GreatFire (GreatFire.org) is a website that monitors the status of websites censored by the

Great Firewall The Great Firewall (GFW; ) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the China, People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in internet censorship in China is to block access to selected ...

of China and helps Chinese Internet users circumvent the censorship and blockage of websites in China. The site was first launched in 2011 by an anonymous trio. GreatFire is funded by sources inside and outside China, including the US-government-backed

Open Technology Fund The Open Technology Fund (OTF) is an American nonprofit corporation that aims to support global Internet freedom technologies. Its mission is to "support open technologies and communities that increase free expression, circumvent censorship, an ...

. GreatFire hosts a testing system that allows visitors to test in real time the accessibility of a website from various locations within China. The organization's stated mission was to "bring transparency to the Great Firewall of China". GreatFire also provides another test system, ''Blocky'', which allows users to search for online services and check their status. GreatFire has worked with

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

to make the Chinese-language BBC website available to users in China, despite it being blocked by the Great Firewall, by using a method known as

collateral freedom Collateral freedom is an anti-censorship strategy that attempts to make it economically prohibitive for censors to block content on the Internet. This is achieved by hosting content on cloud services that are considered by censors to be "too impor ...

that mirrored content on widely used

content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance ("speed") by distributing the service spat ...

s, such as

Amazon CloudFront Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) operated by Amazon Web Services. The content delivery network was created to provide a globally-distributed network of proxy servers to cache content, such as web videos or other bulky media ...

and

CloudFlare Cloudflare, Inc., is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, wide area network services, reverse proxies, Domain Name Service, ICANN-accredited domain registration, and other se ...

, so that it would be too economically costly for censors to block. The organization has since set up similar mirror sites for other blocked websites, such as

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

and the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'', with a directory of links hosted on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

. For security reasons, the members of the organization remain anonymous and do not know much about each other to prevent the whole project from coming down in the event one would be caught by the Chinese government. GreatFire has been targeted with

distributed denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host conne ...

s that attempt to take down the website by overloading its servers with traffic. In April 2015, it was targeted by a Chinese attack tool named

Great Cannon The Great Cannon of China is an Internet attack tool that is used by the government of the People's Republic of China to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks on websites by performing a man-in-the-middle attack on large amounts of web t ...

that redirected massive amounts of Internet traffic to servers used by GreatFire. A sister site,

FreeWeibo FreeWeibo ( zh, 自由微博) is a website that monitors and makes available content from leading Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo that has been censored and deleted by Chinese authorities under the Great Firewall. The home page is constant ...

, monitors and makes available content from leading Chinese microblogging site

Sina Weibo Weibo (), or Sina Weibo (), is a Chinese microblogging ( weibo) website. Launched by Sina Corporation on 14 August 2009, it is one of the biggest social media platforms in China, with over 582 million monthly active users (252 million daily ...

that has been

censored Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governmen ...

and deleted by

Chinese Chinese may refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people identified with China, through nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **Han Chinese, East Asian ethnic group native to China. **'' Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic ...

authorities under the

. In 2015, the

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American not-for-profit organization, not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association, and produces news reports that are dist ...

reported that GreatFire receives funding from a variety of sources, including the

(OTF), a

United States government The Federal Government of the United States of America (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the Federation#Federal governments, national government of the United States. The U.S. federal government is composed of three distinct ...

-backed program. The Open Technology Fund says on its website that it gave Greatfire.org a $114,000 grant in 2014. On its website, the organization identifies GreatFire as an "OTF-supported" initiative.

Notes

References

External links

* {{Internet censorship circumvention technologies Internet censorship in China Human rights in China Internet in China Online nonprofit organizations Internet-related activism

See also

Notes

References

External links