China's Great Firewall inventor forced to use VPN live on stage to dodge his own creation

Making the Great Firewall unpopular

Put mentions of Free Tibet, Fanlun Gong, Tianamen Square and the Panama papers _everywhere_

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The censors are here as well!

Demonstration successful then

He wanted to demonstrate 'internet sovereignty' and that's what he did.

Surely no-one imagined that he was seriously trying to show students how to break out of his firewall?

Reminds me

of the GDR in its later years:

"To the audience's amazement, Binxing then tried to bypass the firewall using a VPN installed on his computer – the same tool secretly installed by millions of Chinese to get around censorship efforts, but whose use is heavily frowned upon by officials."

Everybody* was watching West German TV in the evening to know what's going on and read the Neues Deutschland in the morning to check what was the current official party line. Leading to something best described as a controlled state of paranoid schizophrenia. People would stay on message during "official" conversations and talk more or less freely amongst people they trusted**.

*Except in the Dresden area. Hence the rest of the GDR called Dresden "The Valley of the Clueless". They were somewhat topographically challenged - the usual extra aerial plus amplifier wouldn't work, you'd have needed a full blown radio tower, which would have been a bit of a giveaway. As long as you kept quite about it, the state would look the other way, in the later years at least.

**Tricky bit, that one. When the files the MfS hadn't had time to shred surfaced, a lot of people were in for a very nasty surprise indeed.

Nevermind Google, keep an eye on FaceSpook

I'm more concerned that FaceSpook* seems to be taking an active role in manipulating story visibility. Many posts by my friends, a pretty progressive bunch, are pruned from view even when I specifically go to 'friends only' news feed and set it to sort chronologically. Similar story with pages and groups. This is the reason behind forcing all users to see what their flaky algorithms decide they should see, which includes significant amounts of advertising, and to hell with any preference the user has expressed. Then there was the crippling of the photo sharing feature (forcing handsets to download the jpeg then re-upload it with a post) when the Arab Spring was kicking off.

Seems to me FB is often effectively (deliberately?) a man-in-the-middle attack on people's everyday interaction and communication.

Their advertising algos need some tweaking too. No matter how many times FB put that grinning tory twat Goldsmith (for Mayor of London) next to promises to do the polar opposite of everything his lower-than-vermin party stand for, it will not influence me in any way. My membership of groups and pages with the strings "labour" and "green" and "corbyn" in their names should be enough of a clue. Anyone who wants to copy-paste The Sun Says at me will be ignored/mocked, depending on the effort made.

Pro tip: the 'FB Purity' browser extension is essential, even for casual users; FB is quite intolerable without it.

*Oh, feeling smug because you don't use it? Clever you, have a cookie. The fact remains it is a communications and news channel for millions.

Posting anon just because.

oh what an irony that he has to use a VPN for China