The GFW engages in a continuous IP-blocking race against VPN services: participants reported that when one VPN goes down, others fail simultaneously, and banned services recover 'after a while,' suggesting coordinated blocking waves followed by IP rotation. Major foreign providers (ExpressVPN, NordVPN) now have no mainland China server nodes, rendering them ineffective for Chinese users.

In a survey of 2,415 young Chinese online gamers, 73.9% (1,786) were affected by addiction prevention systems (APS) while minors, and 37.7% (674) of those successfully evaded the APS. 15 of 35 interview participants also actively evaded the GFW at interview time (verified by Twitter live-post retrieval), supporting the hypothesis that mandatory APS evasion for trivial gaming activities normalizes and desensitizes minors to GFW circumvention.

§5, §9.2 evaluation

Domestic Chinese search engines (e.g., Baidu) return no valid results for direct VPN or '翻墙' (climb the wall) queries, but 16 of 18 GFW ladders mentioned by participants remained discoverable via Chinese jargon and homonyms (e.g., '蕃蔷' as a homonym for 'climbing the wall'). Word-of-mouth through college friends, gaming forums (Baidu Tieba), and QQ group chats were primary alternative distribution channels.

§8.1 evaluation

17 of 35 interview participants used game accelerators or GFW ladders interchangeably to connect to international gaming platforms; several popular VPNs bundle game acceleration, and open-source accelerators (e.g., Steam++, rebranded as Watt Toolkit) provide partial GFW-evasion covering GitHub, Google Authenticator, Pixiv, Discord, and Twitch. The paper recommends CRSes market as gaming accelerators to provide plausible deniability, while capping active accounts or rebranding periodically to avoid attracting censor attention as popularity grows.

§9.2, §9.3 defense

Five participants confirmed installing GFW evasion tools exposed them to malware; prior work cited in the paper found >38% of Android apps using the VPN permission contain malware. Participants additionally reported fake gaming platforms that install adware and credential-stealing phishing pages; notably, VirusTotal did not flag any of the fake platform URLs identified by participants, indicating conventional AV tools provide insufficient protection.

§8.4 evaluation

The June 2025 Iran shutdown—carried out during the Iran-Israel war beginning ~June 19—did not use BGP route withdrawals as in 2019. Instead, authorities applied service-level restrictions at the national border: DNS poisoning of foreign destinations, protocol whitelisting permitting only pre-approved domestic services, and DPI to block circumvention-tool traffic. Iran's international traffic fell roughly 90% while the country's BGP routes remained advertised, making the shutdown invisible to BGP-based monitoring systems. OONI measurement volume, which totalled 121,333 in June 2025, collapsed to under 200 submissions on June 19-20.

2025-iran-shutdown-measurement Executive Summary / §2 dpidns-poisoningport-blockingip-blocking

Chinese users treat full proxy/VPN (Shadowsocks, V2Ray/Clash, commercial VPNs) as the '终极大杀器' (ultimate solution) for bypassing GitHub DNS poisoning, implying that lighter-weight DNS-only fixes fail in some network environments where the censor adds firewall-layer blocking beyond DNS.

2026-anon-6-github-dns §3 使用代理或 VPN dns-poisoningip-blocking

Rule-based proxy tools (Clash, Shadowsocks, V2Ray) are documented as the most reliable solution for accessing GitHub from China, with split-tunneling rules routing only GitHub traffic through the proxy while keeping domestic traffic on the direct path. Git command-line tools require explicit proxy configuration (git config --global http.proxy http://127.0.0.1:7890) to route clone/push operations, as they do not inherit system proxy settings automatically.

2026-anon-github-2026-6-dns §方法二 dns-poisoningip-blocking

The GFW blocks GitHub via DNS poisoning across at least four domains — github.com, assets-cdn.github.com, github.global.ssl.fastly.net, and raw.githubusercontent.com — causing connection timeouts and page-load failures for mainland China users. The block is persistent as of February 2026, affecting both browser access and command-line git operations.

2026-anon-github-2026-6-dns Introduction / §方法一 dns-poisoningip-blocking

Article 19 documents that Iran's National Information Network (NIN / SHOMA) was designed with explicit reference to China's Great Firewall as a model, with institutional mirroring: Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace parallels China's Cyberspace Administration of China, and both governments share a "cyber sovereignty" doctrine used to justify domestic content controls and cross-border technology transfer. The report frames Iran's filtering infrastructure as deliberately architected to replicate GFW capabilities, not as an independently developed system.

2026-article19-tightening-the-net §2, §3 dpisni-blockingdns-poisoningip-blockingbgp-hijackthrottling

Article 19 documents that Iran combines technical filtering with formal coercion of major foreign platforms (including Telegram, Instagram, and WhatsApp) to comply with content removal orders under threat of full blocking. The report notes that Iran's 2022 Women Life Freedom protests accelerated platform blocking when foreign operators refused compliance, demonstrating that the censorship system operates in two modes: coerce-and-allow for compliant platforms, block for non-compliant ones. Domain fronting via these platforms is therefore subject to sudden revocation if political conditions change.

2026-article19-tightening-the-net §6 ip-blockingdns-poisoningthrottling