The Great Firewall of China

China, being a Communist regime, naturally cannot help but censor its citizens in their trolling around the internet. When a Chinese web surfer searches for, say, Taiwan in Google, they will receive no search results unless their computer has the appropriate clearance.

Sebastian Wolfgarten has devised three ways to circumvent these, working off a rented Chinese server. He discovered that the Chinese mainframe servers send a kill code to the internet connection provider whenever a person types in keywords that include, for example, Amnesty.org or Falun Gong or Tiananmen square. Three easy ways to bypass this are to use the anonymous internet provider Tor, where the codes sent by the Chinese mainframes cannot find you, programming your personal firewall to block the kill commands, or, if you have a knowledge of hacking and plenty of time, doing something called "tunneling", where you hide the search requests in innocent looking email-based automated data and packet requests. Another computer outside of China, perhaps a Google server in the US, returns your request through the same process, allowing the data to pass freely, if taking a small bit longer to be processed.

Popsci comments on the vulnerability of China's censorship here...