Related Articles
Last month, a non-binding resolution was made by the UN Human Rights Council condemning the disruption of citizen’s internet by governments, which they do intentionally.
China currently stands as the worst country on the planet earth when it comes to Internet freedom according to one report that was done in 2015 by the Freedom House. It comes as no surprise therefore that the country was one of the member nations which was opposing the UNHRC resolution.
The Chinese government has tried vainly in the past few years to restore back their authority on the Internet as more and more users are shifting to using Virtual Private Networks to circumvent the Great Firewall of China.
The use of VPNs sprung up, and it has inspired more and more people to get back control of the Internet through the services. The Chinese government has also made efforts to block and ban some VPN services, but new ones keep on coming up every day. Surprising enough, some of the party members have also been seen using the service to browse freely on the Internet though they were the ones instrumental in creating the Firewall.
This is where GreatFire.org comes in. The organization launched a new Circumvention Central, which is a real-time database which holds information on the usability of the VPN services that are available in China. In a blog post, they explained what they aim to achieve with the new database.
In the blog post, they wrote that their first aim with the database was to help develop and grow the number of people in the country who were able to circumvent the Internet censorship. Through the tool sharing methods they will employ, they want to show the wider audience which tools to use.
Their second aim was to help and improve the circumvention experience for the Chinese people as they brought in better tool performance. These tools would be measured based on the speed and their stability. The group also said that they were inviting developers who wanted to help in the process and who wanted to provide feedback on the testing process.
The third aim of the group is to help any of the developers they engage into business with so that they could help make products for the Chinese people even better. As many tools as will be able to work, the harder it would be for the Chinese government to crackdown on it.
The group ends by saying that since the Chinese government had increased their crackdown on circumvention tools, they were fighting on through the use of CC. They were also encouraging users and customers to share information on the best tools that worked.
