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Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the various ways we found to defeat school firewalls when I was in high school. At the time we simply took it for granted that those in power (i.e. the school itself) were going to try to censor us, and it was our "little secret" that we could defeat that censorship.

As an adult I look back at those days and make comparisons with the situation in China...

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I was going to say this too, I remember initially using web based proxies like proxify and hidemyass until they were all blocked then we figured out the blocking system didn't work on a wildcard so www.facebook.com would be blocked for example but bypass.facebook.com would not.

So a few of my tech savvy friends and I setup a web based proxy on a free host which just wildcarded the sub-domains, I can't remember exactly how we did it but we had that going for a long time.

Pretty sure we used a script like http://www.phpmyproxy.com/

Haha I remember those days too. We quickly discovered that changing 'http' to 'https' seemed to circumvent my entire schools firewall. I hope they didn't pay too much for that!

That's how you get around the passthrough proxy in IPCop.

I sometimes wonder if the Chinese government is implementing the firewall at least partly to try and increase the general level of technical expertise.

I dated a Chinese girl in college who knew all about proxies, tor and vpns all because of the censoring. I was pretty surprised given most kids in college don't know about that stuff but to people who grow up there it seems second nature.

I had the same experience with a co-worker. He was a PM, but knew more than most sys admins I worked with about the same stuff because of the censorship.

He said if you wanted to see anything interesting on the internet in China, you needed to know how to get around the restrictions. He said all of this was pretty standard knowledge to him and his friends.

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