El Reg wrote:Japan's free public VPN project tunnels through Great Firewall
China and Japan make friends on the interwebs
Chinese netizens finding it increasingly difficult to bypass the Great Firewall after a recent crackdown on virtual private network (VPN) services have found an unlikely ally in a new public relay VPN service from Japan.
The VPN Gate Academic Experiment Project (h/t TechInAsia) was set up by researchers at the Graduate School of Japan’s University of Tsukuba with a mission to “expand the knowledge of ‘Global Distributed Public VPN Relay Servers’.”
The free service requires no user registrations and bills itself as having “strong resistance against firewalls” because its VPN servers are provided by volunteers around the world and therefore hosted by different ISPs and in different physical locations.
VPN Gate explains more in patchy English below:
The number of volunteers increases or decreases every day, and each IP address vary every time. If something "out-of-order" will occur on the government's firewall, whole the VPN Gate Relay Server are not affected. If a few VPN servers become unreachable from your country, you can still reach other VPN servers.
The platform supports the SSL-VPN (SoftEther VPN) protocol, L2TP/IPsec, OpenVPN, and Microsoft SSTP protocol.
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