The architect of China’s Great Firewall was made to make use of a VPN to avoid his own creation in a lecture on web security.

The proposed picture from his notebook came up “Page not found” – a common event for Chinese net users who reside behind the censorship equipment constructed by Binxing and run by the Chinese authorities.

To the crowd’s astonishment, Binxing subsequently attempted to circumvent the firewall using a VPN the same tool covertly installed by millions of Chinese to get around censorship attempts, but whose use is greatly frowned upon by officials.

As his compatriots looked on, Binxing subsequently had the frustrating experience of coping with a slow and shaky connection to the external world, together with the link falling over twice as he attempted to get Google and Facebook.

Finally, he continued with his discussion and resorted to using Baidu to snatch a screenshot of the Google homepage. However a planned question and answer session in the conclusion of the conversation was suddenly cancelled.

The troubles of Binxing were probably linked in an attempt to eliminate any reference of the Panama Documents leak story from this week to an expansion of the Great Firewall.