As is known to all, the serious network blockade and censorship in Mainland China (namely the GFW founded in 1998) has given rise to numerous excellent proxy software from China, including but not limited to: Freegate, UltraSurf, SoftEther VPN, GoAgent, Shadowsocks, cow, Lantern, and more. Among them, Shadowsocks (AKA: 影梭) is a free, open-source, cross-platform, encrypted, and secure small proxy project from China. It uses the SOCKS5 proxy protocol (similar to SSH tunnel), and runs very, very fast. In China and many other countries, it's widely used to break through the GFW-like Internet blockade and censorship and access the disturbed, blocked, or shielded web sites and web services around the world, such as Google, YouTube, FaceBook/Twitter, and more.