Apps you won’t have heard about at Beijing’s GMIC

China is the world’s biggest mobile Internet market and the 25,000 visitors to this year’s GMIC, nowadays compared to the Mobile World Conference, included hundreds of entrepreneurs, investors, promoters and other professionals from the mobile Internet sector, as well as representatives of China’s biggest Internet companies, media owners and newspaper editors. But like the World Internet Conference held in the small eastern city of Wuzhen from 19 to 21 November 2014, Internet censorship and control of news and information were not on the GMIC’s agenda, and the organizers carefully refrained from making any comment about the lack of online freedom and the government’s mass surveillance of Internet users. An active supporter of the Chinese NGO GreatFire.org, Reporters Without Borders is today presenting the mobile apps developed by GreatFire in recent years with the aim of allowing users to circumvent the Great Firewall of China – all the human and technological resources created by the Chinese authorities with the aim of filtering and censoring “inappropriate” online content. “China has seen rapid economic development since the early 1990s, in large part due to the enormous sums of foreign investment that have been pouring into the country,” GreatFire’s Charlie Smith said. “Much of that investment has also helped to fuel the development of the mobile Internet. Foreign investors have long promised that economic engagement with China would lead to an easing of censorship and free speech controls. While foreign investors have profited from their investments, freedom of speech has taken a turn for the worse. Furthermore, the development of the mobile Internet in China has only increased the opportunities for the Chinese authorities to single out those who dare to openly criticise the Chinese government.” “By putting their skills in the service of the fight against censorship and information control in China, GreatFire.org’s members are making an incalculable contribution to efforts to return to the Chinese population their fundamental freedoms and their right to information, which are constantly flouted by the authorities,” said Benjamin Ismaïl, the head of the Reporters Without Borders Asia-Pacific desk. “It is essential that the mobile apps developed by GreatFire.org should given as much publicity as possible in order to enable all of China’s Internet users to circumvent their government’s censorship.” The apps developed by GreatFire.org Free browser: Automatically circumvents the Great Firewall and enables access to blocked websites, including Google, Twitter and Facebook. Allows you to watch YouTube videos with a high-speed connection. Download : https://bitbucket.org/greatfire/test/raw/master/FreeBrowser-1.3.apk Paopao: From selling cats to tips on how to circumvent censorship, or network security, Paopao provides you with uncensored news. Paopao is the result of collaboration between citizens concerned by Internet development in China, reporters who support Internet freedom, technicians and cyberactivists. Download : https://raw.githubusercontent.com/greatfire/z/master/PaoPaoAndroid2.0.apk China Digital Times: From CDT "About Us" : China Digital Times (CDT) is an independent, bilingual media organization that brings uncensored news and online voices from China to the world. We achieve this through: Filtering and aggregating news from English-language media and placing it in a broader social and political context; Amplifying the voices of Chinese citizens through translation; Revealing the hidden mechanisms of state censorship by collecting and translating filtered keywords, propaganda directives, and official rhetoric; Download : https://raw.githubusercontent.com/greatfire/z/master/ChinaDigitalTimesAndroid1.9.apk Free Weibo: Welcome to Free Weibo. We offer anonymous and unfiltered search on Sina Weibo social network. Download : https://raw.githubusercontent.com/greatfire/z/master/FreeWeibo1.8.apk These softwares were developed by GreatFire.org. We plan to make all of our software apps open source. Please visit https://github.com/greatfire/wiki/wiki to view existing open source projects and to see the list of unblocked mirror websites. “Enemy of the Internet” that can be defeated by “Collateral Freedom” China is one of the countries that have established the world’s most sophisticated systems for monitoring and censoring the Internet. It continues to be on the Reporters Without Borders list of “Enemies of the Internet.” To combat online censorship, Reporters Without Borders launched an operation in March under which it is unblocking access to censored news websites around the world. Two of them are Chinese – Tibet Post International and Mingjing News. Today they can be accessed in places where they are officially banned. To unblock the foreign media sites that are blocked in China, Reporters Without Borders is using an original method developed by GreatFire; "Collateral freedom", that is based on the technique known as “mirroring,” under which censored sites are duplicated and the copies are placed on the servers of Internet giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Making the mirror sites inaccessible would deprive thousands of Chinese companies of essential services. The economic and political cost would be too high for the Chinese government to assume. China is ranked 176th out of 180 countries in the 2015 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.