Present Situation

As we all know, those who from Mainland China could not enjoy the freedom which brought by the real Internet. For example, we could not access the websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and services provided by some foreign internet companies these years. But in my view, the Internet should be free.1
So I explored some ways which will be introduced in this article to touch the real internet world.

GFW(Great Firewall of China)

In Mainland China, the main reason which causes this problem is that there is a wall(GFW).
At first, I want you to know what the GFW2 is. And there are some information about it from Wikipedia.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia(Redirected from Great Firewall of China)
The Great Firewall of China (Great Firewall, the abbreviation is GFW. ) is a blanket term with ironic connotations thought to have been coined in an article in Wired magazine in 1997 and used by international, including Chinese, media to refer to legislation and projects initiated by the Chinese government (which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP) that attempt to regulate the internet in Mainland China. It is the main instrument to achieve Internet censorship in China. These CCP regulations include criminalizing certain online speech and activities, blocking from view selected websites, and filtering key words out of searches initiated from computers located in Mainland China.

More information, please visit that Wilipedia webpage provided at the footnotes.

Theory

There are some ways to cross the great firewall.

• Domain hijacking3

  Domain hijacking or domain theft is the act of changing the registration of a domain name without the permission of its original registrant.
  This can be financially devastating to the original domain name holder, who may have derived commercial income from a website hosted at the domain or conducted business through that domain’s e-mail accounts. Additionally, the hijacker can use the domain name to facilitate illegal activity such as phishing, where a website is replaced by an identical website that records private information such as log-in passwords.

• VPN(Virtual Private Network)4

  A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network, such as the Internet. It enables a computer or network-enabled device to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if it were directly connected to the private network, while benefiting from the functionality, security and management policies of the private network.A VPN is created by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated connections, virtual tunneling protocols, or traffic encryptions. Major implementations of VPNs include OpenVPN and IPsec.
  A VPN connection across the Internet is similar to a wide area network (WAN) link between websites. From a user perspective, the extended network resources are accessed in the same way as resources available within the private network. One major limitation of traditional VPNs is that they are point-to-point, and do not tend to support or connect broadcast domains. Therefore communication, software, and networking, which are based on layer 2 and broadcast packets, such as NetBIOS used in Windows networking, may not be fully supported or work exactly as they would on a real LAN. Variants on VPN, such as Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), and layer 2 tunneling protocols, are designed to overcome this limitation.
  VPNs allow employees to securely access their company’s intranet while traveling outside the office. Similarly, VPNs securely connect geographically separated offices of an organization, creating one cohesive network. VPN technology is also used by individual Internet users to secure their wireless transactions, to circumvent geo restrictions and censorship, and to connect to proxy servers for the purpose of protecting personal identity and location.

How To

• We can modify a system file which called hosts. There is a hosts file on this webpage5
  The author is still updating this file. Let us give thanks to the author.
  In Ubuntu 14.04, we can use gedit to change the hosts, the step as follows:

  sudo gedit /etc/hosts
  
  #then press your password(note: this sectence is a comment).
  

  
  Then you could copy the content of that webpage(Ctrl + A, Ctrl + C), and paste it into the hosts file(Ctrl + V).
  Save it , and restart the web browser.
  

• The second way is a little difficult. We’ll use GoAgent6 and Google Appengine. 7

  1. We should sign up a gmail account at this website https://accounts.google.com/SignUp.
  2. Now I assume you already hava a gmail account. Then log in the appengine.google.com. Create an application. Please remember the appid of your application which will be used to cross the GFW.
  3. Download the GoAgent software from the website. GoAgent home page on github.
  4. Wait…

Any questions? Please e-mail me : jerry.w1024@foxmail.com
The first draft at 22:25 3/15/2015.