GreatFire (GreatFire.org) is a website that monitors the status of websites censored by the Great Firewall of China and helps Chinese Internet users circumvent the censorship and blockage of websites in China. Through an investigation by the Associated Press, the website was found receiving funds from the United States government through its Open Technology Fund under

Radio Free Asia Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a United States government-funded private non-profit news service that broadcasts radio programs and publishes online news, information, and commentary for its audiences in Asia. The service, which provides editoriall ...

. GreatFire hosts a testing system that allows visitors to test in real time the accessibility of a website from various locations within China. The organization's stated mission was to "bring transparency to the Great Firewall of China."GreatFire also provides another test syste
Blocky
GreatFire has worked with BBC to make the Chinese-language BBC website available to users in China, despite it being blocked by the Great Firewall, by using a method known as

collateral freedom Collateral freedom is an anti-censorship strategy that attempts to make it economically prohibitive for censors to block content on the Internet. This is achieved by hosting content on cloud services that are considered by censors to be "too impor ...

that mirrored content on widely used content delivery networks, such as Amazon CloudFront and CloudFlare, so that it would be too economically costly for censors to block. The organization has since set up similar mirror sites for other blocked websites, such as Google and the '' New York Times'', with a directory of links hosted on GitHub. For security reasons, the members of the organization remain anonymous and do not know much about each other to prevent the whole project from coming down in the event one would be caught by the Chinese government. GreatFire has been targeted with

distributed denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connec ...

s that attempt to take down the website by overloading its servers with traffic. In April 2015 it was targeted by a Chinese attack tool named

Great Cannon The Great Cannon of China is an Internet attack tool that is used by the Chinese government to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks on websites by performing a man-in-the-middle attack on large amounts of web traffic and injecting code ...

that redirected massive amounts of Internet traffic to servers used by GreatFire. A sister site,

FreeWeibo FreeWeibo ( zh, 自由微博) is a website that monitors and makes available content from leading Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo that has been censored and deleted by Chinese authorities under the Great Firewall. The home page is constan ...

, monitors and makes available content from leading Chinese microblogging site

Sina Weibo Sina Weibo (新浪微博) is a Chinese microblogging ( weibo) website. Launched by Sina Corporation on 14 August 2009, it is one of the biggest social media platforms in China, with over 582 million monthly active users (252 million daily acti ...

that has been censored and deleted by

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...

authorities under the Great Firewall. In 2015, the Associated Press reported that GreatFire receives funding from a variety of sources, including the Open Technology Fund (OTF), a United States government-backed program at

. The Open Technology Fund says on its website that it gave Greatfire.org a $114,000 grant in 2014. On its website, the organization identifies GreatFire as an "OTF-supported" initiative.

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* Internet censorship in China Human rights in China Internet in China Online nonprofit organizations Internet-related activism {{China-stub

See also

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