The Great Firewall of China aims to block out websites that can pose any potential threat to the government (and its leaders). The Great Firewall scans the URL, the IP address and the page content every time a user in mainland China tries to access a webs To beat the Great Firewall of China, the Chinese hackers created a powerful censorship-circumvention called Shadowsocks. Hundreds of thousands of people in China, used Shadowsocks as the foundation of several key pieces of software. It was was originally created by a programmer known as clowwindy. “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this,” clowwindy wrote this weekend on GitHub, where the project’s code is stored. “Today they asked me to delete all the code from GitHub. I have no choice but to obey.” A person’s internet traffic is very intelligently camouflaged so that well known and successful Chinese censors through deep traffic analysis cannot block and control what they do online. The Chinese government has complete control over the content and timing of the internet in their country. China is considered as the world’s largest prison for the Netizens. The Chinese internet police force works more to censor the content that doesn’t seem to adhere to its policies rather than minimize cybercrime threats. As a result, tools like ShadowVPN develop a loyal following, because of the huge demand among China’s population to beat the censors. Even though the original code on GitHub has been deleted, it’s been downloaded and copies over many times. While the future of Shadowsocks is not known, its code still remains. Although it was early on a Saturday morning, the news of the government action spread like fire in the domestic Chinese internet and rose to high point internationally in the West when the shutdown was announced. The news echoed strongly with a global audience worried more and more with censorship and control of the Web. Breaking News: Shadowsocks became the Github Trending No.1 globally after its forced removal by the Chinese gov. pic.twitter.com/86QaUVvbwT — GreatFire.org (@GreatFireChina) August 22, 2015 Lantern, an another anti-censorship tool effective in China, became one of the top globally trending programs on GitHub on Saturday, as soon as the Shadowsocks was shutdown. While many Chinese netizens bid adieu and expressed gratitude to clowwindy for his work, they are yet not ready to give up their fight against the Great Firewall. “I hope one day I’ll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code I like without fearing,” clowwindy said.
