Callan Back

Some excellent tools to help protect your privacy while online

While these tools were created to help citizens of countries with ISP-level content filtering/blocking (eg China), you'll find they can come in very handy even in a place like Australia.. especially with our own ISP-level filtering being trialled and implemented on some ISPs. You might also, theoretically, want to use these to encrypt data sent over certain ports.. oh, I dunno.. maybe for programs like uTorrent? Hypothetically of course.

Apps like GTunnel will also help if you work in an office, or go to a college/uni, that has content blocking enabled. It won't work with -all- the censorhip methods out there, but give it a shot and you might be suprised.

GTunnel

GTunnel is a Windows application that works as a local HTTP or SOCKS proxy server. After setting proxy to GTunnel in web browser or other Internet applications, the traffic will go through GTunnel and our 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.

 

Download GTunnel client software at http://gardennetworks.org/download.

 

Features:

 

• Easy to use user interface, English-Chinese dual language support, automatic recognition of OS language
• Local HTTP/Socks5 proxy (UDP is not supported yet) with intelligent recognition of HTTP/Socks5 protocol
• Automatic configuration of both global (system-wide) and per-instance proxy setting in Internet Explorer
• Support multiple transport modes to provide high service availability and flexibility in various network environment. In the standard mode, GTunnel will connect to servers of our server farm directly. In Skype Mode, GTunnel will try to connect via the P2P (Peer To Peer) network of Skype. In Tor mode, GTunnel connects throuph Tor nodes and adds security to Tor users. In GTunnel Tor mode, even the Tor exit node owners do not see the original traffic.
• Automatic software upgrade
• 128 bit industry strength data encryption with highly randomized traffic pattern
• Runs on Linux through Wine.

UltraSurf

UltraSurf is a flagship anti-censorship product by UltraReach  Internet Corp. (www.ultrareach.com).

UltraSurf

• enables users inside countries with heavy Internet censorship to visit any public web sites in the world safely and freely
• works together with the GIFT (a dynamic node-proxy anti-jamming system);
• requires no installation or change in system setting;

UltraSurf is a green software, no installation process is needed and no change in system setting is required. It is simply an executable file on Windows platform.

• Download UltraSurf Client Software at
  http://www.wujie.net/downloads/ultrasurf/u.zip

• Download UltraSurf 8 User Guide in Chinese at:
  http://www.wujie.net/downloads/ ultrasurf/ultrasurf8_userguide.zip

• Download UltraSurf 6 User Guide in English at:
  http://www.wujie.net/downloa ds/ultrasurf/UltraSurf6_userGuide_en.zip

 

UltraSurf’s Chinese name, Wujie – meaning borderless – has become a household name among Chinese Internet users. UltraSurf is one of the “three swordsmen,” thanks partly to its user friendliness and user support in Chinese.

UltraSurf is a robust anti-censorship system evolved from the lasting battle between GFW and UltraReach. Since infancy, UltraSurf has been one of the Chinese Communists’ favorite targets. The freely available software has been analyzed, mutilated and spoofed, and the supporting network infrastructure has been constantly attacked. Without doubt, these factors have accelerated UltraSurf reaching its level of sophistication and fame. The current release, UltraSurf 8.8, has implemented a complex proxy system with complete transparency and a high level of encryption on the Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) platform.

UltraSurf enables users to browse any website 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.

UltraReach  Internet Corp. (www.ultrareach.com), an Internet technology company founded by a group of Silicon Valley technologists. Since 2002, UltraReach has focused its core business on developing anti-censorship technologies, and the current release of its anti-censorship software is UltraSurf 8.8. UltraReach has been expanding its offerings based on its unique GIFT (Global Internet Freedom Technology) platform, and today it is also providing a secure email service called UltraMail, and a protected web portal for users in China, UltraReach.net (or www.wujie.net).

Freegate

FreeGate is an anti-censorship software for secure and fast Internet access.  It was developed and maintained by Dynamic Internet Technology Inc. (DIT: www.dit-inc.us), a  pioneer in censorship-circumvention operation.

• users access web sites overseas as fast as their local ones;
• requires no installation or change in system setting;
• a single executable file on a Windows platform. 

FreeGate works by tapping into an anti-censorship backbone, DynaWeb, DIT's P2P-like proxy network system.

FreeGate's anti-censorship capability is further enhanced by a new, unique encryption and compression algorithm in the versions of 6.33 and above. 

Download the current FreeGate Client Software at
http://us.dongtaiwang.com/loc/download_en.php.

DynaWeb is a collection of anti-censorship services provided by Dynamic Internet Technology Inc. (DIT). DynaWeb is 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.

To keep users connected to such a dynamic infrastructure, DynaWeb has a variety of channels to keep users updated. For example, a user can send a message to one of DynaWeb’s instant messenger (IM) accounts, and will get an instant reply showing the newest addresses of DynaWeb portals. Similar things are being done with emails. By these many, dynamic channels, DynaWeb outsmarts any attempt to collect all DynaWeb addresses by the censors, because each user receives only a (different) subset of DynaWeb’s addresses. Automatic blocking detection combined with quick reaction apparently frustrates the blocking efforts on the China side of the GFW.

DIT also releases a tiny piece of software, FreeGate, which directly taps into DynaWeb’s backbone and keeps a user connected to the dynamic channels automatically. There are indications that FreeGate has some capabilities built-in to exploit some zero-day vulnerabilities of the GFW. 

DIT was founded originally in 2001 to provide email delivery services to China for U.S. government agencies and NGOs. In 2002, DIT started to provide anti-censorship services under the framework of DynaWeb, and like UltraSurf, DynaWeb became a top contender of the GFW-penetration effort. The battle between DynaWeb and GFW has been thrilling, dynamic and dramatic, albeit largely invisible to the general public. Today DynaWeb offers the widest range of options for users to access Internet freely, and supports more than 50 million web hits per day on average from Chinese users alone.

In addition to its DynaWeb service, DIT has released numerous advisories and technical analyses of the evolving Internet censorship operations [http://dit-inc.us/press_release].