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China Tells Carriers To Block Access to Personal VPNs By February (bloomberg.com)
China's government has told telecommunications carriers to block individuals' access to virtual private networks by Feb. 1, people familiar with the matter said, thereby shutting a major window to the global internet. From a report: Beijing has ordered state-run telecommunications firms, which include China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, to bar people from using VPNs, services that skirt censorship restrictions by routing web traffic abroad, the people said, asking not to be identified talking about private government directives. The clampdown will shutter one of the main ways in which people both local and foreign still manage to access the global, unfiltered web on a daily basis. China has one of the world's most restrictive internet regimes, tightly policed by a coterie of government regulators intent on suppressing dissent to preserve social stability. In keeping with President Xi Jinping's "cyber sovereignty" campaign, the government now appears to be cracking down on loopholes around the Great Firewall, a system that blocks information sources from Twitter and Facebook to news websites such as the New York Times and others.
How will business users be impacted, since they will typically need to use a VPN if working remotely?
At the same time I wonder how long it will be before the mouse works out how camouflage the VPN access? It really is a cat and mouse arms race.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Network engineer here. My theory is that any blocking attempt where the users seek to avoid being blocked is doomed to fail unless literally no traffic of any kind (even DNS etc.) is allowed through. This is because all serious network kit uses ASICs to achieve acceptable performance at the cost of flexibility, but all the endpoints are CPUs that are inherently flexible. If the users have an orchestration system that allows the developers to change the protocols as and when, and they play to the weaknesses of ASICS, the network vendors will never be able to keep up. Anytime you let any traffic through whatsoever between two parties you don't fully control, it's game over for your perimeter. Hurray!
The protocol is known at negotiation time and can be banned consequentially. This is a well known technique and available off the shelf.
Any Chinese person I know would scoff at that threat, only Americans are so dedicated to law and order. Breaking the law is a way of life in many places (and in some places in the US, ask any NYer).
Yes, it's still illegal and if they decide to come after you, you are totally in trouble, and this is a horrible oppressive regime we really ought to hate and stop doing business with. But the reason the regime stays in power, and the reason it has managed to become successful in spite of itself, is because it is impotent and corrupt in all the right places. If their government were to ever fix that, and effectively police itself, I imagine the people would revolt in mere days and they wouldn't need the "free" world to tell them anything.