International Law

China tries to block Tor

The official Tor blog reports that:

Tor partially blocked in China

Posted September 27th, 2009 by phobos

On September 25, 2009, the Great Firewall of China blocked the public list of relays and directory authorities by simple IP address blocks. Currently, about 80% of the public relays are blocked by IP address and TCP port combination. Tor users are still connecting to the network through bridges. At the simplest level, bridges are non-public relays that don't exit traffic, but instead send it on to the rest of the Tor network.

If you want to help people in China get access to the uncensored Internet, run a bridge.

Feel free to mirror this post, or the Tor website. We have a list of mirrors at https://www.torproject.org/mirrors.html.en or search for tor mirrors via Google, Yahoo, Baidu, etc.

Links to other helpful sites (not run by us):

• http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9ofr7/we_need_more_tor_bridg...
• http://anonygreen.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/how-to-setup-a-tor-relay-or-t...
• http://twitter.com/#search?q=china%20censorship
• http://identi.ca/torproject
• http://twitter.com/#search?q=gfw
• http://iran.whyweprotest.net/

We knew this day would come, https://blog.torproject.org/blog/torproject.org-blocked-gfw-china%3A-soo....

You can see from Max Berger's Tor statistics site, that China used to host about 50 Tor Relays or Exit nodes,

but currently the number of Tor Relays or Exit Nodes visible to the rest of the world is zero - see the BlutMagie Tor Router Status page.

Obviously the thousands of Tor Client software users in China are also being blocked..

Does this signal a new crackdown on political and religious dissidents in China ? Is there some new corruption or incompetence scandal amongst the Communist party hierarchy, news of which they are trying to suppress ?

Spy Blog, whilst not yet hosting a full mirror, is hosting a copy of the Tor mirror information page, and, if you are desperate, here is a mirror copy of the Tor / Vidalia / Tor Button / Privoxy bundle for Windows (approximately 10 Mb) - currently the stable Tor version is 0.2.1.19. and the front end control application Vidalia is at version 0.1.15

The Tor Browser Bundle which is designed to work standalone, e.g. from a USB flash memory device, which comes with a privacy configured version of the Firefox web browser and some Instant Messaging software configured to run over Tor. Here is our mirror copy of the Tor Browser Bundle version 1.2.9 (about 25Mb)

N.B. we avoided using the normal Tor software URLs in this blog posting, because it seems that the Chinese government censors may be doing some Phorm style Deep Packet Inspection analysis of web pages , in order to block them,so here they are as a graphic image:

We have also mirrored the Tor Bridges documentation page

Feel free to let us know about any Tor Bridges you set up to help route around the Chinese censorship (ideally via PGP encrypted email), but obviously do not publish their details in public via the blog comments below.

We will then pass them on to some contacts in China.

Full post as published by Spy Blog on September 28, 2009 (boomark / email).