around the world (using distributed onion routing) providing both unfiltered access and anonymity.

Installing and setting up Tor is dead simple – check out the guide for instructions. You’ll notice that web pages take longer to load when using Tor due to the pages being sent via a “twisty, hard-to-follow route” but it’s better than a blank error page! I use the FoxyProxy extension for Firefox which allows you to setup rules for which sites are viewed over Tor, it will even try to automatically detect which pages are blocked and then route the connection appropriately – pretty cool stuff!

N.B. This technique not only applies to China but can be used anywhere in the world, so whether you’re in Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan Uzbekistan, Vietnam or just the UK it should still work.

Reference: www.randomwire.com/2007/03/05/tor/