China Declares Skype Illegal | Hacker News Reader

China Declares Skype Illegal

pcmag.com

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

As captain obvious as this sounds, but Star Wars is a very pro American film espousing a very American point of view.

I hope this is true, but there are plenty of examples in history where it isn't.

For instance, pre-WWII Japan also blended rapid development with nationalism very effectively, and was very unlikely to internally liberalize.

Also look at Iraq (under Hussein) and Saudi Arabia, countries with incredibly harsh and restrictive laws, and by our standards terrible and evil governments... Yet they have little internal opposition, and their people like their governments, for some reason.

That seems like a very broad generalization. The Kurds and Shiites (especially in the southern marshes) did not like Hussein or his government. The Iraqi government under Hussein was certainly harsh in many ways but the society was relatively liberal and open (for the Middle East).

Saudi Arabia also has a large and restive Shia minority.

A lot of chinese outsourcing companies rely on skype.

Luckily for them, they might benefit from having a "business" Internet link as opposed to a "home" one.

Before going to China, I decided to set up a server I could securely tunnel my browsing through. There are many commercial VPN solutions, but I didn't want to pay, and the free options are the first to be blocked. (Though it is an arms-race, and those services are still often usable.)

While in China, the SSH tunnel worked well to provide access to blocked sites such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and (for some unfathomable reason at that time) Python.org. However, I began to notice that while in my apartment, the connection would periodically close. I thought it was due to high latency or some automatic timeout, but it happened consistently enough to be noteworthy.

I took my laptop into work (a building with offices, a private school, and a bank) and tried the same SSH command, and to my surprise, I couldn't reproduce the problem. Later, back at home, I re-ran the same SSH command and browsing habits and I was disconnected within 10 minutes or so.

While China wants to control people's access to information, the government also understands the need for businesses to function well. This is why I suspect that residential connections are more heavily monitored and filtered - even if it's all automatic.

After all, why would a model citizen require a persistent encrypted connection to a server in the US?

[Reminder: this is only one out of a possible billion-or-so anecdotes, so it might not be best to draw conclusions about ALL of China from it.]

If China "creates" its own skype and flogs it in the US, should the US block it? I know this would a very protectionist move but what is the way forward for foreign companies to be competitive in China when China's blocking of foreign services is accompanied by worries of "disrupting harmonious societies"?

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