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A new anticensorship tool from GreatFire turns any website into an unblocked app in China
- GreatFire’s new tool uses machine learning to let creators easily produce apps that make content accessible anywhere
- The organisation has spent years helping users skirt China’s Great Firewall
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There are plenty of anticensorship tools designed to help people hop China’s Great Firewall. But a new one called the GreatFire AppMaker is designed specifically for content creators. The creators of the tool say it enables any blocked media outlet, blogger, human rights group or civil society organisation to get their content onto the phones of Chinese users.
The tool doesn’t just work for China, either. GreatFire, a group of activists who monitor censorship in China, says it also works in other countries where the content is blocked.
“At a time when governments are responding to censorship with censorship, this is a solution that we believe highlights what is most important – freedom of access to information,” said Charlie Smith, the head of the organisation.
Smith is a pseudonym that the activist has been using since the start of GreatFire’s battle with the Great Firewall in 2011. The non-profit organisation compiles a censorship database about blocked websites and searches in China. It also collects deleted posts from social platforms like Weibo and WeChat. Another anticensorship tool the organisation maintains is a web browser called FreeBrowser, which GreatFire said inspired AppMaker.
Like the browser and a New York Times app that GreatFire helped with, AppMaker relies on the concept of collateral freedom, Smith said. This works by hosting blocked content alongside other innocuous content on critical cloud services, like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. The idea is that China won’t block large swathes of those cloud providers just to keep out some offending content, because the cost would be too great.
Organisations that want to use AppMaker can go to the site, put in their blocked web address and upload an app icon. When they hit submit, the tool compiles an Android app that users can download with a QR code posted to GitHub. In line with the collateral freedom concept, China has been reluctant to block GitHub because the open source code depository is an irreplaceable tool for the local tech community.
After scanning the code, users get a link to an APK installation file for Android. The app that users get is effectively a web browser that automatically pulls up the specified website – now unblocked.
Masha Borak is a technology reporter. Before joining the Post, she reported on China tech from Beijing.
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