Popular Censorship Circumvention Tools Face Fresh Blockade By China (techcrunch.com) 9
Tools helping China's netizens to bypass the Great Firewall appear to be facing a fresh round of crackdowns in the run-up to the country's quinquennial party congress that will see a top leadership reshuffle. From a report: Greater censorship is not at all uncommon during countries' politically sensitive periods, but the stress facing censorship circumvention tools in China appears to be on a whole new level. "Starting from October 3, 2022 (Beijing Time), more than 100 users reported that at least one of their TLS-based censorship circumvention servers had been blocked," writes GFW Report, a censorship monitoring platform focused on China, in a GitHub post.
TLS, or transport layer security, is a ubiquitous internet security protocol used for encrypting data sent across the internet. Because data shared over a TLS connection is encrypted and cannot be easily read, many censorship circumvention apps and services use TLS to keep people's conversations private. A TLS-based virtual private network, or VPN, directs internet traffic through a TLS connection instead of pushing that traffic to one's internet provider. But Chinese censors seem to have found a way of compromising this strategy. "The blocking is done by blocking the specific port that the circumvention services listen on. When the user changes the blocked port to a non-blocked port and keeps using the circumvention tools, the entire IP address may get blocked," GFW Report says in the post.
TLS, or transport layer security, is a ubiquitous internet security protocol used for encrypting data sent across the internet. Because data shared over a TLS connection is encrypted and cannot be easily read, many censorship circumvention apps and services use TLS to keep people's conversations private. A TLS-based virtual private network, or VPN, directs internet traffic through a TLS connection instead of pushing that traffic to one's internet provider. But Chinese censors seem to have found a way of compromising this strategy. "The blocking is done by blocking the specific port that the circumvention services listen on. When the user changes the blocked port to a non-blocked port and keeps using the circumvention tools, the entire IP address may get blocked," GFW Report says in the post.
It is a game of cat and mouse.. (Score:3)
The tools get better->there is a crackdown->The tools get better->there is a crackdown and so on..
Re: (Score:3)
And the mice seem to be losing badly.
Perhaps this anecdote is relevant to the story? Recently got a new router. The vendor would only tell me that it was made in China, but now I'm pretty sure the actual maker is ZTE. At first everything seemed hunky dory, but as I started tightening up the security settings, it suddenly started acting funny with software that can be used for "censorship circumvention".
I'm not in China or trying to send "unauthorized" data to China, but I do know some Chinese people. Maybe
Re: (Score:3)
Can they just connect to Elon Musk Starlink internet and not worry China providers?
In theory, why not? However, (a) they have to buy a ground terminal and get it into the country, plus (b) they need to pay for the service. Neither of those things are easy to do from within China.
China is amazing, but... (Score:2)
What China has achieved economically over the past 50-60 years is nothing short of amazing. I doubt too many middle-class Chinese want to go back to the living standards of their grandparents.
That said, this success has always come at a cost of freedom. Poor rice farmers didn't miss freedoms they barely knew existed. As more and more people have achieved higher living standards and better educational levels, the lack of freedom becomes impossible to overlook. Then we have the political elite: nepotism, cr
Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Also?
You must be an optimist.
way to Chinia (Score:1)