Circumventing China's Firewall Is About to Get Harder

Traveling to Mainland china and hoping to use a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent the Great Firewall? New rules from the Chinese Net Assistants are about to brand that a lot harder, the South China Morning Post reported this week.

SecurityWatch All VPN services in mainland People's republic of china now need permission from the government to operate legally, according to the Post. Since the government is unlikely to approve VPNs that let unfiltered Internet access, the decision is a fourth dimension of reckoning for VPN companies based in Mainland china, which must now cake sites or be shut down.

The new VPN rule is a companion to a broader series of online censorship measures that the Cyberspace Administration announced last calendar week. They include requiring whatsoever company with a Web presence in China to register a ".cn" domain name. According to security visitor Golden Frog, the registration requirement ways that even if a VPN found a way to circumvent the new rules, its customers notwithstanding wouldn't be able to access blacklisted sites.

"The electric current method being used to block websites is blacklisting, or blocking and filtering of sites deemed unfit by the Chinese government," Golden Frog said in a blogpost last week. "If this new domain registration arroyo is implemented, even so, it means that a VPN would be useless—the website content wouldn't be allowed/be in Mainland china to brainstorm with, so circumventing a block wouldn't enable users to access it."

Such a crackdown is unsurprising, since getting effectually the firewall has historically been fairly easy. Many Western companies in Mainland china, including luxury hotels—have offered unrestricted Cyberspace access to their employees and guests via VPNs. There are also many consumer VPN providers that optimise their products for the Chinese firewall, including Golden Frog'southward Vypr. A representative from the company told the Mail that it is "currently working on ways around" the crackdown.

Of the top i,000 websites as measured on Alexa, 171 are currently blocked in China, co-ordinate to GreatFire.org. They include Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.