Kuniao Browser

» see ie.kuniao.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Every circumvention tool built in China before this one was built to hide. Kuniao did the opposite. It had a website, a mascot owl, a WeChat account and a marketing line calling itself the first legal way for mainland users to reach popular foreign sites. You downloaded a 53 MB installer from ie.kuniao.com, and on the other side were Google, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia, sites that had been walled off from that network for years.

Getting in took a mobile number and an invitation code from somebody already inside, which is not how a normal browser is distributed and is exactly how a controlled trial is run. The proxy sat on Tencent Cloud infrastructure in Hong Kong. Nobody outside the company ever established whether it was real circumvention or a set of IP addresses that the filtering system had simply been told to let through, and that ambiguity was the most interesting thing about it.

What it definitely was not was open. Google worked, but Google searches for June the Fourth, Falun Gong or Xi Jinping came back empty. A law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong put it plainly to the South China Morning Post: users who thought they were getting past the Great Firewall were being handed a smaller one of their own. Turkey has had its own blocks, YouTube for over two years from 2008 and Wikipedia from 2017, and I lived through both of those the way everybody here did, by changing DNS servers and then by paying for a VPN. What we never got was the Chinese version of the idea, a filter you were officially permitted to install.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

It surfaced in the middle of november 2019 and the foreign press found it almost immediately. China Digital Times wrote it up on the 14th. The SCMP ran its explainer on the 15th. The security community opened a thread on it the same day, pulled the installer apart, noted that the binary had been compiled on 27 october, and asked the question that hung over the whole product: whether a browser this loudly advertised was a way out or a way to watch people who wanted one.

That suspicion was reasonable. A tool that requires your phone number, hands out access by invitation, and filters the results it returns is a tool that knows who used it and what they looked for. Chinese users had spent a decade buying VPNs from sellers who took cash and asked nothing. Kuniao asked for everything and offered a curated internet in exchange.

~ the day it died ~

On 15 november 2019 it stopped reaching anything. Within days the download page could not be opened from the mainland, and the official Weibo and WeChat accounts were gone, replaced by a notice saying the account was no longer available after user complaints and a platform review, amid suspicion that it had violated relevant laws and regulations. The Cyberspace Administration did not comment. The company did not comment either.

Nobody has ever published the real story of who authorized it and who then decided against it. The likeliest reading is boring and institutional: something was approved at one level, drew far more attention than anyone expected once the foreign press picked it up, and was withdrawn at a higher one.

~ what got buried with it ~

The Internet Archive holds exactly one day of ie.kuniao.com, 14 november 2019, and a copy of version 10.8.1000.11 of the installer. That is the whole surviving estate of a product that was, for about a week, the only officially sanctioned window out of the largest censored network on earth. The owl from the homepage is on this page because it is one of the few pieces of Kuniao that anybody thought to save.

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