Best 5 Anti-censorship Software Tools (proxy, VPN), Free ! (Tutorial Video)

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Looking for the best anti-censorship software tools / methods to get around the repressive regimes such as Mainland China and Iran’ firewall and filtering system? And hopefully free?

Solutions: Yes, it’s possible. The following 5 free anti-censorship client software tools are the most powerful tools and and popular methods used by people esp. Chinese people in the past years, to access the information in the free world from inside the closed society, they are UltraSurf, FreeGate, GTunnel, FirePhoenix and GPass.

• Users from over 180 countries access UltraSurf’s website at over 800 million hits a day !
• As of May 2008, Dyanweb has had over 150 million user visits

Best 5 Anti-censorship Software Tools

1. UltraSurf (无界)

Download (下载) software from following official websites:

– English: http://www.ultrareach.com/
– Chinese (中文): http://www.wujie.net/

UltraSurf is one of the most successful anti-censorship software in the world. It’s a flagship anti-censorship product by UltraReach  Internet Corp. (www.ultrareach.com), an Internet technology company founded in 2002 by a group of Silicon Valley technologists (Chinese). It’s is a green software, no installation process is needed and no change in system setting is required.

UltraSurf enables users inside countries with heavy Internet censorship to visit any public web sites in the world safely and freely- just the same as using the regular IE browser– while it automatically searches the fastest proxy servers in the background. It has strong support for load balancing and fault tolerance, and it even employs a decoying mechanism to thwart any tracing effort of its communication with its infrastructure.

UltraSurf is a robust anti-censorship system evolved from the lasting battle between Chinese regime’s Great FireWall (GFW) and UltraReach, which has following features:

• Protect privacy
  Protect Internet privacy with anonymous surfing and browsing — hide IP addresses and locations, clean browsing history, cookies & more …
• High security
  Completely transparent data transfer and high level encryption of the content allow you to surf the web with high security.
• Great freedom
  UltraSurf allows you to overcome the censorship and blockage on the Internet. You can browse any website freely, so as to obtain true information from the free world.

UltraSurf has gained large popularity among the Internet users, which has got:

• Daily hits over 800 million
• Daily traffic over 8,000 GB
• Millions of users
• Users from over 180 countries

With the support of UltraReach’s dedicated anti-censorship force, service of UltraSurf has been serving the censored people for 7 years !

Following video is a UltraSurf Tutorial produced by Freedom House:

2. FreeGate (自由门)

Download (下载) FreeGate Client software and user guide from following official websites:

– Chinese (中文): http://us.dongtaiwang.com/
– English: http://us.dongtaiwang.com/loc/download_en.php

FreeGate is an anti-censorship software for secure and fast Internet access  developed and maintained by Dynamic Internet Technology Inc. (DIT: www.dit-inc.us), a  pioneer in censorship-circumvention operation, which was founded originally in 2001 to provide email delivery services to China for U.S. government agencies and NGOs.

FreeGate works by tapping into an anti-censorship backbone, DynaWeb, DIT’s P2P-like proxy network system and a web-based anti-censorship portal. Once users point their web browser at one of the DynaWeb URLs, a web page will be presented similar to the one at us.dongtaiwang.com, with most blocked websites as links. In addition, a user can type in any URL in the box on this page and DynaWeb will fetch the pages for him/her instantly. No software is needed, nor are any settings tweaked on a user’s computer.

But since the Chinese net police watch DynaWeb’s portal websites closely and block them as soon as they identify them, DynaWeb must indeed be very dynamic. It has hundreds of mirror sites at anytime, and each with a varying IP and DNS domain name, to defeat IP blocking and DNS hijacking. On the backstage, DynaWeb also has mechanisms to proactively monitor the blocking status of each of its mirror sites, and as soon as blocking is detected, it will change the IP and DNS domain name instantly.

There are indications that FreeGate has some capabilities built-in to exploit some zero-day vulnerabilities of Chinese regime’s Great FireWall (GFW).

Following video is a FreeGate  Tutorial produced by Freedom House:

3. GTunnel (花园)

Download (下载) GTunnel Software and user guide  from following official websites:

– English: http://gardennetworks.org/
– Chinese (中文): http://gardennetworks.com/

GTunnel is a Windows application that works as a local HTTP or SOCKS proxy server, developed by non-profit organization Garden Networks (http://gardennetworks.org/), which was made  for people to access Internet content blocked by totalitarian countries such as China and to protect Internet users’ online privacy and security.

After proxy set to GTunnel in web browser (like IE)  or other Internet applications, the traffic will go through GTunnel and Garden Networks’ server farm before it reaches its original destination.

GTunnel protects Internet users’ privacy and freedom of speech in these ways:

• User’s IP address is hidden and user’s Internet privacy protected. The destination servers see GTunnel server addresses instead.
• Traffic content is encrypted with industry-strength algorithms between the user’s PC and GTunnel servers so the local filtering/censorship systems will not see the content in clear-text format.
• Blockade of target servers circumvented.

4. FirePhoenix (火凤凰)

Download (下载) the current FirePhoenix Software and user guide from following official websites:

– English: http://firephoenix.edoors.com/
– Chinese (中文): http://firephoenix.edoors.com/index-cn.html

FirePhoenix (FP) is the first virtual private network (VPN) based anti-censorship tool which is dramatically different from other existing tools. It offers the most powerful protection so far to users working under censorship.

It’s regarded as an all-protocol, automatic, secure and dynamic proxy system that not only encrypts web (http) traffic, but also encrypts emails, online games, instant messages (MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AOL IM, etc.) and streaming medias (videos, etc).

After FirePhoenix installed, to a user, it is just as if his/her computers were directly connected to a wide open network overseas, and the firewall and filter system becomes nonexistent.

FirePhoenix is released in the summer of 2006 by The World’s Gate Inc. (WG), an upcoming organization focusing on building an extensive and trustworthy Internet platform, Edoors (www.edoors.com),  for users from repressive regimes to freely and securely access and publish information such as emails, blogs, forums and social networks.

5. GPass (世界通)

Download (下载) GPass for free from following official websites:

– English: http://gpass1.com/
– Chinese (中文): http://www.gpass1.com/index_cn.php

Gpass is an Internet anti-jamming product widely used in China to overcome Internet censorship, released by World’s Gate, Inc. in the summer of 2006.

Compared with traditional online privacy and anti-jamming products, GPass’s innovative design allows it to

• support Internet access mechanisms such as Web2.0 websites,
• online multimedia streaming (e.g. MMS protocol), file transfer (e.g. FTP), and
• communication tools such as email and instant messengers as well as web surfing (e.g. HTTP).

GPass (and FirePhoenix) sets the trend of multi-protocol protection. Currently most anti-censorship tools only offer protection to web traffic, which means a user’s privacy and safety are only protected when he/she visits those specific websites, but other applications with non-web protocols, such as emails, instant messaging, and audio/video streaming, are still subject to censorship.

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Summary 总结

To fight the Goliath of repressive Internet censorship, the above leading companies and grassroots organizations on the front line, formed an alliance, the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC). The Consortium brings together a veritable “dream team” of talent and experience combined with dedication and determination.

Dreams,  can become true, with the help of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium – GIFC.

Download (下载)

You can download the up-to-date GIFC  Anti-Censorship Tools Bundle which includes all above 5 popular client software packages from following official website:

English: http://www.internetfreedom.org/

Enjoy !

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Related news:

– Why the State Department refused to spend the funds to “expand access and information in closed societies” such as Iran and China, via The Wall Street Journal, May.2, 2010
– Iranian Internet lifeline– Chinese Falun Gong’s Software, The New York Time, June 17, 2009
– GIF resumes anti-censorship services to Iran due to election crisis, Global Internet Freedom Consortium, June 17, 2009
– Editorial: The US congress can help fend off authoritarian censorship in Burma, Iran and China, The Washington Post, July 7, 2009