News

 

05/10/2009

As we announced in the 3/11/09 update, we have put in place network policies to reject traffic from non-China IPs in our regular transport mode. However, as of today, the skype transport mode gateways are still accepting requests from all clients. The skype gateways are seeing a lot more traffic than before, which has given us increased pressure on upgrading hardware and bandwidth.

We have received many requests from non-China users, especially users from Iran, asking us to continue to offer the anti-censorship service to those areas. In order to help these users, we are considering a paid service model to offset some of our operational cost. Those we are interested in continuing to use our service for a minimum fee, please contact us at support#gardennetworks.org (replace # with @) to purchase a usage token to continue using our software. The skype transport gateway servers, and gateway servers for the new transport that we will be announcing soon, will be upgraded to support paying users.

03/11/2009

Due to financial constraints, we are sad to announce that we will soon discontinue services to requests that are not originated from mainland China. We will put in place firewall and server policies that will reject non-China client IPs.

We have offered free services for the benefit of our users since the year of 2001. Given the economy situation, we have to make necessary adjustments to our resource allocation.

04/14/2008

The TOM.com version of Skype (the "Official Chinese Version" as they claim, http://skype.tom.com) has obviously integrated the censorship functionality into skype client. The ContentFilter.exe, which did content filtering in older version of Tom Skype, is no longer a part of Skype installation (3.6.4.150). Instead, the keyword file is downloaded by Skype client. At this point, many of the filtered keywords are related to politics and religion. For example, the Chinese name of the news paper and news web site The Epochtimes is one of the words that triggers filtering. When a filtered keyword shows up in a message, the whole message will be dropped. The download URL of the keyfile is http://skypetools.tom.com/agent/newkeyfile/keyfile. It contains multiple lines of encoded data. Skype, how far do you want to go? Are you also sending user IDs to Chinese Police? 

To defeat this, add this line in file c:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts then restart skype:

127.0.0.1    skypetools.tom.com 

12/06/2007

Add CGI Proxy Service! CGI Proxy is a web interface with which you can access other web sites. You can use this service to bypass some network censorship. The URL is http://cgiproxy.gardennetworks.org. HTTPS is enabled so your have the option of encrypting your traffic, although the speed will be a little lower. Give it a try! 

11/15/2007

GTunnel 1.1.0.7 released. Some issues fixed. Added mode icons.

10/24/2007

GTunnel 1.1 released. New features include Tor mode and dialup/ADSL global proxy support. Check out the features. Download GTunnel.

10/18/2007

New client software GTunnel 1.0 released. New Skype mode in additional to the standard mode, new protocol support, stronger encryption.

10/17/2007

English forum opened.

04/14/2007

Due to changes in external resources, the effectiveness of the client software is affected in some regions in China. We have received user feedbacks regarding these issues. We are glad to announce that two new versions of Garden (Garden Networks's client software tool) are being developed, along with new back-end systems.

Aside from addressing the reported usage issues, the new systems will provide stronger data encryption, richer functionality, improved application support and more robust anti-jamming features. The new client software will be easier to use and provide more feedback

The new systems will be available in Q3, 2007.