China's Great Firewall inventor forced to use VPN live on stage to dodge his own creation

[steve2470]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/07/great_firewall_architect_forced_to_use_vpn/

The architect of China's Great Firewall was forced to use a VPN to bypass his own creation in a lecture this week on internet safety.

Fang Binxing was speaking at his old university, the Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang, China, when he attempted to access webpages hosted in South Korea as a way to illustrate a point about internet sovereignty.

The projected image from his laptop came up "Page not found" – a common occurrence for Chinese internet users who live behind the censorship apparatus built by Binxing and run by the Chinese government.

To the audience's amazement, Binxing then tried to bypass the firewall using a VPN installed on his computer – the same tool secretly installed by millions of Chinese to get around censorship efforts, but whose use is heavily frowned upon by officials.

[davidpdx]

1. There is a word for that

irony.

I worked in China a few years ago and it was a pain in the ass to use a VPN all the time. I was working on my dissertation then and had to have access to materials that were not Communist approved.

The hilarious thing is I'm thinking of going back there for two years (I live permanently in Korea) because I have a nice job offer. This time I'll be ready with a good VPN. I have to be out of my fucking mind.