WUHAN – Facebook’s presence in China reached three-digits yesterday, according to a press release from the company.
Pei Zhang, an engineering student at Wuhan Technical College became the 100th Chinese citizen in China to successfully register a new membership with the popular social networking site, which has been blocked in the country since 2007.
“It took me about six weeks, but I managed to create a six-link proxy using a modified Linux version of Tor and the new Vidalia patch,” the 21-year-old native of Tsingtao said. “The ISP firewall kept detecting the proxy settings, but I finally dodged them with a combination of dynamic IP addresses and some packet encryption.”
Zhang was able to log on to Facebook at 4:15am Tuesday, and successfully registered his membership four hours later.
“My profile picture took some time, because the proxy server in Istanbul was getting a DOS attack from somewhere in Beijing. A government bot-net, I’m guessing.”
At China’s current Facebook growth of six members per year, total membership is expected to surpass the 119 members of the island nation of Vanuatu in 2014.
Zhang was unavailable for an update on Wednesday.
