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China is reinforcing the Great Firewall with a 14-month crackdown on unauthorized VPNs:
Beijing has launched a 14-month nationwide campaign to crack down on unauthorised internet connections, including virtual private networks (VPN) services – a technology that allows users to bypass the country's infamous Great Firewall. A notice released by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Sunday said that all special cable and VPN services on the mainland needed to obtain prior government approval – a move making most VPN service providers in the country of 730 million internet users illegal. The "clean up" of the nation's internet connections would start immediately and run until March 31, 2018, the notice said.
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New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by jmorris on Monday January 23 2017, @10:33PM
And here we see the utter futility of obsessing overly over crypto, VPNs and TOR. If you can use them you probably didn't REALLY need them. Use enough crypto to keep your credit card getting ripped off, keep people out of yer porn stash, and perhaps keep the MPAA from nuking your internet account; anything else don't worry. So long as the paranoids can still use a VPN or TOR that is, when they ban them worry.
It is kinda like the protests this weekend. Oh my God, Hitler is reborn! We must resist! Sure sparky, you would be out there protesting if you actually thought that, if you thought he would really arrest everyone and send them to the camps... after first building some camps of course. Which is how I know things are just fine. When the protesters really ARE afraid is when I will worry.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday January 24 2017, @01:52AM
That statement is either incorrect or incoherent; I can't really decide which.
Much technical work has gone into making Tor and VPNs difficult to ban. Things like disguising the traffic as HTTPS, eliminating patterns that could be used as a signature, etc. China has been trying to play whack-a-mole with VPNs and Tor for a long time. They've been unable to win. I doubt their most recent crackdown will be any more successful. I hope not, because I definitely needed my personal VPN when I was in China to get a reasonable Internet experience there. China Internet without a VPN would have been quite frustrating.
So, is your claim that that technical work on masking VPNs and Tor was unnecessary (incorrect), that that technical work was futile (incorrect), or something else (incoherent)? Inquiring minds have a perverse curiosity to know.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday January 24 2017, @05:58AM
You can't see the contradiction there? Up to now China has been 'discouraging' penetrating the Great Firewall. Cat and mouse, measure and countermeasure are all find and dandy while they are playing or here in the U.S. where the authorities won't smash your computers and beat the shit out of you as a first warning. If they actually 'crack down' YOU might simply be expelled from the country or even overlooked since the Firewall isn't really aimed at you; they realize Westerners have to be able to securely communicate with their company abroad.
Now imagine what a 'crackdown' looks like for a Chinese national, when they play cat and mouse, every time the cat wins a few thousand mice get eaten. If they have really decided to enforce the Firewall they can, totalitarian countries aren't fun places to be a plucky dissident. And all the crypto in the world, all the disguising of traffic doesn't mean much when ONE failure means prison and rubber hose crypto to break up anything you were trying to do. It will be cold comfort to know that the 133t hackers will have a patch out for the latest method China is using to identify traffic in a day or two as they languish in a craphole prison. If your opponent controls all Internet access it isn't hard for them to conduct traffic analysis to find the few end points who are the likely VPN/TOR users and direct some human intelligence your way, a country like China doesn't need warrants or anything cumbersome like that. Remember, the NYT's Thomas L. Friedman adores that about China, the way they can 'get things done' without any pesky laws in the way.
So again, playing hide and seek with the authorities is a fun game only as long as the authorities aren't really serious. The second they get serious it is a ragtag band of misfits up against the resources of a nation state actor and the ending usually isn't the one in all of the movies.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday February 01 2017, @06:45AM
You have a really warped view of China. I've been there and am very close to someone who lives and is from there. China is /NOT/ North Korea,.
North Korea is serious, so North Korea doesn't even have a connection to the Internet except for party elites. North Korea cuts all their citizens off from the outside world, and their commerce, education, and pretty much everything else suffer greatly for it.
China's not like that at all. China has Internet connections to the outside. China's not in the same universe as North Korea. Chinese citizens aren't free -- they don't have freedom of speech, and they're not a democracy -- but they have more freedom than you think they do. Look up "Grass Mud Horse" and consider that thousands of people -- at a minimum -- tweeted and retweeted that on Weibo. This was a free speech protest, and people felt safe enough to do it on a China-based website where their real names were obvious or at least easily discoverable.
This "crackdown" is against companies, not individuals. Some VPN service providers in China will be forced to shut down, or be fined, and Chinese citizens will use foreign-based providers like most of them probably already do, and everything will stay basically how it is. Which is to say the government will be undemocratic, disrespectful of free speech, and very corrupt, but also not a living embodiment of 1984. That dishonor goes to North Korea and, fortunately, very few if any other places.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @03:34AM
If you can use them you probably didn't REALLY need them.
That's terrible advice. Every government on the planet is corrupt and authoritarian (though not all equally so) and people should try to protect themselves. Every government has different strategies to oppress its people; not all are as overt about it as China or North Korea. Attempting to protect yourself from mass surveillance is important, especially for whistleblowers, activists, journalists, etc. It's also important to provide cover for people who need encryption and anonymity more than you by using tools for those yourself.
You're delusional if you think governments like the US aren't oppressive. Just because they haven't gone after you personally doesn't mean they aren't harassing people who actually try to change the system.