Teacher Li: A Netizen Shares Experience in Bypassing the Great Firewall

A netizen shared their experience of bypassing the Great Firewall, and more people are welcome to add their suggestions in the comments section.

Since high school, I have had over ten years of experience bypassing the firewall, and I will briefly share some insights here, some of which were learned from the Program Think (编程随想) blog.

1. Preparation Before Bypassing the Firewall
2. Hardware As of 2023, most domestic Android phones have built-in anti-fraud centers or services capable of monitoring the phone. If you use a domestic Android phone to bypass the firewall, the probability of being discovered is very high, and you might even be unable to install circumvention tools. Solution: Buy an iPhone or a Google Pixel.

If you use a Windows PC to bypass the firewall, please ensure there is no domestic security software on the system (such as 360, Kingsoft毒霸, etc.), no Tencent WeChat, and no Tencent QQ. In fact, you should try to avoid using domestic software as much as possible.

If you are a petitioners, social activist, or politically sensitive person, it is recommended to use a Google Pixel phone with a Tensor processor (it is rumored that relevant departments currently cannot crack and gather evidence from these phones, though unverified), or perform a fresh install of your own Windows PC, ensuring neither the phone nor the PC installs any domestic applications.

If you use an iPhone and face the risk of your phone being inspected, you can use Xlocker or AAlocker to hide related apps.

If you have already emigrated abroad (run), stop using phones purchased in mainland China.

1. Software If using a Windows PC, use Firefox ESR (recommended by Program Think) or Chrome browser. If you cannot get these two browsers, you can temporarily use Edge.

If using a Chinese mainland version of the iPhone and using the Safari browser, please turn off the option at "Settings - Safari - Fraudulent Website Warning".

If using a Chinese mainland version of Android, for security reasons, it is not recommended to bypass the firewall.

1. Contact Information: Email and Phone Number Regardless of registering for an airport (proxy provider) or VPN, you should never use domestic email addresses, and certainly must not provide a phone number. Please use Protonmail; it will not be elaborated here, you can search for it yourself. If you cannot bypass the firewall to register for Protonmail or Gmail, you can temporarily register for Outlook, and do not use your real name and phone number when registering.

You can buy an Ultramobile Paygo SIM card with a monthly fee of $3, through which you can register for Google Voice. Thus you will have one physical phone number and one virtual phone number. Both physical SIMs and Google Voice can be used to register on platforms like Twitter (now X) and Telegram (rumored to cooperate with Tencent, so no longer recommended).

II. Methods to Bypass the Firewall Currently, there are roughly three ways: self-hosting servers, purchasing airport services, and purchasing VPNs. I do not self-host servers, so I will only discuss the latter two.

1. Purchasing Airport Services (also known as ladders) Three principles: use a non-common, non-domestic email; pay monthly rather than annually; obey customer rules.

When you register for an airport, first observe whether a free trial is available. If not, you can buy the cheapest monthly plan first. Then use the airport service to try visiting Pincong and The Epoch Times. If you cannot access them, it indicates that the airport is suspected of cooperating with relevant departments. It is recommended to delete the account and change airports in time until this test passes.

If you can pay with cryptocurrency, it is even more recommended to do so.

Airports may exit scam (run away) at any time, so please purchase services from two airports simultaneously. If one runs away, you can use the other.

If the airport provides a QQ communication group, the suspicion increases.

If you can use its service normally, please follow the relevant rules, such as preventing the leakage of node information and not using P2P services.

1. Purchasing VPNs Provided that you can use airport services, and you have Paypal or other payment methods, you can purchase a VPN.

III. What to Do If You Cannot Bypass the Firewall Step 1: Use a PC and open domestic Bing;

Step 2: Search for edge keywords to find some airports, which can be accessed without bypassing the firewall;

Step 3: Observe whether the airport website provides tools like Clash for Windows. If provided, you can download the circumvention tool without bypassing the firewall. Then try or buy the service to initially bypass the firewall, breaking the dilemma of "you cannot get circumvention tools without bypassing the firewall".

Step 4: Use a proxy to open Duckduckgo or Google, start looking for a secure airport, or purchase a VPN, and thus enter the free internet world.

-- This just provides one train of thought; there are many other methods. For example, find a friend who can bypass the firewall to help you, or use unsafe circumvention methods like Psiphon or Lantern temporarily, etc.

IV. After Bypassing the Firewall For your own safety, please study social engineering and information security-related knowledge; you can read the Program Think blog. Learn to use TOR. Here are a few simple tips:

1. Do not use the same online alias for overseas platform accounts as domestic platform accounts. It is best to use randomly generated different aliases for each platform to prevent credential stuffing.

2. Please use different passwords. You should have your own password algorithm, which will not be elaborated here.

3. If you frequently publish statements, change your language habits. For example, if you are used to saying "Have you eaten today?" domestically, you can change it to "Did you eat today?" so that you won't be recognized by people with ulterior motives. If you find it troublesome, translate your language into English, and then Google Translate it back into Chinese, and publish the translated result. It will no longer carry your language habits (this rule refers to the "writing style" mentioned by Program Think).

4. If the content you need to publish contains your voice, please use AI voice synthesis or a voice changer to prevent voiceprint recognition.

5. If you need to publish images, please clear the EXIF data.

6. Please do not share or click on links with security suspicions.

7. Payment exposes your personal information. When you use Alipay or WeChat Pay to purchase airport services, it is already insufficiently secure.

8. The Simplified Chinese internet world is filled with a large amount of fraudulent information and fake news. Please strive to learn English and break out of the information cocoon.

9. If you are also a dissident, please hide your tendencies within the wall and protect yourself. Pretend to be a little pink (nationalist), and repost some positive energy content on your Moments.

10. If you use iPhone, remember to turn off iCloud sync for certain apps.

11. Program Think mentioned the input method issue as early as 2010. Also promptly clear browsing history and cookies, etc.