The Maker of Great Firewall Falls Into His Own Trap and Has to Use VPN
According to a daily paper from Hong Kong, Ming Pao, the exceptional and rather infamous maker of the Great Firewall of China, Fang Bixing, became a victim of his own creation. This happened during the lecture that he was giving at Harbin Institute of Technology. When he tried to access a South Korean website, he was blocked out of it by the Great Firewall and was forced to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) in order to overcome the protection that this creation has placed.
Ming Pao also states that this happened after Fang wanted to show something to the people who were listening to them and was located on that website. However, as soon as he typed in the URL of that website, a notification popped up stating that the URL is blocked in China. Fang was clever and immediately turned on VPN in order to be able to access the website. This was all done on the big projector screen in front of the audience.
According to BBC, this piece of news never reached the papers or the television in the mainland China, although it went viral among the Chinese on their own social media called Sina Weibo.
Fang Bixing earned his PhD in computer sciences and was a professor at the Harbin Institute until recruited for network team in 1999 that the Chinese government found and which was a way to establish censorship on the internet. After joining the Chinese Communist Party as well, Fang started working on the Great Firewall of China and gained a lot of respect and credit after the project was finished and put to use.
Furthermore, the ways with which Fang Binxing and his team achieved this general surveillance and filtering was considered rather controversial. As a matter of fact, he gained a lot of haters all over China who were the internet users and who were not allowed to visit websites such as Facebook or Twitter due to them being blocked with The Great Firewall of China. A popular Chinese blogger named Hanjunyi even threw a shoe at Fang in 2011 as a sign of rebellion towards the Internet restrictions that this man established in China.
Moreover, Fang and his team also take care of what goes online and what does not. For example, the big Tiananmen Square protests that happened in 1989 are never mentioned online as if they had never happened and it is such kind of things that Chinese government does not allow and that makes China rather closed to the freedom of speech on the internet.
Fang used VPN to overcome protection, and this is exactly the thing that other Chinese people and tourists who go to China do in order to overcome the Great Firewall.
LimeVPN gives you an ability to not only access restricted websites, but to do all of that in complete anonymity.
Rachael Chapman
A Complete gamer and a Tech Geek. Brings out all her thoughts and love in writing blogs on IOT, software, technology etc
