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China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

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Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#4

many are using proxies instead in Hong Kong - like http://mediahint.com . Not sure about mainland. Any ideas what is used on the mainland?

expressvpn, astril, tian xing (local solution)

cant open this article without vpn, but seems bad.

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#6
> "No unauthorized use of VPNs through March 2018."

I was wondering, "what just happened internally in China that they want to censor for a year or so?" Then it dawned on me...they want to censor everything until the 2018 Winter Olympics is over with. I was wondering if Trump had tweeted, "free Tibet," or something like that.

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#8

Is something getting lost in translation or is this targeted at businesses and not individuals? (Still a big deal, but I thought VPNs were already banned?)

I'm not sure about their legality over the years, but I do know that they were in fact largely accessible and were and extremely important avenue for academic researchers to engage with the broader community. This ban will likely disproportionally effect China's elites, who have long used VPNs for many reasons unrelated to politics.

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#9
This seems more ominous to me than it normally would...

All this sort of thing worldwide makes me wonder why there isn't more of an exponential growth in movement to decentralized or federated platforms. It's definitely seen a lot of growth, but with concerns about centralized censorship and monitoring in various places, it seems like it should be getting more attention.

Maybe it's irrelevant in the case of China, or maybe it's a good place to use as a thought experiment because censorship strategies have been played out so thoroughly there.

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