It is widely known that the Government of the People’s Republic of China conducts large-scale censorship of Internet access in that country. But what would it be like to actually experience, first-hand, this despicable, flawed attempt at curbing free speech?

The China Channel add-on let's you waft in and out of the great firewall of China like a cartoon ghost.

That’s exactly what China Channel attempts to do. From a software point of view it’s a bit dodgy, overriding your proxy settings and reducing Firefox to a crawl, but it’s interesting nonetheless. You download the add-on from here, install it in Firefox (which takes a bit of fiddling around, as I found out), restart the browser, then you get a tasteful little icon like this above the tab bar:

Clicking it points Firefox at a proxy server located somewhere inside China, behind the filters and DNS poisoning. Browsing is painfully slow, but quite surreal.

Attempting to access blocked sites gets you disconnected entirely.

For example, googling ‘Tiananmen’ and visiting this BBC page about the 1989 massacre was deemed too dissenting by the powers that be, so I was blocked. One thing I hadn’t realized before is that as well as being prevented from accessing the site in question, you are also completely disconnected from the Internet for fifteen minutes. Thankfully, living in relatively liberal Ireland, I was able to just call up another proxy server and start over.

A new site kicks off with an old video. In 1969, the Post Office Research Station published this 8-minute film, showcasing its bizarre, amusing, yet often surprisingly accurate predictions about what electronic communications would be like in the 1990s. Most troubling is the ultraviolet photocopying mechanism built into the telephone terminal…