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The firewall is largely ineffective at preventing the flow of information and is rather easily circumvented by determined parties by using proxy servers outside the firewall. VPN and ssh connections to outside mainland China are not blocked, so circumventing all of the censorship and monitoring features of the Great Firewall of China is trivial for those who have these secure connection methods to computers outside mainland China available to them.
Neither the Tor website or network are blocked, making Tor (in conjunction with Privoxy) an easily acquired and effective tool for circumvention of the censorship controls. Tor maintains a public list of entry nodes, so the authorities could easily block it if they had the inclination. According to the Tor FAQ sections 6.4 and 7.9, Tor is vulnerable to timing analysis by Chinese authorities, so it allows a breach of anonymity. Thus for the moment, Tor allows uncensored downloads and uploads, although no guarantee can be made with regard to freedom from repercussions.
In addition to Tor, there are various HTTP/HTTPS Tunnel Services, which work in a similar way as Tor. At least one of them, Your Freedom, is confirmed to be working from China and also offers encryption features for the transmitted traffic.
It was common in the past to use Google's cache feature to view blocked websites. However, this feature of Google seems to be under some level of blocking, as access is now erratic and does not work for blocked websites. Currently the block is mostly circumvented by using proxy servers outside the firewall, and is not difficult to carry out for those determined to do so. Some well-known proxy servers have also been blocked.
Some Chinese citizens use the Google Mirror elgooG after China blocked Google. It is believed that elgooG survived the Great Firewall of China because the firewall operators thought that elgooG was not a fully functional version of Google.
As Falun Gong websites are generally inaccessible from mainland China, practitioners have launched a company named UltraReach Internet Corp and developed a piece of software named UltraSurf to enable people in mainland China to access restricted web sites via Internet Explorer without being detected.
Other techniques used include Freenet, a peer-to-peer distributed data store allowing members to anonymously send or retrieve information, and TriangleBoy.
Another common way of sneaking illegal information is the use of cellular phones and text messaging, though these are also monitored by the government.
