Following pressure from Chinese police on Saturday, one of China’s great anti-censorship tools had to shut down.
The Great Firewall of China aims to block out websites that can pose any potential threat to the government (and its leaders). The Great Firewall scans the URL, the IP address and the page content every time a user in mainland China tries to access the web.
To beat the Great Firewall of China, the Chinese hackers created a powerful censorship-circumvention called Shadowsocks. Hundreds of thousands of people in China, used Shadowsocks as the foundation of several key pieces of software. It was was originally created by a programmer known as clowwindy.
“Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this,” clowwindy wrote this weekend on GitHub, where the project’s code is stored. “Today they asked me to delete all the code from GitHub. I have no choice but to obey.”
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