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How-To: Bypass the Great Firewall of China

1. Perform these steps BEFORE going to China. Many of the sites you need to reach to bypass the Great Firewall are blocked by the Great Firewall.
   1. Too late? Find someone in China who’s already punched through the Great Firewall to help you.
2. Set up GoAgent on your browser and a Google App Engine account according to the instructions here.
3. Those instructions are for FireFox. I was shown how to get it running under Chrome, by a Linux fan, and between the two of us we had an easy time interpreting that for my mac.
   1. I launch the proxy agent manually, by going into the <GoAgent>/local folder and running “sudo python proxy.py” there.
   2. When I say “<GoAgent>”, I mean the folder you unzipped from your download of GoAgent from code.google.
   3. The SwitchySharp Chrome extension gets installed in Chrome by going to Settings->Extensions within Chrome, and then dragging the (only) .crx file from <GoAgent>/local into the Chrome window that shows your current extensions.
   4. You probably want to update its autoproxy rules from the live servers:
      1. Click the SwitchySmart Chrome Extension icon that’s now in the upper-right of your Chrome window.
      2. Click “Options” under its menu. A new tab appears.
      3. That tab has a tab-bar of its own. Click “Switch Rules” there.
      4. At the bottom of that window, click the button to “Update List Now”
4. Your computer won’t be happy loading sites, still: routing everything though a proxy makes it look like you’re being snooped by a man-in-the-middle hacking attack. You have to add the proxy’s certificate to your trusted certificates list.
   1. On Mac, open the program “KeyChain Access”.
   2. Drag the certificate file from <GoAgent>/local into an unlocked keychain there.
      1. You should see a new certificate for “GoAgent CA”. You might have to search to narrow down to see it among the hundreds of other certificates a mature computer will have in its keychain.