Beating the Censorship of China’s Great Firewall with Raspberry Pi

Chinese internet censorship can be a pain in the ass. While it’s easy enough to circumvent with a good VPN, it’s tough to bring your VPN with you wherever you go; even if you install its client on all your own devices you won’t have it at friends houses or on public computers, and you’ve got to open the client and connect on each device separately.

Yesterday, in a reddit thread about how people use the Raspberry Pi (the tiny, $25 computer pictured on the right), a China-based redditor using the handle JaiPasInternet posted this clever way to make jumping the GFW a lot easier across all your devices (we added the link):

I set my Raspberry to automatically connect to my VPN server through OpenVPN, and then share the connection with a wifi dongle, using hostapd software. I use it on a daily basis with my iPhone and Android tablet (way better than the included VPN client) but the good thing is that, wherever I go, I just bring my Raspberry [Pi], plug it into ethernet and to any usb plug, and after a few minutes, I have my censor-free wifi hotspot.

So, while it still requires a VPN, it sounds like the Raspberry Pi can make things easier for those looking to evade the censor’s long arm, especially if you use a number of different devices, use unfamiliar/public computers often, or want to surf the uncensored web on computers you can’t install your own software on (like work computers in some offices). Happy GFW-hopping, people!

(via reddit, so go upvote this guy!)