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| Formation | 2011[1] |
|---|---|
| Type | Website |
| Purpose | Advocacy against Internet censorship in China |
| Website | en.greatfire.org |
GreatFire (GreatFire.org) is a website[note 1] that monitors the status of websites censored by theGreat Firewall of China[2] and helps Chinese Internet users circumvent thecensorship and blockage of websites in China.[3][4] The site was first launched in 2011 by an anonymous trio.[5] GreatFire is funded by sources inside and outside China, including the US-government-backedOpen Technology Fund.[6][7]
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".[8] GreatFire also provides another test system,Blocky, which allows users to search for online services and check their status.[9]
GreatFire has worked withBBC 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 ascollateral freedom[10] that mirrored content on widely usedcontent delivery networks, such asAmazon CloudFront andCloudFlare, so that it would be too economically costly for censors to block.[11][12][13] The organization has since set up similar mirror sites for other blocked websites, such asGoogle and theNew York Times, with a directory of links hosted onGitHub.[14]
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.[15]
GreatFire has been targeted withdistributed denial-of-service attacks that attempt to take down the website by overloading its servers with traffic.[16] In April 2015, it was targeted by a Chineseattack tool namedGreat Cannon that redirected massive amounts of Internet traffic to servers used by GreatFire.[17]
A sister site,FreeWeibo, monitors and makes available content from leadingChinese microblogging siteSina Weibo that has beencensored and deleted byChinese authorities under theGreat Firewall.[18]
In 2015, theAssociated Press reported that GreatFire receives funding from a variety of sources, including theOpen Technology Fund (OTF), aUnited States government-backed program.[6] The Open Technology Fund says on its website that it gave Greatfire.org a $114,000 grant in 2014.[19] On its website, the organization identifies GreatFire as an "OTF-supported" initiative.[7]
Internet censorship circumvention technologies | |||||||
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| Background |
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| Principles |
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| Anti-censorship software |
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| Anonymity |
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