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posted by martyb on Friday January 30 2015, @09:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the information-wants-to-be-free dept.

The Chinese are at it again. The New York Times is reporting on how the Chinese government is building the Great Firewall of China higher:

[E]arlier this week, after a number of V.P.N. companies, including StrongVPN and Golden Frog, complained that the Chinese government had disrupted their services with unprecedented sophistication, a senior official for the first time acknowledged its hand in the attacks and implicitly promised more of the same.

The move to disable some of the most widely used V.P.N.s has provoked a torrent of outrage among video artists, tech entrepreneurs and university professors who complain that in its quest for so-called “Internet sovereignty” — Beijing’s euphemism for online filtering — the Communist Party is stifling the innovation and productivity needed to revive the Chinese economy at a time of slowing growth.

“I need to stay tuned into the rest of the world,” said Henry Yang, 25, the international news editor of a state-owned media company who uses Facebook to follow broadcasters like Diane Sawyer, Ann Curry and Anderson Cooper. “I feel like we’re like frogs being slowly boiled in a pot.”

The importance (and foolishness) of this action is made clear in this paragraph:

“One unfortunate result of excessive control over email and Internet traffic is the slowing down of legitimate commerce, and that is not something in China’s best interest,” said James Zimmerman, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. “In order to attract and promote world-class commercial enterprises, the government needs to encourage the use of the Internet as a crucial medium for the sharing of information and ideas to promote economic growth and development.”

and this:

“It’s as if we’re shutting down half our brains,” said Chin-Chin Wu, an artist who spent almost a decade in Paris and who relies on the Internet to promote her work overseas. “I think that the day that information from the outside world becomes completely inaccessible in China, a lot of people will choose to leave.”

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @09:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @09:48AM (#139421)

    Facebooking? Blogging? Why not just make a selfie video of yourself autofellating?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @09:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @09:55PM (#139901)

      americans just pissy that they can't get in

      the Communist Party is stifling the innovation and productivity needed to revive the Chinese economy at a time of slowing growth

      bahahahaha! us media having a go at chinese economy... that's rich

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by lars on Friday January 30 2015, @10:00AM

    by lars (4376) on Friday January 30 2015, @10:00AM (#139425)

    VPN service is both a way to get around government spying, and a necessary tool for business. You cannot have it both ways, their government and ours will have to decide which is more important: Being able to spy on everyone, or having secure channels of communication for business. Sure they REALLY BADLY want to have that surveillance, but they are also beholden to business leaders.

    There are some potential ways out:
    1. A key that only the government holds to decrypt everything. I don't see this working since people don't trust the government enough for that, especially the Chinese government. There are also issues like the keys getting leaked, which could be used to decrypt all previous data someone has logged. One also wonders how governments would share keys for international data.
    2. There could maybe be some kind of "encryption licence," that only lets some people/businesses use it, and would at least let those monitoring know who is talking to who.

    Regardless, it seems that governments have overstepped in their targeting to such a degree that encryption may soon be the norm. Previously, using encryption called attention to one's self, now those with something to hide look just like everyone else. It seems security agencies have shot themselves in the foot.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Friday January 30 2015, @10:29AM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Friday January 30 2015, @10:29AM (#139430) Homepage

      There are also issues like the keys getting leaked, which could be used to decrypt all previous data someone has logged.

      A minor point, but (to my understanding, which may be incomplete) forward secrecy [wikipedia.org] protects against this.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk
    • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday January 30 2015, @02:04PM

      by isostatic (365) on Friday January 30 2015, @02:04PM (#139476) Journal

      From what I understand, they're leaving ipsec connections alone, so western businesses with offices in China are fine. Which makes sense. They aren't bothered about a texan oil main who's having a wank over wikipedia entries in his hotel room, and while corporate espionage is a nice-to-have, they can't alienate the companies too much.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @02:56PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @02:56PM (#139500)

        ipsec is insecure - they're probably just leaving it alone bc it's easily breakable

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 30 2015, @05:26PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 30 2015, @05:26PM (#139553) Journal

      Sure they REALLY BADLY want to have that surveillance, but they are also beholden to business leaders.

      Ever stop to think that maybe that existence of conflict of interest indicates that government is not beholden to business leaders?

    • (Score: 1) by TheRealMike on Friday January 30 2015, @06:58PM

      by TheRealMike (4989) on Friday January 30 2015, @06:58PM (#139593)

      People there could just disable the encryption on their VPNs, but that misses the point. These businesses and users are not encrypting their VPN traffic to stop the government spying on them, at least not directly. They're doing it to confuse and evade the blocking, allowing them to use the internet as the rest of the world does.

      Bear in mind that the internet we know and love is barely functional in China. They block, amongst other things, Google and various CDNs, which lots of websites import scripts and content from. Without being able to access Google nothing that relies on Analytics works properly, without being able to access the CDNs hosting jquery and so on, a lot of sites break, without being able to access Facebook any site that includes a Like button or uses Facebook authentication breaks, etc etc.

      The last time I was in Beijing was years ago, but even then, attempting to use the web as I do anywhere else was a hopeless waste of time. Nothing loaded properly. Now it's even worse.

      So VPNs are needed to make the internet work again. And they have to encrypt to do that because it forces the GFW to either let the traffic through or "cleanly" disconnect you and the GFW has historically had various thresholds in it to try and not entirely block all SSL websites but be more surgical, so this strategy has been able to slip through the cracks. Now it seems China is getting closer and closer to just banning all encrypted traffic in or out of the country, which in turn means basically banning access to the non-Chinese internet because companies like Google or Cloudflare aren't going to just stop using SSL to allow the Chinese government to be more surgical. They already got blocked there and don't care anymore.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @02:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @02:19AM (#139709)

      Your two potential ways out are non starters. The only way out is guns blazing

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @02:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @02:01PM (#139473)

    This post, and others like it, are essentially xenophobic posts made by frightened Americans.

    Why do you hate diversity?

    We should embrace the people and policies of our neighbors in the East. That will only improve our diversity.

    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday January 30 2015, @03:40PM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 30 2015, @03:40PM (#139515)

      Chin-Chin Wu and Henry Yang would disagree with you.

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @02:22AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @02:22AM (#139710)

      You hate freedom and you like to throw around big words you don't understand.

      Both China and the US are on the same page. NSA is targeting VPNs with XKeyscore and the FBI and others are trying to keep firms from offering decentralized encrypted services and phones.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @10:00PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @10:00PM (#139903)

        there's as much freedom in china than in america

        only difference is that china doesn't try to pretend their big government doesn't rule with an iron fist

        the american propaganda machine seems to be faltering though

  • (Score: 2) by Geezer on Friday January 30 2015, @03:13PM

    by Geezer (511) on Friday January 30 2015, @03:13PM (#139507)

    “I think that the day that information from the outside world becomes completely inaccessible in China, a lot of people will choose to leave.”

    Hell, move to the USA. Our privacy/censorship situation isn't much better, but we have tacos.

    It's easy, too. Not like we have any real borders or anything.