Īs the functionality of the Great Firewall extended, the Tor developers had implemented the concept of connecting using unpublished relays, which are also called bridges, meant to provide specific hidden connection to the Tor network for censored netizens. The directory is downloaded by Tor clients during the bootstrapping phase, and blocking this step effectively blocked the public Tor network.” Up till then, about 80% of the public relays are blocked by IP address and TCP port combination. As stated in the research by Winter P et al, “The directory authorities serve the consensus, which is a directory containing all public Tor relays. There were report showing a user somehow managed to download a copy of the Tor client and use the network without interference (Winter P et al, 2012).Īccording to the Tor Project reported in September 2009, the Great Firewall blocked the public list of relays and directory authorities by simple IP address blocks. It seemed that the Great Firewall was simply blocking Tor by IP:port filtering to stop netizens from downloading the Tor Browser Bundle from its official website, while the plenty of mirrors operated by volunteers are still accessible. Netizens have reportedly noticed that they were not able to reach the official web site of the Tor Project (Winter P et al, 2012). The two major methods are blocking by protocol and blocking by endpoint (Winter P et al, 2012), which the development by time is to be discussed below.Ģ008 is when the attempt to block Tor started to appear on files. There weren’t official records of when Tor first gain its visit from China that we could find during our research, but there have been reports and experiments on Tor being blocked, and how the Great Firewall worked its way up to enhance its ability on blocking Tor. The increasing popularity of Tor, along with what Tor is, has caught the eye of the Great Firewall which explains has been receiving special attention by the censors and treated differently ever since.

Major methods to “climb the wall” that have been introduced to Chinese netizens so far are using Tor and a VPN (virtual private network) service.Īs designed to for anonymity only, Tor absolutely became a good choice for netizens in China to circumvent the Great Firewall and for a period of time, the trend increased within the group.

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