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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.
Guess we'll have to switch to SSH and HTTPS tunnels instead of brazenly using IPSec and OpenVPN. Got the message loud and clear. :D
Yep, get used to it. Because there isn't anything you can do about it. Sure the 0.0001% may be free to use what they want, (That 0.0001% being the people who can mess with ASM, and do hardware glitching to meet their own ends.) but the vast 99.9998% of people just made a new master for them to bow down to. Even better is what happens when we get hard AI that will ensure continuous monitoring and oppression.
So why the grim future? Well because as history shows, people don't give a fuck about something until it bites them hard enough in the ass, and by then it takes a monumental effort to even try to correct the problem. Sadly, that "we don't give a fuck" attitude may very well usher in a new dark ages this time.
You won't get people to care before then. They want it to be cheap, easy to use and forget about, and not to need to use that 10lbs of dead weight that they keep in their skulls while messing with it. That combination (Ignorance, Arrogance, and Apthy) will always result in being taken advantage of, being coerced, and being used. People just don't look out for their own safety when using the damn things. So they are blind and death to attempts to protect them as well as attempts to do them harm.
We have no-one to blame but ourselves. We allowed them to use the things without a care in the world. We allowed them to goof off and not learn how to do basic maintenance, or even basic concepts. We gave them the fish instead of teaching them how to fish. Now we have no choice. Now we must bear the consequences of our actions and our inaction.