Jarrod 1, GFW 0
Before I left for Hawaii, I made a few lists of things I needed to do or buy while I was in America.
The "Buy This Shit!" list was full of things I either can't find here in China or are too expensive as import products. For example, Levi's jeans usually run 700rmb and up ($100+) here while they're only about $30-50 in any US department store. I also wanted to buy some Red Bull (just a 4-pack to give my students a taste of what college students in America live on), some Cap'n Crunch, some migraine medicine, among other things. The "Go Here" list was (obviously) just a list of places I wanted to check out but not necessarily buy anything from, including Target, Taco Bell, Borders/Barnes and Noble, and a comic book shop.
The oddest list I made was called "Internet Crap". It included things I wanted to check out or do on the internet that I can't do through a regular proxy site here. Mostly I just wanted to download some Apple software that is for some reason or another blocked here, download the new Drown Culture album, and add/delete some people on Twitter (Delete: Perez Hilton because he's incredibly annoying and stupid, Add: Mike Kinsella because I like his music and he seems like he'd have some decent tweets), I also un-deleted my Facebook profile (albeit by accident).
After a week of total internet freedom and fast download speeds, it was hard for me to find myself constrained behind the Great Firewall so are started looking for ways to break free. I used to just utilize web-based proxies like NetEvader, but sites like that A) don't work well with Java/Cookie heavy sites like Twitter and Facebook (hence traveling thousands of miles to delete Perez as a friend) and 2) you can't download anything with them. After one intense Google search, I found some open-source software called JonDonym.
I hadn't heard of it before, so I thought I'd check it out. The software works well and it even has a plugin for Firefox. It's a little slow, but the best part about it is that it doesn't bog down my browsing by processing everything I try to access. I just set up a new Firefox user profile and run everything I need to route around the Great Firewall through that. This way I can use Google Chromium (my new, totally awesome, default browser) for all my regular surfing and internet doings and tab over to Firefox when I feel the need to access some totally evil, perverted shit like Danwei.org or Amnesty International or NPR.
For you dudes in China, I highly recommend JonDonym/JonDo/JonDoFox. For me, it works better than any other proxies and it's much (MUCH!) simpler to set up and use than Tor/Vidalia (which you can't even download from China anymore anyway).
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