Getting Around the Chinese Firewall

Pamela at Atlas Shrugs details a technological workaround that allows people in China to avoid dealing with the Google censorship limitations altogether. The application is called Freegate, and it has run into problems with some of the network security companies who have treated the code as malicious software. Symantec has decided to relabel Freegate:

Symantec is to stop classifying a software utility that enables Chinese surfers to view blocked websites as a Trojan horse.

The reassessment follows stories earlier this week questioning the designation of the widely-used Freegate program as malicious code. Freegate has 200,000 users, Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), its developer, estimates. The software lets users view sites banned by the Chinese government by taking advantage of a range of proxy servers assigned to changeable internet addresses. Symantec mislabelled this behaviour as that of malicious code and wrongly-labelled Freegate as malign.

This means that Freegate users will no longer be constrained by Symantec's anti-virus programs. Score one for the good guys. Here's more on the background of the push to get the network security companies to change their treatment of the code.

Technorati: china, censorship, dictatorship, repression, google, microsoft, yahoo, dont be evil.