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China Blocks WhatsApp (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: China has blocked WhatsApp, security experts confirmed today to The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled). Over the past few months, WhatsApp has experienced brief disruptions to service, with users unable to send video chats or photos. Now, even text messages are completely blocked, according to Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, a Paris-based research firm that also monitors digital censorship in China. Kobeissi found that China may have recently upgraded its firewall to detect and block the NoiseSocket protocol that WhatsApp uses to send texts, in addition to already blocking the HTTPS/TLS that WhatsApp uses to send photos and videos. He said, "I think it took time for the Chinese firewall to adapt to this new protocol so that it could also target text messages." His company noticed the app disruptions beginning last Wednesday.
I block China! So there! :-D
There is no alternative. Sure there may be some apps that they aren't blocking yet, but that's not truly a long term solution.
You can't solve an oppressive regime by building better encryption. If enough people are getting around the firewall the regime will just crack down on whatever method they're using. If there are too many methods, they might switch to a whitelist instead of a blacklist, or they could take the approach of some governments and just ban internet access altogether.
The government of a country has effectively unlimited resources when being compared to the individual citizens of that country. And if they don't have enough resources, they'll just take the resources they need from those same citizens.
When your government is working against you, there is no safe and sustainable way to work around them.
Actually, it has a lot more to do with government officials being enriched by local companies who want to compete with whatsapp. Pay off enough cronies and their service gets blocked. They've had the tech to block it for a while. This has happened time and again to popular non-Chinese internet services and applications. Why ascribe to "luddite" behavior what can more easily explained by plain old greed and corruption.
He has been suppressing all forms of criticism and descent, of which this is just a small part. He is aggressively using technology to control people. And they even recently released a document recently denouncing civil society and democratic values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The US fears them because the US owes China too much money. (Clinton talked about upsetting one's banker. Trump just doesn't know where China is.)
The Australians fear China because China owes Australia too much money. They are by far our largest trading partner.
The Europeans are incapable of any action at all without the US leading the way.
The North Korea crisis (I use the word carefully) is all about China. Yet nobody dares to say so. That could end very badly.
But the real fear is that China now has a large middle class. They cannot go back to the cultural revolution of th 1960s. When their economy stops growing at a fantastic rate (which it must) people will demand reform. Totalitarianism results in incompetence, nepotism and corruption. If Xi et. al. push back, there will eventually be trouble. Big trouble. By which time it will be too late for us to have any influence.
Incidentally, Chinese students are a major Australian export to China. But the Chinese recently warned that those undertaking an Australian education would become "incompatible with Chinese values". Chilling stuff.