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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @04:54PM
I wouldn't put it past TMB as a massive troll of the more liberal users here. The text is eventually processed to be displayed, and it is currently pure text on the page so it is still trivial to search for a specific phrase and no regex is needed. Since he has access to the codebase it should not be difficult for him to apply the filter after the post has been regularly processed.
Personally I think it may be time to work on decentralized models. I just took a look at the slashcode github repo and the last commit was from April, where is TMBs filter code? This site is running in "benevolent dictator" mode and I for one do not trust it. The anonymity protections are trivial and TMB even said it was possible for him to dig through the database and unmask IPs.