A UPenn Student Started a YouTube Channel. Her Face Was Stolen in China; Business Insider, March 25, 2024

Matthew Loh , Business Insider; A UPenn Student Started a YouTube Channel. Her Face Was Stolen in China

How Apple and Amazon Are Aiding Chinese Censors; Slate, August 2, 2017

April Glaser, Slate; How Apple and Amazon Are Aiding Chinese Censors

"Over the weekend, Apple took a small step to help shore up the Great Firewall of China: It deleted more than 60 apps used to route around internet filters from its App Store in China.

The removed apps are virtual private networks, or VPNs, which are used to tunnel web traffic through another computer, often hosted in other countries. VPNs allow Chinese users to circumvent government censorship by essentially letting people use the internet as if they weren’t in China.

The move came after the Chinese government began enforcing a cybersecurity law that prohibits the use of unregistered VPN apps, Apple CEO Tim Cook said on a call with investors on Tuesday."

In Russia and China, Big Brother is watching you online; Washington Post, 7/8/16

Editorial Board, Washington Post; In Russia and China, Big Brother is watching you online:

"HARD TO believe, but a court in Perm, a Russian city near the Ural Mountains, recently convicted Vladimir Luzgin, 37, and fined him 200,000 rubles, or about $3,100, for posting a simple and true historical fact. Mr. Luzgin wrote on Vkontakte, a Russian social media platform like Facebook, that the Soviet Union collaborated with Nazi Germany to invade Poland in September 1939. He was prosecuted under a law signed by President Vladimir Putin in May 2014 against “rehabilitation of Nazism,” a law that declared its intent was to oppose glorification of Nazism but that human rights activists say was intended to discourage historical debate...

The Cyberspace Administration of China, a powerful censorship agency, took yet another step July 3 when it issued new rules to punish websites that publish unverified content, rumors, hearsay, conjecture and fake news. “Unverified” in this context means “unapproved,” and the real significance of the announcement is to warn websites that news is not what’s trending, but what the Communist Party bosses say it is, period.

Both Russia and China seek to tame the wild and free nature of the Internet, sharing a dangerous and illiberal vision that information should be a ward of the state."