Censorship In Run-up To 1 October Anniversary

Reporters Without Borders said yesterday that Internet control agencies have redoubled efforts to prevent Internet users based in China, including foreign residents, from using censorship circumvention software such as Freegate and virtual private networks (VPN). This is related to the 60th anniversary of the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October.

IP Blocking for Freegate and VPNs

It seems that tens of thousands of IP addresses suspected by the authorities of using Freegate and VPNs, especially those that are free, have been blocked in the past few days.

“The Electronic Great Wall has never been as consolidated as it is now, on the eve of the 1 October anniversary, proving that the Chinese government is not so sure of its record,” Reporters Without Borders said.The new restrictions are making it even more difficult to access social-networking websites such Facebook and Twitter, or YouTube’s video-sharing sites, which have been blocked since July. [Via Reporters Without Borders]

DNS spoofing

Also, another blocking system was reported from China. Visits to certain websitess were being redirected to different IPs. Analysis shows that this is an unprecedented large-scale domain name hi-jacking in China achieved through DNS record spoofing. This effort is the result of an escalated level of Internet censorship in China.

When a user visit a website with a domain name, by default, the user’s ISP’s DNS server will be queried first to find out the IP of that site. By modifying the DNS record so that a user will never reach the correct website is called DNS spoofing.

You can read more about DNS Spoofing in China on DynaWeb.

Update 1: HideIpVPN.com has published today a solution for DNS spoofing problem for those that use their VPN service.

Update 2: Freegate Update Released as National Day Approaches