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Shanghai (AFP) Feb 18, 2011 The architect of China's vast Internet censorship system has admitted using software to circumvent the controls -- but only to probe just how secure his widely-criticised creation is. Fang Binxing said in an interview published Friday he uses six virtual private networks to scale the so-called "Great Firewall". "I have six VPNs on my home computer," Fang 50, said in the rare interview published in the Global Times newspaper. But Fang, president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, said he uses them purely to test the firewall's effectiveness. "I'm not interested in reading messy information like some of that anti-government stuff," Fang said. Fang also defended the Great Firewall, calling it "urgently" needed. He is considered the inventor of the system, which filters out information deemed sensitive or politically harmful by China's government. Sites blocked by the system include Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. China has sanitised media reports on the Middle East unrest and restricted online discussion of it, apparently fearful it could spark calls for democracy at home. China has a world-leading 457 million Internet users, according to official figures. The government also blocks many sites where virtual private networks are available, but countless Chinese continue to find ways to access them. VPNs get behind the firewall by disguising a user's location. Thousands of Chinese Internet users vented their anger at Fang in December when he opened a microblog account on web portal Sina.com, which operates a tightly-managed Twitter clone. Fang closed the account within days. "Before, the GFW deprived people of their right to freely access the Internet, now people will deprive you of your right to use a microblog," said one typical comment, later deleted by web monitors. "He is the enemy of all netizens who are forced to scale the wall all day long," said another. Fang told the newspaper the comments were "dirty abuse" that he endured "as a sacrifice for my country". "They can't get what they want so they need to blame someone emotionally: like if you fail to get a US visa and you slag off the US visa official afterwards," he said. He defended the Great Firewall as an urgent necessity when it went up in 1998 and said it needed to be upgraded to prevent people from tunnelling under it. "Drivers just obey the rules," he said, comparing the firewall to traffic control. "So citizens should just play with what they have." China's Internet controls have become a key irritant in relations with the United States, especially after a dispute over Chinese censorship led US search engine giant Google to reduce its presence in China. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton renewed a call for Internet freedom on Tuesday, saying nations such as China that suppress online activity will pay an economic cost and risk the sort of unrest seen in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. She also announced plans to launch Twitter feeds in Chinese, Russian and Hindi, just days after starting Twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi.
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