It’s pretty embarrassing to show that you can get around censorship that you helped build.

What's your most embarrassing memory on homecoming day to your alma mater? For Fang Binxing, his visit on Sunday was supposed to be a inspiration to China's future cybersecurity experts but it went, well, less than great.

homepage.hit.edu.cn

As "Father of China's Great Firewall," Fang is being ridiculed online after he reportedly tried and failed to bypass the blockade he built in front of a crowd on Sunday.

The 56-year-old was giving a speech titled "Defining Cyber Space Security" at the Harbin Institute of Technology in northeastern China, where he graduated as a Computer Science major. But when he went to open the link to a South Korean website to elaborate his point — that South Korea also adapts internet censorship — the projector showed that the website was blocked by the Great Firewall. In front of a sizeable crowd in the School of Computer Science, he had to using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), a common tool to get past the system he built himself, Hong Kong newspaper Mingpao reported. The paper also reported that the school canceled the scheduled session for questions.

tv.cntv.cn

A picture of the lecture has been circulated on Weibo, presumably taken by one of the students present, showing a page reading "The page can't be found" in Chinese on a projector screen, just below a red banner heralding the "Outstanding Alumnus"' speech.

However, the school decided to ignore the hiccup and published a wrap-up report on Tuesday congratulating Fang's "splendid" report which "won waves of clapping" and informed the students with "cutting-edge" knowledge about cybersecurity.

weibo.com

This is super ironic for many Chinese internet users, who have been using all sorts of paid or unpaid VPN services just to connect to Facebook, receive important emails on Gmail, or do academic research on Google, which are all blocked in China.

View Video ›

facebook.com

---

View Entire List ›