Brille (Proxy Relay)

Most websites such as Google and ChatGPT are blocked by the GFW, so a proxy relay is essential for my family and friends to see the world clearer. The figure shows the configuration of my personal proxy relay. Accessing Google and ChatGPT from a PC within the GFW is disguised as accessing my personal blog OChicken.net via local port forwarding to V2Ray service. OChicken.net is not on the blacklist of GFW so the traffic (shown by the gray line) can pass through GFW and then arrive at Cloudflare CDN, which resolves the domain name OChicken.net to the IP address 134.xxx.xxx.xxx. After arriving at the proxy relay (the VPS hosting OChicken.net), the TLS traffic is decrypted by the Nginx service and then forwarded to the V2Ray service, which verifies the credential of the incoming traffic, and finally reaches the target servers.

In some sensitive periods, the GFW would block the IPs from the VPS service provider, so it's essential to use CDN service like Cloudflare to guarantee that the proxy relay (OChicken.net) is always accessible, as long as Cloudflare is not blocked by the GFW. The DNS task is done by Cloudflare so that it protects the real IP of the proxy relay from being attacked as well.

As a self-protection, ChatGPT blocks the IPs from VPS providers (including DigitalOcean) and only permits accesses from the native IPs, so that if visiting ChatGPT with a proxy, the webpage would show "access denied". To resolve this issue, the Cloudflare WARP service is used: the traffic to AI.com is firstly forwarded to port 40,000 (the WARP service) by claiming the V2Ray's routing rule, then reaches the Cloudflare edge node in the vicinity of VPS's geographic location, then finally arrives at ChatGPT's host. ChatGPT regards this traffic as an access from a native IP, so that my family can talk with it.

In Chinese, such a proxy relay is referred to "the ladder to bypass/cross GFW". However, I personally prefer the German word "Brille" ("glasses" in English) to refer to the proxy relay. Without the Brille, you cannot clearly see anything, and the proxy relay is exactly the Brille for you to see the world clearly. Compared to the "ladder", this word has a more neutral (and even more positive) meaning.