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The Chinese are at it again. The New York Times is reporting on how the Chinese government is building the Great Firewall of China higher:
[E]arlier this week, after a number of V.P.N. companies, including StrongVPN and Golden Frog, complained that the Chinese government had disrupted their services with unprecedented sophistication, a senior official for the first time acknowledged its hand in the attacks and implicitly promised more of the same.
The move to disable some of the most widely used V.P.N.s has provoked a torrent of outrage among video artists, tech entrepreneurs and university professors who complain that in its quest for so-called “Internet sovereignty” — Beijing’s euphemism for online filtering — the Communist Party is stifling the innovation and productivity needed to revive the Chinese economy at a time of slowing growth.
“I need to stay tuned into the rest of the world,” said Henry Yang, 25, the international news editor of a state-owned media company who uses Facebook to follow broadcasters like Diane Sawyer, Ann Curry and Anderson Cooper. “I feel like we’re like frogs being slowly boiled in a pot.”
The importance (and foolishness) of this action is made clear in this paragraph:
“One unfortunate result of excessive control over email and Internet traffic is the slowing down of legitimate commerce, and that is not something in China’s best interest,” said James Zimmerman, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. “In order to attract and promote world-class commercial enterprises, the government needs to encourage the use of the Internet as a crucial medium for the sharing of information and ideas to promote economic growth and development.”
and this:
“It’s as if we’re shutting down half our brains,” said Chin-Chin Wu, an artist who spent almost a decade in Paris and who relies on the Internet to promote her work overseas. “I think that the day that information from the outside world becomes completely inaccessible in China, a lot of people will choose to leave.”
(Score: 1) by TheRealMike on Friday January 30 2015, @06:58PM
People there could just disable the encryption on their VPNs, but that misses the point. These businesses and users are not encrypting their VPN traffic to stop the government spying on them, at least not directly. They're doing it to confuse and evade the blocking, allowing them to use the internet as the rest of the world does.
Bear in mind that the internet we know and love is barely functional in China. They block, amongst other things, Google and various CDNs, which lots of websites import scripts and content from. Without being able to access Google nothing that relies on Analytics works properly, without being able to access the CDNs hosting jquery and so on, a lot of sites break, without being able to access Facebook any site that includes a Like button or uses Facebook authentication breaks, etc etc.
The last time I was in Beijing was years ago, but even then, attempting to use the web as I do anywhere else was a hopeless waste of time. Nothing loaded properly. Now it's even worse.
So VPNs are needed to make the internet work again. And they have to encrypt to do that because it forces the GFW to either let the traffic through or "cleanly" disconnect you and the GFW has historically had various thresholds in it to try and not entirely block all SSL websites but be more surgical, so this strategy has been able to slip through the cracks. Now it seems China is getting closer and closer to just banning all encrypted traffic in or out of the country, which in turn means basically banning access to the non-Chinese internet because companies like Google or Cloudflare aren't going to just stop using SSL to allow the Chinese government to be more surgical. They already got blocked there and don't care anymore.