GUIDE TO THE INTERNET

The Chinese government’s Internet monitoring and censorship programs present particular challenges for foreign correspondents, whether it be accessing Web sites in their home country or communicating privately with sources. While it is probably impossible to write a definitive account of either the technical difficulties or solutions, we hope this collection of resources will help correspondents overcome some of the most common problems. 

References

·     James Fallows’ March 2008 Atlantic article on “The Great Firewall” is a good explanation of the basics of Chinese Internet censorship

  http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall 

·     As is an earlier piece by Oliver August in Wired magazine

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-11/ff_chinafirewall 

·     Reporters Without Borders has a handbook (not China-specific) on how bloggers and dissidents can evade Internet censorship

  http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542 

·     The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab has a guide to by-passing Internet censorship

  http://deibert.citizenlab.org/Circ_guide.pdf 

·     Front Line has a guide on how human-rights activists can evade Internet monitoring and censorship

http://info.frontlinedefenders.org/manual/en/esecman/index.html?q=manual/en/esecman/ 

·     Open Net Initiative documents Internet filtering/censorship worldwide

  http://opennet.net/ 

·     Rebecca MacKinnon’s guide for Hong Kong journalism students

http://jmsc.hku.hk/blogs/newmedia/working-from-mainland-china/

Rebecca’s blog is also a good source for discussions of Internet and media issues in China http://rconversation.blogs.com/ 

·     Andrew Lih’s blog also frequently touches on China Internet issues

 http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/ 

Tools

  Virtual Private Network (VPN). As the name suggests, these are Virtual Private Network (VPN). As the name suggests, these aresecure,private networks that run through the public Internet. This gives them the benefit of bypassing China’s Internet monitoring and censorship systems. Many corporations use VPN systems to allow employees to access company e-mail remotely; if you work for one of them, you probably will not need other tools for accessing e-mail and blocked websites. For others, there are a number of off-the-shelf technologies that can easily create VPNs. 

Explanations of VPN

·     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN

·     http://www.howstuffworks.com/vpn.htm

VPN software and services

·     Paid

  http://www.witopia.net/personalmore.html

  http://www.hotspotvpn.com/

  http://www.publicvpn.com/

·     Free / advertising-supported

  http://anchorfree.com/downloads/hotspot-shield

Other tools for private/secure Internet access

• Gladder (an add-on for the Firefox browser)

·     Tor

  http://www.torproject.org/index.html.en

·     Psiphon

  http://psiphon.civisec.org/

·     Anonymizer

 http://www.anonymizer.com/

·     Proxify

  https://proxify.com/ 

Secure email 

·     Web e-mail

  Gmail. Accessing gmail via https:, rather than the usual http: connection, creates a secure connection for e-mail, and should be your default option. The added "s" means secure.

§ https://mail.google.com/mail/

  Hushmail. A service offering web-based email encrypted with PGP technology (see below).

§ https://www.hushmail.com/

·     PGP email. The open-source standard Pretty Good Privacy allows for high-level encryption of e-mail sent through standard desktop e-mail software. This prevents anyone intercepting the e-mail from being able to read it.

  Explanations

§ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

§ Phil Zimmerman, inventor of PGP: http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/background/index.html

  Software

§ http://www.pgpi.org/

§ http://www.gnupg.org/

§ http://www.winpt.org/

§ http://www.cgeep.com/

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