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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 19 2017, @11:28AM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 19 2017, @04:03PM (3 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday September 19 2017, @04:03PM (#570230)

    Is it really that far-fetched for yet another Executive Order in the wake of some inevitable crisis which demands that certain content on the Internet be blocked or filtered from equipment they control? Similar things have already occurred: Cogent Networks blocked access to The Pirate Bay earlier this year.

    Blocking TPB can be justified by claiming that the site only exists to support illegal activities (even though that isn't completely true, some torrents are perfectly legal like Linux ISOs). You can't really claim that about VPN use. And Executive Orders aren't sovereign; they can be challenged legally. The big thing to remember is that MANY large corporations rely on VPNs for their security; it's how employees away from corporate facilities do business-related work. One thing that US government simply *cannot* get away with is anything that all the corporations would be completely against.

    USians demanded that their elected representatives NOT bail the bankrupt bankers out by 300 to one. The "representatives" gave the banksters a blank check anyway, and while a bunch of self-proclaimed "Tea Party politicians" later got elected, they were all corrupt and nothing significant changed.

    Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. But what the voters wanted isn't really relevant; what did the *corporations* want? Well, they wanted blank checks, so that's what happened. What do the corporations want in regard to VPNs? They certainly don't want VPNs banned; that isn't going to help them in any way, and will actively hurt them.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @05:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @05:14PM (#570264)

    Blocking TPB can be justified by claiming that the site only exists to support illegal activities

    I don't think it can be justified at all, regardless of the arguments one uses. Where is the free speech in censorship?

    Also, the US has free speech zones, obscenity laws, FCC censorship, NSLs, and several other forms of government censorship that are all unconstitutional (no matter of what the courts say). Better than other countries? I would say so. But good? Not at all.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @11:58PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @11:58PM (#570439)

    Really starkly revealing that you're one of the 'nothing to fear, nothing to hide' crowd. I'm quite surprised to see that viewpoint promulgated here, given everything we know as fact about the .gov - not to mention large corporate players (or have I repeated myself?) - surveilling literally everything you do online.

    You absolutely can, should, and must assert that VPN use is not synonymous with illegal activity. It is synonymous with a desire for privacy, nothing more. That could represent piracy, or it could represent a desire not to be tracked. Or someone in witness protection. Perhaps a security researcher. The list goes on.

    Literally everyone should be using a VPN today, routinely. Just like literally everyone should be using Signal messaging, and HTTPS, routinely.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:30AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:30AM (#570479)

      HTTPS as traditionally implemented is completely broken. Rogue Certificate Authorities that issue wildcard certs to enable you to be transparently man-in-the-middled are commonplace, and even if you take the trouble to nuke all Chinese CAs, etc., you still have to deal with US National Security Letters. Firefox devs are also fouling their product by soon breaking their own browser by not allowing it to use HTTP anymore.

      The only real solution is a new technical one, and some details on work being done on it can be found at youbroketheinternet.org [youbroketheinternet.org].