China is famous for its tough internet censorship. In this country it is forbidden to access social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, to use Google services and to watch YouTube videos.  There are some ways to bypass these restrictions and visit your favorite sites without limitations. To get a VPN is the most widespread. But, do users really need it?

It is a difficult question to answer. Some people consider that such restrictions are in violation of their rights. You can find this type of users on forums, asking for advice about the best VPN. They probably use their selected VPN service regularly to access blocked sites. For them it is essential to communicate with their friends and relatives using Facebook and to exchange commercial correspondence with the help of Gmail. That’s why these users need VPN services, because they can unblock websites that have been censored by the government and provide with secure access to Internet.

On the other hand, there is the opinion that Chinese users can manage without restricted sites because China has its own counterparts. And this point of view insists that only foreigners staying in China cannot live without access to the blocked American-based websites. Native users can follow China-based websites of the same type instead of foreign ones. For example, to upload their videos, they can use Chinese websites like v.sina.com.cn, tudou.com and youku.com that are not as fast, but at least are not censored. Is it a a negative phenomenon – prohibiting foreign media because they promote ideas that are alien to the centuries-old culture, but having local replacements with the same ideology?

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As we had already reported, censorship in China has become enormous.  The government has restricted the access to outside websites, and Google is one of them. Google has officially said that its business with Chinese advertisers is growing, even though its share of online searches in the country falls down.

"Google's revenue in China has grown year-on-year," said a company spokeswoman. "Our business in China is doing well. We have hundreds of partners – large and small – who we continue to work with." Google says it sees its biggest opportunities in China in selling advertising on behalf of local websites or to companies that want to reach customers abroad through its global sites.

But still Google’s position in China is not so encouraging. A major Chinese portal announced last week it would no longer use Google for searching. The future of Google map service is also in doubt. Google's main presence in China has been reduced to its advertising sales offices only, an unusual situation for a company that dominates the internet elsewhere. That’s why a lot of people try to set up VPN connections to unblock webs.

The talks with Chinese government didn’t give any results, so Gmail still remains inaccessible for China. Moreover, Google risked being completely shut out of China after it angered Beijing by announcing last January it no longer wanted to comply with web censorship. "Without a flagship Google will fall further behind Baidu as a search provider. Chinese companies will think twice before they can have any kind of relationship with Google," said Edward Yu, president of research firm Analysys International.

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Google has claimed that Chinese authorities continue to block free access to Gmail service, concealing it as Gmail technical difficulties. Security experts say that China seems to use invisible intermediary servers, or "transparent proxies". They allow for the monitoring and blocking of network messages, disguising the interference as if Gmail was malfunctioning.  

This technique is widely used by companies to control employees’ access to the Web. But it is getting more often that governments use transparent proxies to censor and track protesters and dissidents. Such kind of interference is known as a “man in the middle” attack.

There are not many possible ways of defense against the attack, because almost all national Internet providers have a valid cryptographic certificate. HTTPS protocol can be effective as it encrypts information in transit. However, Microsoft has recently detected nine fake certificates for popular Web sites, including Google Mail, Microsoft's Live service, and Yahoo's services. The use of a VPN connection is one of the effective ways to unblock Websites restricted by authorities. This way, people would need to set up a VPN service to access their emails or blogs. 

Chinese Internet communication restrictions are treated as a response to political protests in the Middle East. Google says it has carefully checked technical issues on its end. So it looks like it is a governmental blockage made to look  as a Google problem. The examples from other countries reaffirm this assumption: Tunisian authorities performed the same attack to block Facebook logins because it had become the main way of communication available for protestors in many countries.   
 

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