The software was developed by Chinese dissidents as a means of allowing internet users to bypass the Great Firewall of China. It currently boasts as many as 11 million users worldwide. The tool has been lauded as "one of the most important free-speech tools on the Internet" by Wired, and as the "best performing" circumvention tool by Harvard University in a 2007 study; a 2011 study by Freedom House ranked it fourth. Critics in the open source community have expressed concern about the software's closed-source nature and alleged security through obscurity design; UltraReach says their security considerations mean they prefer third party expert review to open source review.
In 2002 UltraReach was founded by Chinese dissidents in Silicon Valley. Shortly after, UltraSurf was created to allow internet users in China to evade government censorship and monitoring. As of 2011 UltraSurf reported over eleven million users worldwide. During the Arab Spring, UltraReach recorded a 700 percent spike in traffic from Tunisia. Similar traffic spikes occur frequently during times of unrest in other regions, such as Tibet and Burma during the Saffron Revolution. Wired magazine in 2010 called UltraSurf "one of the most important free-speech tools on the Internet" for enabling citizens to access and share information from oppressed countries during times of humanitarian or human rights crises.
UltraSurf is funded, in part, through contracts with the U.S. government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which administers Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. As of 2012, UltraReach has had difficulty serving its growing user base due to insufficient funding.
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