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Chinese Man Jailed For Helping Net Users Evade State Blocks (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A Chinese man has been given a nine-month jail sentence for helping people evade government controls on where they can go online. Deng Jiewei, from Guangdong, was charged with illegally selling programs known as virtual private networks (VPNs), according to court papers. VPNs are illegal in China because they let people avoid government monitoring of what they are doing. The sentence is part of a larger crackdown on the use of VPNs in China. Deng started selling VPNs in late 2015 and was arrested in August 2016 for selling software which lets users "visit foreign websites that could not be accessed by a mainland IP address," reported the South China Morning Post. The Chinese government operates a massive monitoring system, known as the "great firewall," that watches what people do and say online. It also blocks access to sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, that are popular outside the country.
Blocking YouTube is a bit harsh, but I can understand blocking Facebook.
#DeleteFacebook
Wanna buy some VPNs?
It is imperative to keep a safe distance. Besides, VPN use is too easy to detect. We need to devote our efforts to a better alternative. And let's shitcan all the masturbatory arguments about whether we should. It's not a matter of "should". We must!
Oh wait... would it end up being as effed up as China?
Not much worst than the US jailing a person for not decrypting a harddrive. Innocent until proven guilty,
It's China
not the US
not Europe
not anywhere else but China
China is a nation-state that prefers to control what its citizens do - for whatever reasons.
China follows China laws, even if I don't agree with them.. which I don't.
What is the big surprise here?
From TFA:
"Multinational firms operating inside China were still allowed to keep using VPNs for staff accessing corporate resources."
After all, the sites visited could have been supportive of Trump.
Hell, maybe they even refrained from calling Trump a RAAAAACIST NAZI!!!!.
Can't have that, now can we? I mean, such unhinged right-wing speech is in fact violence, isn't it?
(You really believe "progressives" aren't that bad? Well, guess what? You're WRONG. "Progressives" are actually targeting Taylor Swift for not using her popularity to tell everyone how to "think" - better stated as "drink the progressive kool-aid" )
Why not find a robust technological method of ensuring that it's impossible to go against your wishes?
Requiem for the American Dream
FTLOG, put an expand/collapse link in your post. Usability 101 yo.
Requiem for the American Dream
while many see this as a freedom of speech issue (which it is), the larger issue here is the economic advantage that China is forcing by potentially cutting off large swaths of the US economy from the Chinese market to the advantage of locally-grown copycat companies. youtube & facebook, for example are $20+ billion/year businesses that see zero income from China. as more and more of the US (& western) economy moves online, China, with its firewall, gets to pick and choose which of those businesses it wants to allow access to its people, effectively circumventing WTO restrictions on tariffs and rendering trans-pacific trade agreements impotent.
Only if you spell it correctly first.
What's good for the goose....
Do as I say not as I do.
Turning away from the world is what caused you to be dominated by the Americans and British 150 years ago. Do you really want to go back to that world?
Apparently, the answer is Yes. Just remember, you did this.
All internet connections from China should be filtered so no one from the government or military can access any web site the people cannot access.
The Chicomm government is easily angered.
Corporatism != Free Market
I can understand blocking Facebook.
going against {...} freedom of speech?
The thing is, "freedom of speech" implies that there exist some actual speech to be protected.
I think to understand that the parent poster doesn't consider any of the garbage that usually happens on some social site to be any form of speech.
He probably thinks that nothing actually conveys information, most of it is click-baiting scams and ads anyway, and thus not worthy of "speech" status.
Therefore for once his views align with those of an authoritarian regime who does also inhibit "freedom of actual speech".
He would probably consider that facebook falls more into the "freedom to defecate in public" rather than "freedom of speech".
(But somehow this content problem is magically not affecting youtube).
Though I might understand why the "...and nothing of value was lost" stance regarding facebook, my personal opinion is that we should never block anything (because that could be supporting censorship), only educate the user to better understand the usefulness of various media.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Guy was seller obfuscated proxy called shadowsocks R (a fork of shadowsocks, both wrote by Chinese programmers and popular amongst Chinese netizens to get around great firewall of China)
Im using it now.