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from the what-about-the-ones-you-did-NOT-catch? dept.
Chinese authorities have detained a software developer for selling computer services that allow internet users to evade China's "Great Firewall," which blocks access to thousands of websites, from Facebook to Twitter to some news outlets, a media report said Monday.
The software developer, who is from the coastal province of Jiangsu, near Shanghai, was arrested in late August and held for three days for building a small business to sell virtual private networks, the Global Times newspaper reported, citing the official Xinhua news agency. VPNs create encrypted links between computers and allow Chinese web users to see blocked sites by hiding the address from government filters.
Subscribers paid 10 yuan, or about $1.50, for one month of the developer's service. Authorities also seized the developer's earnings, which totaled 1,080 yuan, or about $165.
Some internet businessmen have faced far harsher punishments: Earlier this year, a 26-year-old entrepreneur who sold VPN services in Dongguan, near Hong Kong, was sentenced to nine months in prison.
How far away from having this happen in the West are we, really?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 19 2017, @03:16PM (4 children)
Honestly, what did this guy expect? I could have told him right away that this was a stupid business plan. China obviously put the Great Firewall in place for a reason, and has banned VPNs for getting around it. Selling VPN service isn't anywhere near lucrative enough to justify the risks; he made out with a pathetic $165 (108 subscriber-months of service) for his trouble, and could very well spend time in prison like that other guy in TFS. And to my knowledge, VPN traffic is pretty hard to hide; it's hard to crack because of the encryption, so it keeps your actual data private, but it doesn't hide the fact that you're using it, so it's pretty easy for whoever's running the firewall to look for that traffic.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @03:25PM (1 child)
That makes me wonder: Are there any steganographic internet protocols? For example, you apparently just do an unencrypted video chat (video because it causes huge amounts of data where you could hide something), but covertly there's a TCP/IP tunnel hidden in the video streams?
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday September 19 2017, @05:30PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography#Network [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @07:55PM
maybe everyone is not a complete skank like you? maybe he did it to fight his evil government despite being surrounded by ungrateful suck ass whores like you?
insightful? you people are retarded.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:58PM
And what makes you think that reason was to stop every VPN connection? If it was, they would all be stopped. Like you said it's almost trivial to detect.
It's almost like they want to restrict access but not stop it completely. So why not sell a product if it's so obviously allowed/tolerated? Hundreds of other people do it. Literally millions of people use them.