In order to access the sites blocked in China I have an account in sdf.lonestar.org which provide free shell account access (no root account of courese) that can be used to browse the web. This is what I do: ssh yuliansu@esmeralda:~> ssh weiwu@sdf.lonestar.org Last login: Fri Aug 4 04:00:29 2006 from pc216.broad.dyn ARPA Member Vote - Polls close 31-AUG-06 23:59:59 UTC - Type 'vote' to vote. you have 1 pending notification type 'notify -r' to retrieve it > lynx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(film) I have been using this method for years. lynx is a text based browser, I cannot 1. click to open a page, which is almost a killer feature for pages with 100 links (e.g. 99 links are navigation menu links, you need to press arraw-down 50 times to go to the correct link) 2. view the pictures I have always been thinking is there are good way to let my firefox use this ssh connection to display webpages. I think it's not possible... <dream> but there is still a small chance, I can run curl on the remote shell account, perhaps firefox can make use if that... </dream> Other people may suggest using a proxy server, which doesn't work for me because the great firewall of China is keyword text-based, it filters the content of webpage rather then only IP address or domain name, unless I am using SSL protected 'proxy', the pages had been in-accessible are still not accessbile with a proxy server. But so far I don't know how to find proxy servers that have SSL enabled. (or, can proxy server SSL enabled at all?) And I'd very much like to share experience (both how succeeded or faield) working around the great firewall of China. However if you are in China you will not see this email from mail archive websites, because it must be filtered. P.S. perhaps it is a good idea to start a project to set up a special software in Linux to let Linux transparnetly workaround the great firewall of China. This could be a very good idea because if we take a general solution that work for both Linux and Windows, Windows users may start to use it and gain attention from authorities (thanks to huge number of Windows users) and finally get this solution shut down by some means. However if this solution only (or mainly) work for Linux, thanks to the small number of Linux users, this solution can keep several years without getting forced down. This encourage people to use Linux too.