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Verso Trials Skype Blocking in China
An anonymous reader writes to tell us MacWorld is reporting that Verso, a US company based in Atlanta, GA, has just begun a paid trial for 'NetSpective'. Verso hopes to use NetSpective, and M-Class filter to block VoIP calls made using Skype in China. From the article: "While Verso said in its release that the use of Skype is illegal in China, the situation is more nuanced. Chinese government officials have been generally tolerant of VoIP software, such as Skype, that is used to make calls from one PC to another. But the ability of Skype users to make calls to a phone via the SkypeOut service is more sensitive, because this directly affects the revenue that operators such as China Telecom earn from international phone calls." This seems to be just another in the continuing campaign of China vs VoIP.
There is a Central American country that also has made VoIP illegal because of their interest in the state run/owned TelCo. I'm not certain if they have implemented anything other then laws around its use in country, but China is not the first to do this.
I wanna say the country is Panama, but I'm really not sure. Based on http://www.google.com.au/search?q=panama+voip+ille gal&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls =org.mozilla:en-US:official">Google it seems it's Costa Rica, but my point is there are probably a handful of countries doing this already. This by no means makes it ok, of course!
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
True, it is possible to evade most filtering systems. The basic proof-of-concept is an encrypted tunneling protocol, like OpenVPN, that can pass arbitrary IP traffic via UDP or TCP. You have to set up a remote server, outside of the filtered jurisdiction, to act as your gateway out, but it's not really that hard. It's similar to the idea of open proxies to get around the Great Firewall for web content, but it lets any layer 3 traffic pass (not just HTTP). In fact, OpenVPN even has a nifty method for encapsulating layer 2 (ethernet) inside of an encrypted UDP or TCP tunnel, so you can use non-routable protocols.
But most of these methods aren't commonly known to ordinary users, and they require some technical sophistication to set up. Then, you have the logistical difficulties of maintaining the remote servers and shuffling them around to avoid IP bans. A lone, tech savvy user can use these method for personal communications, or perhaps even support a small group of people, but stealing fire for the whole human race would require an active organization to keep things humming. At that point, you start to become a nice, fat target for the government to crack down on.
That's the problem with subversive activities: organizational capacity scales with org size, but so do the risks of operating.
Just because they called themselves neutral in the cold war, and didn't come hugging the US and their nukes, and dared criticise the US in Vietnam, doesn't mean they're communist.
A typical example of America's "Either you're with us, or against us"