

China Declares Skype Illegal - adeelarshad82
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374898,00.asp

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

~~~
Charuru
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.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
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.

------
swax
A lot of chinese outsourcing companies rely on skype.

~~~
prole
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.]

------
flashgordon
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"?

