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The government has made some attempts to clip its wings. She ran it on her computer using some rudimentary coding skills she picked up in a class.Īt the very least, Shadowsocks is widespread enough that Chinese authorities are aware of its existence. When her VPN stopped working, she searched for an alternative and discovered Shadowsocks on a Chinese-language internet forum.

While preparing to study abroad, she used a VPN to access YouTube and watch university lectures.

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Both sites are blocked in China, but he visits regularly for his job at a production company.Īnother Shadowsocks user, 25-year-old Steffie Chao, told Quartz she began using the software four years ago. One Shadowsocks user Quartz spoke to says he relies on it to watch videos on Vimeo and YouTube.

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Still, anecdotes suggest that the software has reached at least some people in China who aren’t professional developers. After that, they can browse the internet freely.

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Next, using a Shadowsocks client app (there are many, both free and paid), users input the server location and password and access the server. Then users must log in to the server using their computer’s terminal, and enter the Shadowsocks code. One common method to use it requires renting out a virtual private server (VPS) located outside of China and capable of running Shadowsocks. If you’re a luddite, you’ll probably have a hard time setting up Shadowsocks.

That way everybody’s not using the same protocol.” Calling all coders With Shadowsocks, he adds, “Each person can configure it to look like their own thing. It wasn’t designed for the circumvention of censorship,” says Larry Salibra, a Hong Kong-based privacy advocate. “People use VPNs to set up inter-company links, to set up a secure network. What’s more, tech-savvy Shadowsocks users often customize their settings, making it even harder for the Great Firewall to detect them wholesale. The latter is makeshift, but way more discreet. The former method is more lucrative as a business, but easier for authorities to detect and shut down. Leo Weese, a Hong Kong-based privacy advocate, likens VPNs to a professional freight forwarder, and Shadowsocks to having a package shipped to a friend who then re-addresses the item to the real intended recipient before putting it back in the mail. These tactics don’t work so well on Shadowsocks, since it is a less centralized system. Chinese censors have been able to use machine learning to find “fingerprints” that identify traffic from VPNs using these protocols.

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And VPNs usually rely on one of a few popular internet protocols, which tell computers how to talk to each other over the web. That makes it easy for the government to identify those providers and then block traffic from them. But most people who use them in China use one of a few large service providers. How is this different from a VPN? VPNs also work by rerouting and encrypting data. It creates an encrypted connection between the Shadowsocks client on your local computer and the one running on your proxy server, using an open-source internet protocol called SOCKS5. It still knows you are requesting packets from Google-you’re just using a bit of an odd route for it. Nowadays, even if you have a proxy server in Australia, the Great Firewall can identify and block traffic it doesn’t like from that server. So even if you’re in China, your proxy server in Australia can freely connect to Google, Facebook, and the like.īut the Great Firewall has since grown more powerful. This other computer is called a “proxy server.” When you use a proxy, all your traffic is routed first through the proxy server, which could be located anywhere. Proxying grew popular in China during the early days of the Great Firewall-before it was truly “great.” In this setup, before connecting to the wider internet, you first connect to a computer other than your own.

Shadowsocks is based on a technique called proxying. To understand how Shadowsocks works, we’ll have to get a bit into the cyberweeds. While the government has made efforts to curb its spread, it’s likely to remain difficult to suppress.

It’s called Shadowsocks, and it’s an open-source proxy built for the specific purpose of jumping China’s Great Firewall. In response to these difficulties, China’s tech-savvy programmers have been relying on another, lesser-known tool to access the open internet.

Shadowsocks protocol