Talk:Ultrasurf

Need to revert?
An anonymous IP made changes on this page that is clearly advertising that Supreme surf is a good, trustworthy program, and totally left out the trojan problem.

devper94 (talk) 09:22, 29 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Sounds good to me. It might be best just to go back to the old version but also put back in the paragraph the IP added, which has a source (although I didn't actually look at the source). r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 19:06, 29 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I was the one who made the edits before. I use Ultrasurf to get around firewalls at work, and when I found this page—which was full of unsourced or poorly sourced accusations—I decided to do some research and fix it. I removed all the unsourced content; it was badly written and inconsistent with reports from credible sources like Harvard University and Freedom House. I added a summary of Harvard’s study on circumvention tools, and also pulled from a feature profile on the company that appeared in Wired magazine. Just now I build out more information, so that it doesn’t read so much like a promotional piece.

I suggest you not restore the old version of the page. It simply did not rely on reliable sources, or any sources. If anyone wants to debate the factual accuracy of things, then I hope they do so using good sources, not a French blog... Regarding the trojan stuff, I’ve run security checks on Ultrasurf, and have no problem. But I have reason to suspect that there are fake versions of the software circulating. A ‘who is‘ lookup reveals that http://www.ultrasurf.org/, for instance, is owned by someone in Mainland China, and it asks for personal information on people who try to download the software. It’s a phishing site. But it’s not run by the same people who run Ultrareach Internet Corp. Maybe these fake versions account for part of the problem. 206.136.32.214 (talk) 18:13, 31 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The software is detected by some AV programs as "potentially unwanted software". And I don't think Softonic should be considered a proper source.

"Some anti-virus products flag Ultrasurf as a possible trojan because it circumvents firewalls through an encrypted tunnel" Tor certainly didn't get any warning. Ultrasurf gets flagged because it uses EXE protection. And obviously Ultrasurf should not be used if you want anonymity, so I removed it from the article. devper94 (talk) 07:07, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Possible merge of Ultrareach and Ultrasurf articles
Also, I think we should merge this article and Ultrareach. The page is an orphan, and has very little content. devper94 (talk) 07:07, 2 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree. Jeff Ogden (talk) 05:31, 20 September 2011 (UTC)


 * ✅ I went ahead and did this. Jeff Ogden (talk) 04:08, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Is Ultrasurf malware or not?
I'd like to restart the discussion about Ultrasurf being or including malware, spyware, or trojan horses. Does it?

The sources cited in the article don't seem to be very authoritative. There is evidence that several antivirus programs flag Ultrasurf, but we don't really know why and there are suggestions that they see the program as one that tries to bypass filtering and blocking (which it is) and may flag it as malware for that reason and not because it contains spyware. It has been suggested that there is a rogue version of Ultrasurf out there that is causing problems and that www.ultrasurf.org (not to be confused with http://ultrasurf.us) is a phishing site. There are a number of articles in the mainstream press about Ultrasurf and they don't talk about malware. Ditto for some non-profit or university research organizations. In fact the articles seem to say quite positive things about Ultrasurf. And the charge that the U.S. government is funding malware seems particularly flimsy. We know that Untrasurf was partially funded by an agency of the U.S. government, but I've seen no evidence that that funding was for anything other than the development of an censorship circumvention program or system. Is there such evidence?

So how do we go about sorting this out? Are there any more definitive sources somewhere? It seems unfair to say that Ultrasurf is malware, if it isn't. On the other hand, it would be a shame to raise its viability without a strong warning, if it is in fact malware. Jeff Ogden (talk) 05:56, 20 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I don't really know enough about computers to answer this question, but I agree with your concerns somewhat. I know a few perfectly legitimate programs that my antivirus software regularly wants to "quarantine", so I don't know if being flagged by antivirus in of itself should be enough evidence to authoritatively call something malware. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 12:56, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

I think that the malware section should renamed and modified. Possibly, it should be called Technical Details or something like that and the potential antivirus issues included there. Here is a link to an article that talk about the false positives with anti-virus software. http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-anonymous-surfing-service.htm

Ultrasurf is also available on sites like softonic.com, which conduct their own reviews and virus scans: http://ultrasurf.en.softonic.com/

With regard to the reference of the 2009 "Is Ultrasurf a Trojan" article, it relies on Mcafee's flag of the software, but softonic and other sites include Mcafee in their scans, so it can't still be flagged that way. As for the reflects.info post, click the translate button at the top (if you don't speak French) and it is just speculation and conjecture. It doesn't discuss their research into the matter at all. Their conclusions stand in contrast to Harvard's Berkman Center and Wired magazine, which are far more reliable sources. Additionally, it is known that there are fake versions of Ultrasurf out there, like the download available at ultrasurf.org which is full of malware, but which is not the real product. It is possible that some of these bloggers came across one of these versions rather than downloading the legitimate product.

In short, I support including mention of the potential spyware alerts that one can get while using the software, but I do not think it should go further than that. The "Technical Details" section I propose could include not only this information, but also some of the explanation of how Ultrasurf works from the Wired article and potentially other things that I may come across. Is there any opposition to me taking this approach? The page is kind of light anyway. 206.136.32.225 (talk) 22:53, 21 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Sounds good to me. Jeff Ogden (talk) 03:48, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Censorship Program
The program itself blocks access to 4chan. How Ironic.

--85.220.21.15 (talk) 22:07, 19 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Actually, 4chan blocks some proxies, so you probably have it backwards. --Bobbozzo (talk) 07:40, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Dingledine/Applebaum criticism
Under Evaluation, it is stated that Ultrasurf leaves a trail to the user's IP address. The source for that statement additionally claims that the visited URL is traceable. See the video at about 46:00, where Applebaum says that the logs will show an URL sent to a script on an Ultrareach server, and "that URL is in fact a CGI on a server, it's being fed through Google, so Google gets a log of it, Bluecoat gets a log of it, the data that's there is encrypted with a static key that's encrypted in their binary, so you get some bootstrapping informatino. The thing is you can visit that URL, or at least at the time that we pulled this log … it pretends to be an RSS atom feed [where] they send the string PGP, but it's not as strong as PGP, so they attract the attention, but like a**holes they don't follow up".

I'm not knowledgeable enough on the subject to reformulate this to more lexiconlike language though. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kiwibird (talk • contribs) 10:15, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Expanded article
I went ahead and made changes to the article based on comments I had made previously (I was the IP user above). I proposed a number of changes before, but never acted on these proposals until I was reminded about this stuff earlier today. I’ll summarize here:

-      Based on previous discussions, it’s seems quite likely that the French blog cited in the article was describing a fake version of Ultrasurf, and the content of the article is highly speculative. The notion that the tool is malware, as suggested by some of these lesser sources, is also contradicted by findings from Harvard University’s Berkman Center, among others (even critics like Appelbaum don’t make that claim). It doesn’t seem like the kind of credible, peer-reviewed conclusions we should promote.

-      Instead of badly sourced critiques from a French blog, I expanded the section on ‘evaluation’ by drawing on a variety of other, quality sources. I also replaced the youtube video of Appelbaum’s presentation with a report that he published on the Tor blog yesterday. Appelbaum is certainly an expert in this field, but we might want to consider that Tor is a competitor of Ultrareach, and they apparently bidding for the same government contracts. I don’t know how Wikipedia normally handles sources like these where there is a potential conflict of interest. A lot of the critiques in the Appelbaum report are similar to criticism that has been published elsewhere, though, so I used that type of material, as well as other critiques to which Ultrasurf responded directly.

-      Regarding the Washington Post article that implies Ultrasurf promotes Falun Gung on its download page, I use Ultrareach, and I have never encountered anything like that. The actual line in the Post articles was “Falun Gong also put ads encouraging people to join the sect on its software download page.” What is the Falun Gong software download page? Is this something on a Falun gung website? It’s certainly not referring to the Ultrasurf download page, and doesn’t belong in this article. 64.134.66.145 (talk) 17:43, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Good work. I added a few explanations and things and added some of Ultrasurf's response to Tor. The Sound and the Fury (talk) 20:54, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Ultrasurf vs. UltraSurf and Ultrareach vs. UltraReach?
What is the correct way to capitalize the names Ultrasurf and Ultrareach? The article was recently changed to use UltraSurf and UltraReach. The ultrasurf.us website uses both versions for both names, but Ultrasurf seems to be much more commonly used. Use of Ultrareach vs. UltraReach on the website is mixed. Should we leave the article as it is now (UltraSurf and UltraReach)? If we end up sticking with UltraSurf, should we rename the article to match? --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 20:34, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Contradiction in article
The section Ultrasurf contradicts with Ultrasurf, since Evaluation says that pornographic sites are blocked but Inappropriate use gives pornography as an example. Can I remove this section? CubeBag (talk) 16:11, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I wrote that section (except for the last sentence). I can tell you from firsthand experience, I don't care what Evaluation says, my son used it to circumvent our hardware-based firewall to watch pornManicBean (talk) 16:35, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
 * We don't go by firsthand experience we need sources which back this kind of stuff up. Wikipedia wouldn't work if people edited on the basis of firsthand experiences, you have been here long enough to know this. Also just dissmissing what other things in the article are saying (or what other users are saying) because you dont like it is not how issues like this are debated. Find a source for this first and we ewill go from there. ( I have also notified you in case there is anything you want to chip in to this exchange. Flaughtin (talk) 20:50, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * We don't allow firsthand experience but the reference to which you refer is basically an advertising piece that says what Ultrareach CAN do, and with SOME sites. Just because my car speedometer says 140 doesn't mean it can go 140.  Some drugs can cause rectal bleeding but, then again, perhaps they won't. It is not a contradiction in the article, it's a warning about a possible consequence. You do a disservice to everyone when you say "firsthand experience not acceptable" when firsthand experience, provided as a warning and articulated as a possibility and not a given, is considered excludable content. This section and content needs to stay on this page.

Another view
There is a long NPR article (https://www.npr.org/2021/04/14/986982387/falun-gong-steve-bannon-and-the-trump-era-battle-over-internet-freedom), which gives a different perspective on this. Kdammers (talk) 03:46, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Bontuu abdala
fadilu 197.156.86.134 (talk) 16:10, 25 March 2023 (UTC)