Daily Archives: January 23, 2015

Youth Congress protests against internet censorship outside Ravi Shankar Prasad #39;s residence
Members of Youth Congress held a protest against censorship in internet outside Union Minister for Communications Information Ravi Shankar Prasad #39;s residence.

By: Zee News

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Youth Congress protests against internet censorship outside Ravi Shankar Prasad's residence - Video

Internet users in China who use virtual private networks (VPNs) to circumvent the country's Internet censorship system, known as the Great Firewall, found the services blocked or only intermittently available Friday, in what analysts see as part of an increasingly vigorous online censorship campaign in the country.

Users of many VPN services in the country reported difficulty accessing the services Friday. The popular service Golden Frog posted an update on its blog confirming that users were experiencing problems.

China blocks a large number of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, and those that the authorities deem to contain politically sensitive material, such as information about the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings, or unflattering news stories about Chinese government figures. The websites of several Western news outlets, including the New York Times and BBC have also been blocked at times.

The blocking of these sites, however, has often been more symbolic than effective. Many Chinese Internet users simply accepted the restrictions as a fact of life and used widely-available VPN technology to circumvent them.

We have seen increased web censorship over the past year and I think drawing a correlation to the disruption of consumer-facing VPN services is not a stretch, Charlie Smith of Greatfire.org, which monitors censorship in China, told the Financial Times.

The wave of increased Internet censorship includes the blocking of Google's Gmail service in December 2014. One U.S.-based expert linked the Internet crackdown to the anti-corruption drive that President Xi Jinping has launched since taking power.

"We all know that China is in the middle of a very ferocious power struggle or political cleansing under the name of an anti-corruption campaign," Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor with University of California, Berkeley's School of Information, told The Associated Press. "That to me is a very clearly related fact with the amount of political rumors and information related to China's high politics showing up in websites outside of China."

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China Blocks Many Virtual Private Networks, Used To Skirt Internet Censorship, In New Crackdown

China is clamping down on unrestricted access to the Internet by blocking services that allow users to get around government censorship.

Several foreign-based operators of virtual private network (VPN) services said Friday that access to their services in China had been disrupted as a result of the crackdown and users are facing a harder time getting to some foreign websites.

Virtual private networks work by establishing an encrypted pipe between a computer or smartphone and a server in a foreign country. All communications are sent inside the pipe, effectively shielding Internet traffic from government filters that determine whether a site can be accessed. VPNs are used by Chinese citizens to get to external news sources and by resident foreigners and businesses for day-to-day communications.

StrongVPN, a commercial provider that operates a network of servers around the world, said users in China had recently begun experiencing connection problems to some of its sites. Comments alongside a company blog post indicate the list of sites affected is changing and sites that might work one day are failing the following day.

Another VPN provider, Golden Frog, told customers they might have more success connecting to services in Hong Kong or The Netherlands than those in the United States or Australia.

The problems have been caused by an upgrade to Chinas censorship system, reported the English-language Global Times newspaper. The state-run paper quoted unnamed Chinese analysts as urging Internet users to abide by the governments Internet censorship system for safety.

China has over 600 million Internet users and all of them are governed by the Great Firewallan elaborate censorship system that proscribes certain topics from domestic websites and filters out overseas sites carrying reports the Chinese government doesnt want its citizens to read.

The list of blocked sites changes all the time but includes major news sites such as the BBC, social media sites including Twitter and Facebook, and sites such as WordPress, Google Maps and Bing. Recently, access to Gmail was also blockedsomething that brought a lot of inconvenience to foreigners living in the country and caused many to increase their reliance on VPNs.

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China tightens Internet control by blocking VPN services