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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A censorship crisis has started in China after the authorities restricted the use of VPN services in the country. Some VPN services, including free VPN, faced problems in their work process; some have been banned,  and others have been resumed. The Chinese government implemented these measures in fear of the Jasmine Revolution, trying to stop people from accessing outside websites through VPNs.

As Greatfirewall.biz reports, the major VPN service provider to the Chinese market, Witopia, remains inaccessible, as well as a few other VPN services: Hidemyass, CyberGhost VPN, Ultra Reach, Hotspot Shield, TorProject and others. In addition, the IP addresses of the VPN servers owned by these providers have also been blocked. As a result, the companies have to keep shifting their users from one server to another.

Moreover, Email services such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Aol Mail have slowed down in their performance. For example, Gmail has been 45 times slower than QQ. Google has started discussions with the Chinese authorities regarding Gmail being boycotted, but so far it hasn't had much success.

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Witopia, the VPN service provider, has recently reported a huge amount of complaints from its Chinese users about being unable to access some of the resources. According to Bloomberg, they were even forced to ask their subscribers to report problems via e-mail instead of their live support service, because of the “extraordinary volume of China's shenanigans”.

China, notorious for its Great Firewall (The Golden Shield Project) attempts to impose control over the Internet content by banning access to pornography, gambling and opposition sites, as well as to famous western resources such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Herdict.org, a Harvard based organization which monitors accessibility of web sites across the Internet, reports China to have the leading position in Internet censorship.

China denies interfering into the VPN services. Li Wufeng, chief of the Information Office Internet Affairs Bureau of China’s ruling State Council, stated that there have never been any issues involving the access of legitimate VPN services that are used by companies to enhance security.

A virtual private network (VPN) uses encrypting mechanisms for providing a secure data exchange between remote networks and is mostly used by corporations. However, the average users in China have found VPN extremely useful for surfing through blacklisted sites and protecting their Internet privacy.

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From today, we are starting publishing our daily news about security and VPN. We will track what is going on in the world of VPN and will see what role VPN plays in the world.

In February, Bloomberg News and BusinessWeek were interested in how some Chinese guys bypassed the “Great Firewall of China” and why the number of Facebook users from China is growing. Facebook has been blocked in the country since 2009. China bans pornography, gambling and content that is critical of the ruling Communist Party. All sites, including Facebook, that do not follow the nation’s self-censorship rules are blocked. But last month the number of Facebook users from China exceeded 700,000. “This number will probably double over the next six months,” say the experts.

Chinese users started using VPN services to access the restricted sites. A Chinese user seeking to access Facebook would first start an encrypted connection with a VPN service, which would then get on the social-networking website. The Internet service providers can see only that the user logs on to the VPN server, not to Facebook’s. Using VPNs can slow down the connection speed and might require additional software and costs. In spite of this, AnchorFree Inc., an American startup, said that they have seen 1.5 million people using their free VPN service in China during January, a 25 percent increase from the previous month. “There is a general growth in demand for getting onto Facebook and other social media sites everywhere,” said David Gorodyansky, Chief Executive Officer of AnchorFree.

In February, Facebook opened an office in Hong Kong, bringing the company closer to China. Does Facebook feel the "warming" from the Chinese government towards the social networking sites? We can hardly say it. Facebook has about 621 million users worldwide and 700 thousand is a significant number. But we must consider that, in China, the total number of internet users amounts to 457 million. "When you consider the number of Internet users in China, the number of Facebook  users is just a blip. It will never be open enough so that most people can use it. It’s too risky." said Paul Wuh, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Samsung Securities Co.

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