Witopia worse than Great Firewall

[sthubbar]

As a long term user of Witopia, and seeing as Chinese-forums.com is an affiliate of Witopia, it is unfortunate to see how the service has developped lately.

It all started with Hulu access being blocked through Witopia. I understand this is not Witopia's fault, though the fact that competitors, such as strongvpn.com still can access Hulu doesn't make things much better.

What has really pushed me over the edge is I have just realized that Witopia is filtering website access, even more than the Chinese government and the Great Firewall of China. In particular, any torrent sites such as ishunter, or just try to go to any torrent site while Witopia is active and you will be denied. Disable Witopia and all the sites are reachable.

BTW, this is not just my imagination. I have confirmation from Witopia tech support that Witopia is filtering web access because of DMCA trouble in the US.

Hmm, so I'm paying money to have less access than without their service?! I have asked for a refund and will switch to strongvpn.com, even though it is twice the price, or another service if someone wants to recommend one.

[roddy]

"Worse than the Great Firewall"?

Makes sense - Witopia's servers will be downloading and sending out copyrighted stuff on an industrial scale, and that's probably not something you can get away with any more. Hulu and similar sites will likely block other VPNs as they get big enough to notice.

Look for some smaller tracker sites - the invite-only ones I use are still fine through Witopia. But I'd usually turn Witopia off for downloading anyway, seems only fair.

You might get some use out of another VPN, but any service based in a country with a functioning legal system is going to have to do the same sooner or later, and personally I'm not going to be sending my data through a service based anywhere else. Check refund policy before signing up, you may need it.

Let us know how you get on with strongvpn and the refund from witopia.

[AxelManbow]

A lot of the bigger services limit traffic on the basis of IP addresses. As Hulu recognise Witopia as a big proxy that might be used to evade their licence with movie/TV show producers, they block it. I'd guess they'd do the same to strongVPN if they knew about it/strongVPN IPs were a significant consumer of their service.

Some VPNs (and even ISPs) block all BT traffic, which is a pain.

An inexpensive solution is to use a webhost that allows shell access. That gets you a reasonably unique IP which is not associated with VPN type stuff. You can then tunnel traffic over to that webserver, and surf the web from the webserver. Bandwidth is usually generous to unlimited.

That's what I did when I was in an cafe on WiFi, as I wanted to secure my browsing from snooping. A side-effect was I could get on Youtube. Bonus.

[trevelyan]

I don't think the blocking is Witopia's fault. What pisses me off is the DNS corruption that the GFW has started doing. Technical solution is still setting up one's own proxy service. If you're technically inclined, the price is competitive. Never used these guys, but their prices aren't out of line at the low end, which is all that's needed for a proxy.

http://vpslink.com/vps-hosting/

[imron]

but any service based in a country with a functioning legal system is going to have to do the same sooner or later

Not necessarily. Service providers generally aren't held accountable for the acts of the users using their sevices if the service itself has significant non-infringing uses (which is true for a VPN, but not say Kazaa), and there have already been numerous cases upholding this in court.

In any case, I tend to agree with AxelManbow.

[roddy]

I don't know, in the US if they're getting DMCA notices then I think they either need to stop the infringement, or have the actual service user state that they hold the copyright to, eg, the latest episode of 24. Otherwise they lose any safe harbour and become directly liable. Getting those statements is probably more hassle for a VPN service than just cutting off the user and blocking torrent trackers.

[imron]

If they were hosting 24 yes, but just serving as the pipe? I don't think that's the case.

[renzhe]

I wouldn't be so sure. The four guys from PirateBay have never hosted anything, yet they were locked up.

Don't underestimate the influence of the media corporations.

[sthubbar]

This is the official response from Witopia:

Although, we have tens of thousands of customers in China and they always tell us that it rains content over there so there really is no reason to use VPN for file-sharing.

But, yes, it's in terms and conditions and on website that we can't allow it anymore. we were getting thousands of threatened lawsuits because those sites are FILLED with law enforcement honeypots and our IPs were getting logged left and right. Costed us hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars because ISPs were shutting us off and keeping our deposits, etc.

Did you find a VPN provider that allows them? No one usually does, or if they do, be careful because some will turn you in to avoid prosecution or they don't understand the issue and all their IPs get blacklisted and they get shutdown.

[gato]

Yeah, just go get your pirated fill in the blank at your local shop. Five yuan pretty much get you most things you'd want.

[sthubbar]

What about my porn, what happens when Witopia starts blocking that as well?

[gato]

You can make your own with the wifey. Hehe

[sthubbar]

Have to say a good thing about Witopia. They gave me a partial refund of my annual fee, even though it is about 4 months since I renewed my account.

Now to sign up for Strongvpn and see how it works.

[imron]

I wouldn't be so sure. The four guys from PirateBay have never hosted anything, yet they were locked up.

Note my first comment:

Service providers generally aren't held accountable for the acts of the users using their sevices if the service itself has significant non-infringing uses

An ISP/VPN whose primary mode of business is providing Internet access is in a completely different situation from the Pirate Bay, and in Australia at least they are not responsible for the actions of their users, and this has been upheld in court.

[smalldog]

If I'm allowed to suggest an alternative, I use the ivacy.com VPN. It's pretty fast, I haven't found anything to be blocked, and you can choose to connect through servers in the US, UK or Russia. The monthly service is pretty expensive (because it is mainly used for filesharing, I think), but the volume-based pricing only costs 10 euros for 20 GB which will last years if you only use it for facebook, etc. (@Roddy: they have a pretty generous affiliate scheme too.)

[roddy]

An ISP/VPN whose primary mode of business is providing Internet access is in a completely different situation from the Pirate Bay, and in Australia at least they are not responsible for the actions of their users, and this has been upheld in court.

The DMCA makes the situation in the US quite different. Perhaps it's time to look for Aussie VPNs.

[rob07]

Well the Australian court decision has been appealed and whoever loses the appeal will likely appeal it again after that. Plus the Government may change the law. So although the ISP won the first round, that of itself doesn't guarantee anything longterm.

[Ariane]

I've been having weird problems with witopia too, though I also have windows7, so I don't know if it's related to that-- but I seem to be able to connect to witopia just fine, but then I still can't access pages like facebook and youtube. Any ideas?

[roddy]

Yes - just had to solve this myself.

You need to be running Witopia as administrator. Right-click on the icon (the one you use to start it, not the taskbar one), Compatibility, Run as Administrator.

This caught me out as I set it up for the actual application, but it also needs to be done for any shortcut you use.

Trouble with this is that Windows will ask you to confirm you want to do this every time you start it up, which is a bit irritating. Not sure if there's a way around this.

[gato]

See here:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11841-run-administrator.html

1. Right click on the program shortcut or program .exe file, then click on Properties, and on the Compatibility tab. (See screenshots below)

NOTE: If you are doing this while logged on as a standard user instead of an administrator, then you will need to also click on the Change settings for all users button and type in the administrator's password.

2. To Always Run this Program as an Administrator -

A) Check the Run this program as an administrator box, and click on OK. (See screenshots above)