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China Cracks Down On International VPN Usage (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: China's government has announced a 14-month crackdown on the use of unauthorised Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), commonly used by visitors and native activists, amongst others, to communicate with the world beyond the Great Firewall of China. Sunday's announcement [Chinese] from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reiterated regulations first outlined in 2002, but which have since been subject to sparse, selective or lenient enforcement. The new announcement promises a 'clean up' regarding the VPN situation in China, beginning immediately and running until March of 2018.
When I used to go to China, I often found that access to sites I need to use to do my work were blocked in whole or in part. Without setting up a vpn, I can't do my work. And even then, it was always a cat and mouse game as the connections were randomly terminated.
So now I just avoid going there at all if I can help it.
Guess we'll have to switch to SSH and HTTPS tunnels
Yes, but you can't win that game.
If that would ever become popular, it too can be blocked. Also that is beyond the ability of the average person to do. If they "solve" the problem for 99.9% of the population, that's what matters.
The end game is bigger and bigger swaths of the open internet being blocked, until what's left is a white list of approved web destinations, with maybe some special exceptions being made for companies, exceptions not available to the average person.
The internet once held the promise of freedom for all. Now it holds the chains of oppression for all. With each passing year we have seen more and more control, monitoring, and lockdown, not just in China, but all over the world. Some of that was imposed externally, like from the Chinese government, and some we freely signed up for by re-centralizing the decentralized network handed to us by its creators. It is simply too succulent a target for those who would be your masters to ignore.
Governments want it for power over the population. Corporations want it so you are locked into their portals. People want it because in mass they are stupid and cheerfully walk into their own cages.
We are not winning the war on internet freedom. We are losing it, badly. It is more heavily censored, controlled, and monitored than at any time in its history, and that shows no signs of slowing down.
Captcha: prevails.
The quicker my generation dies, the better.
Dunno how you are, but I may be similar (late 57 here).
So yeah, most of our gen are technical ignoramuses, I'll agree with that. But I disagree it's any better among the younger folks, and in fact in some ways it's worse. Our generation built a free and open internet, on open standards and open protocols. You wanted to run your own IRC or XMPP server, go ahead. It was not a locked down internet. It took the younger set like Zuckerberg to destroy that ethos. And not just him, but masses of people have eschewed those open standards in favor of golden jails like Instagram and Facebook that facilitate centralized censorship and control.
In our generation there were two categories: technically literate people, and people who were not using technology so were not having adverse impact upon its evolution. In the current generation there are two categories: technically literate people, and people who are technically clueless but ARE having an adverse impact on its evolution. Sadly, in both generations the technically clueless outnumber the technically aware by magnitudes, but in our generation the clueless weren't changing the direction with their choices, since they weren't involved at all.