Earlier this year, the Chinese authorities announced a ban on "unauthorized" VPN services, making it mandatory for companies to obtain an appropriate license from the authorities inward lodge to endure inward the country.
Citizens inward Cathay ordinarily brand purpose of VPN together with Proxy services to bypass the country's Great Firewall, too known every bit the Golden Shield project, which employs a diversity of tricks to censor the Internet inward the country.
The Great Firewall project already blocked access to to a greater extent than than 150 out of the world's 1,000 top websites, which includes Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Tumblr, together with The Pirate Bay inward the country.
VPN helps Chinese citizens encrypt their Internet traffic together with road it through a distant connector together with then that they tin shroud their identities together with place information spell accessing websites that are ordinarily restricted or censored past times the country.
So to tighten traveling pocket over the Internet, the Chinese authorities announced a 14-month "clean-up" drive inward January, which straightaway resulted inward the judgement of Wu Xiangyang, a Chinese citizen from the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, for offering a non-licensed VPN service from 2013 until this June that helped thousands of users illegally bypass Great Firewall.
Xiangyang was too fined 500,000 yuan ($76,000) past times the courtroom inward the southern share of Guangxi, according to an announcement from China's Procuratorate Daily on Wednesday.
The study too said he was convicted of collecting "illegal revenue" of 792,638 yuan ($120,500) from his unlicensed business.
Xiangyang marketed the VPN service on its website, pop shopping site Taobao (owned past times Alibaba) together with on social media sites. In March concluding year, his fellowship too claimed on Twitter to accept 8,000 foreigners together with 5,000 businesses using its VPN service to browse websites blocked inward China.
This wasn't the offset sentencing made inward Cathay for selling a VPN service without belongings a proper license. Another Chinese citizen, Deng Jiewei, was too sentenced to ix months inward prison theater together with fined 5,000 Chinese yuan this March for selling unauthorized VPNs on his website.
The Hacker News reported inward July that Apple too removed to a greater extent than or less of the popular VPN apps, including ExpressVPN together with Star VPN, from its official Chinese app store to comply amongst the authorities crackdown that volition stay inward house until March 31, 2018.
