How to hide ip: Chinese Internet users struggling to access free VPNs

Chinese Internet users struggling to access free VPNs

Posted: 02 Feb 2010 04:00 AM PST

A lot of very popular websites were blocked in China in the year 2009. These well known websites include popular sites like Facebook, YouTube and Blogspot, which were used regularly by millions of Chinese internet users.

These websites are still blocked, and the Chinese are now scrambling to get a piece of their favourite websites by bypassing the restrictions with the help of free VPNs, short for Virtual Private Networks. It is obvious that while the censoring authorities want the citizens to stay away from the 'corrupting' influence of these commercial sites, the average Chinese internet user cannot do without these sites, and is looking at various alternate methods to get a daily dose of the same.

This is essentially a struggle between the close minded authoritarian Censorship and the open minded Netizens who are essentially global citizens thanks to the internet. The freedom of the average Chinese netizen has been compromised by the aptly named Great Firewall of the untrusting censors.

Therefore, looking for free VPNs seems to be a good alternative to preserve this freedom of choice. However, there are certainly some roadblocks on the free VPN highway. These include:

1. The Government authorities can easily block free VPNs, including their main website, the site that is providing the free VPN service in the first place. This was the case with several sites like HotSpot shield and Alonweb, two very popular sites that provided VPN connectivity.

2. There are technical obstructions after the installation phase. After installing OpenVPN or other such application systems, the next step is to find the essential files required for further processing, like client.ovpn, which can be tricky with VPN. However, this is only true for free VPNs, while paid VPNs do not have this setback. Also, connectivity of free VPNs in China can be frustratingly unreliable at times.

3. The technical support for free VPNs is essentially missing, and therefore one has to source help from unreliable and often not very helpful sources, like online forums and free advice on the web, which can be useless and mundane, apart from posing the additional language barrier and communication block problems. This is especially true in the Chinese context, as most Chinese Netizens are not very comfortable with Non-Chinese languages. Using only Chinese language forums greatly depletes the potential information available online.

4. For speed and efficiency, most US servers on the West Coast are considered the best for the East Asian countries. These are also the most commonly and widely used servers for this geographical region, at least until they were blocked by the censoring authorities. Now, the Chinese Netizens are left with useless VPNs that will not function unless they are altered to connect with other servers that are still available, but which might not be as fast as the previous servers like HotSpot Shield.

Chinese Internet users are now left with several free VPNs, which are:

AlonWeb
The Free VPN
HotSpot Shield
Its Hidden
HideIpVPN (currently not offering free accounts)

There is, of course, still left the option of paid VPNs, but as these require Paypal or MasterCard or at least Visa credit cards, it is still an impossibility for a large number of Chinese netizens who do not own any of the aforementioned payment tools.