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China Is Knocking Out VPN Access Before Its WW2 Parade

The Great Firewall strikes again.
Image: Wikipedia

Prior to a military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of World War II in Beijing, China appears to be disrupting access to virtual private network (VPN) services. VPNs are used to reroute connections through uncensored networks, giving Chinese users a way around their government's Great Firewall.

The South China Morning Post reported that Chinese users of VPN provider Astrill started sending messages about disrupted service this Tuesday. Users started reporting unreliable connections, and Astrill said that users may experience disrupted service between now and the parade on September 3.

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"Due to upcoming Beijing's military parade next week, China is cracking down on IPSec VPNs using Great Firewall auto-learning technique," read a message Astrill sent to its users.

This also isn't the first time Astrill in particular has been the target of China's anti-censorship authorities.

China may also be linked

to the recent denial of service attacks launched on Github, which hosted a number of Chinese anti-censorship apps.

Chinese authorities shut down

one developer for authoring an anti-censorship tool that became the foundation for several anti-censorship apps that the

Daily Dot

says is used by hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens.