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China Detains Man for Selling Service to Evade Internet Firewall

posted by martyb on Tuesday September 19 2017, @11:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-the-ones-you-did-NOT-catch? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 19 2017, @11:50PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 19 2017, @11:50PM (#570435) Journal

    What was immediately necessary was preventing the money supply from collapsing. Making sure the banks had the cash to back peoples' deposits was the key mechanism for it. It was loaned to them, or provided in exchange for equity in the banks. To a substantial extent, much of this was repaid later and I keep hearing reports of the government actually making a profit on the deal, longterm.

    While I grant there is some truth to your first part, let's keep in mind the background to that alleged profit. It is alleged [washingtonpost.com] that the federal government made $15 billion on TARP by 2015. But it spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 trillion over the span of time between 2009 and 2015 inclusive. In addition, the Federal Reserve ran a multi-trillion dollar money printing operation. There was plenty of opportunity to run a shell game, particularly given the federal government's legendary shoddy accounting.

    My take is that the federal government turned a profit on TARP by loaning the banks and other businesses in question money at cheap rates to pay off the TARP loans. It's book cooking at its finest.