Reports from various sources said that one of the most popular circumvention tool, Freegate, has been blocked since last Friday (August 27) in China.

When users ran the program, a warning message appeared: Error, the program has to be shut down. Please accept our apology. Below is a screen capture at the internet freedom forum:

According to the RFA report, users from several provinces across the country have encountered similar problem and they believe that it is due to the upgrade of Great Fire Wall. Apart from the Freegate, when running UltraSurf and FreeU the same error message appeared.

However, advanced computer users quickly find out how to solve the problem manually: Ignore the message until the program found its server. Open the browser and set the proxy to 127.0.0.1 and port to 8580.

In order to tackle the problem, Freegate launched its latest beta version (7.03) on Saturday (Aug 28):
http://dongtaiwang.com/loc/beta/fg703xb2.exe
http://dongtaiwang.com/loc/beta/fg703xb2.zip