Great Walls of Fire!

CHINA BANS UNAUTHORISED VPN SERVICES.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China recently announced that virtual private networks (VPNs) would hereby need to “obtain prior governmental approval” or be deemed illegal. VPNs provide invaluable access for many Chinese internet users to websites such as Google, The New York Times, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which lie beyond the country’s Great Firewall of censorship. According to the announcement in late January, the Chinese internet service showed “signs of disordered development that requires urgent regulation and governance”. It is unclear at time of writing just what an ‘authorised’ VPN service might look like...