Speculators assert Chinese government is monitoring traffic through VPN connections. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are a technology used by an increasing number of Chinese mainland people on a daily basis. Being an efficient tool to circumvent censorship, the government has done all it could to turn VPNs into a useless technology. According to Lokman Tsui - ex Googler at the Asia Pacific branch and Free Expression advocate - the Middle Kingdom has used software, hardware, laws and policies up to market incentives to practically cut VPNs traffic and, initially, this approach resulted in an effective crackdown. Nonetheless, few years later, developers managed to achieve the realisation of VPN technologies that censors’ system is not able to recognise as such. Andrew Staples of GoldenFrog, a VPNs service provider, stated that the Great Firewall of China has not given up in its quest of identifying VPNs protocols and it has put in place deep inspections of Internet traffic. Despite the constant technology improvements set up by both parties, rumours of Chinese government predominance are intensifying. Of course it’s just speculation, but in the opinion of And Tsui, professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the real strategy behind Chinese government approach doesn’t consist in achieving a perfect censorship, but it rather involves increasing the cost of bypassing the block in terms of technical efforts and money so to restrain infringers to a small number. gLAWcal Team LIBEAC project Tuesday, 18 November 2014 (Source: The Diplomat)