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Beijing appeared to have doubled down on its crackdown of the internet in China, with news emerging that over the weekend, Apple pulled several virtual private network (VPN) services from the local version of the App Store.

Multiple VPN service providers, affected by the decision, slammed the move online, calling it a "dangerous precedent" set by Apple, which governments in other countries may follow.

VPN service providers received notification from Apple on July 29 that their apps were removed from the China App Store for including "content that is illegal" in the mainland, according to a screenshot posted by ExpressVPN.

VPNs let users in China bypass the country's famous "Great Firewall" that heavily restricts internet access to foreign sites. It also allows for privacy by hiding browsing activities from internet service providers.

Manjunath Bhat, a research director at Gartner, told CNBC that a VPN could circumvent government censorship.

"VPN creates a private tunnel between you (the user) and the service you want to consume," Bhat said, explaining that such a connection escapes government censorship, hiding a user's true origin. It also encrypts communications so that users can be confident others aren't reading their information when connected to public internet services.

Data on GreatFire.org, a site that monitors censorship activity in the mainland, showed 167 of the top 1000 domains are blocked in China. Those include YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Instagram among others.

Golden Frog said its VyprVPN service is still accessible in China, despite the app's removal from the App Store. ExpressVPN said users can stay connected to the open internet with the company's apps for Windows, Mac, Android and other platforms.

Apple has recently stepped up business efforts in China. Earlier this month, the company announced the appointment of Isabel Ge Mahe in a new role of vice president and managing director of Greater China to provide leadership and coordination across Apple's China-based team. Apple is also setting up its first data center in the mainland by partnering with a local company, in order to comply with tougher cybersecurity laws in China.

In a blog post, ExpressVPN said it was "disappointed" with Apple's decision. It "represents the most drastic measure the Chinese government has taken to block the use of VPNs to date, and we are troubled to see Apple aiding China's censorship efforts," the post read.

Golden Frog also said in a blog post that it was "extremely disappointed" in Apple's decision. It added, "If Apple views accessibility as a human right, we would hope Apple will likewise recognize internet access as a human right (the UN has even ruled it as such) and would choose human rights over profits."

The move was also criticized by others, including U.S. whistle-blower Edward Snowden in a tweet.

"Earlier this year China's (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology) announced that all developers offering VPNs must obtain a license from the government," an Apple spokesperson told CNBC. "We have been required to remove some VPN apps in China that do not meet the new regulations. These apps remain available in all other markets where they do business."

Apple's decision to remove the apps comes at a time when businesses and individuals inside the mainland are finding it harder to connect to the so-called open internet outside China via VPN. A business executive told CNBC that connecting through VPN in cities like Hangzhou is becoming far more difficult, as compared to bigger places such as Beijing and Shanghai. People using an international SIM card or apps downloaded from App Stores outside China are still able to use VPNs on the mainland, according to the executive.

Some of the remaining VPN companies that have yet to face Beijing's crackdown could end up collaborating with the authorities, according to Martin Johnson (a pseudonym) from GreatFire.org. He told CNBC that some of those companies may hand over user data when requested and be allowed to operate without restrictions. "Those that protect their users security will be removed."

Johnson added, "Apple is now an integral part of China's censorship apparatus, helping the government expand it's control to a global scale."

To be sure, Apple's removal of those apps is not the first time Beijing's cyber regulators have gone after VPN providers. Recent reports said two popular providers GreenVPN and Haibei VPN stopped their services following a notice from the regulators. In fact, a number of VPN apps are still available on the local App Store as of Monday.

In January, the MIIT embarked on a 14-month campaign to "clean up" China's internet connections by March 31, 2018. In a notice, the ministry said that, while China's internet access service market is facing "a rare opportunity for development," there are also signs of "disorderly development" needing to be rectified.

Among other services, the move also affected VPNs: The Ministry said those connections cannot be created without the approval of the relevant telecommunications authorities.

State-owned news outlet Global Times reported that a spokesperson for MIIT said at a press conference last week that foreign companies or multinational corporations that need to use VPN for business purposes could rent special lines from telecom providers that legally provide such services.

Previously, the Ministry had denied a Bloomberg report that it ordered major telco operators China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom to block individuals' access to all VPNs by February 1, 2018.

Johnson said the authorities would "prefer to divide users such that businesses can continue to access the global internet, while ordinary users can only access the filtered internet."

"The Chinese government does not care at all about freedom of speech, but they do care very much about economic growth and China's economy continues to be very dependent on the outside world. Apple should use this leverage and stand up for the principle. Sadly they don't," he said.

CNBC's Barry Huang contributed to this report.

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Apple removes VPN apps in China as Beijing doubles down on censorship - CNBC

When Chinese social media users on microblog Weibo came across an almost illegible post earlier this month, many of them would have instantly recognized it as Martian, a coded language based on Chinese characters that was very popular many years ago.

It was a version of a post by a prominent retired sociologist and sex adviser, Li Yinhe, in which she called for the elimination of censorship in China. The original post went viral on Weibo, which is similar to Twitter and has some 340 million monthly active users. More than 60,000 users (link in Chinese) shared the postunsurprisingly, it was soon deleted.

Chinese internet users and media observers have noticed tightening online restrictions in recent months, as stricter internet rules for online journalism and a new cybersecurity law came into effect in June. This month, in the wake of the death of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in custody, pictures vanished from private conversations on messaging platform WeChat, and similar blocks were noticed on WhatsApp, the last product from Facebook available in the country, and hotels announced they were reconfiguring internet access to comply with Chinese law.

To navigate around restrictions, Chinese internet users have often engaged in linguistic acrobatics, from code words, slang, and coded images, to dipping into other languages. Recently, some have turned to Martian (huo xing wen), a linguistic invention from the early days of the Chinese-language internet that had fallen out of favor and now is resurfacing.

Martian dates back to at least 2004 but its origins are mysterious. Its use appears to have begun among young people in Taiwan for online chatting, and then it spread to the mainland. The characters randomly combine, split, and rebuild traditional Chinese characters, Japanese characters, pinyin, and sometimes English and kaomoji, a mixture of symbols that conveys an emotion (e.g. O(_)O: Happy). For example, the word (y g), which means one of or one thing is transformed into in Martian language. It replaces with the number in a circle and adds a small square to the left of the traditional version of .

A Weibo user who goes by the alias Tangnadeshuo, and is a Martian-language user, says its a marker for Chinese people born after 1990: We use it to make fun and sneer. Its a cultural symbol of the post-1990s [generation], he said.

Its not an easy language to masterthe same Chinese character can have more than one Martian counterpart.

Even so, Martian language fever swept across the strait as players chatted in popular online games like Audition Online (link in Chinese) and then flooded onto Tencent QQ, a widely-used instant messaging app at the time. Soon creative Chinese developed new Martian language input methods for keyboards. The language has online translation tools.

It was very popular back in my school days People used Martian language in their ID and profile descriptions on QQ, Lotus Ruan, a research fellow at University of Torontos Citizen Lab, which conducts research on censorship, told Quartz.

Though its hard to read, young Chinese adopted the language not only because it was new and cool but also because it was incomprehensible to parents and teachers. Parents in paternalistic China seldom regard teenagers messages and diaries as their private materials. But they werent familiar with the transformation rules of Martian (and some even worried that using Martian might affect other language skills). Gossiping in Martian prevented many moms (link in Chinese) from understanding childrens messages in QQ and prevented teachers from reading notes passed to classmates.

Although Martian language is not as popular now as it was five to 10 years ago, people will still resort to it from time to time to circumvent the censors, Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, told Quartz.

Internet censorship works by filtering information for sensitive keywords. Research by Citizen Labs Jason Q. Ng shows that a Weibo post will first be reviewed by a machine and flagged if it contains certain keywords that are blacklisted. Human censors also review published posts. Using Martian can prolong the longevity of a post. If the Martian language [versions] of certain keywords are not on the blacklist already, it can be used to bypass censorship until a human reviewer censors it, she said.

It isnt only the Chinese whove resorted to using workarounds derived from Martian, such 7-1, 5-1 to refer to the June 4 Tiananmen Square protests (the math in the workaround refers to the date 6/4). In 2014 when the British Embassy in China published a 2013 human rights report, it posted (link in Chinese) the title in Martian: 2013 was written as 2013MZ. The new titl breaks down the word (rights) into its two parts , replaces with its synonym , and changes (democracy) into the initials of its pinyin MZ.

In the face of renewed efforts to ban the use of individual VPNs and crack down on online video streaming services, Chinese netizens have become increasingly concerned about their ability to communicate online. Earlier this month, a Weibo user posted in Martian language (link in Chinese and Martian language): From today on, I will post on Weibo in Martian language. Because if I post in Chinese I will be gagged. Guys you can have a try.

After the sexologist Li Yinhes anti-censorship July 9 post in Chinese was deleted in Chinait can still be read outside Chinait was reposted several times in Martian. Several of those posts got deleted too, most likely by a human censor, but one still survives.

Ruan notes that just because a Martian term gets blocked on one platform doesnt mean it wont be useful on another. Internet users should also note that censorship in China is not monolithic, she said. If a Martian-language keyword is censored on Weibo it does not necessarily mean that it is censored on other platforms such as WeChat.

Still, as Chinas sensitive-terms blacklist gets refined, Martian language may become less helpful. Also Chinese Martian users trying to evade censorship shouldnt ignore the possibility that, like them, people working in internet censorship groups might once have been Martian-speaking teens too.

Excerpt from:
In China, internet censors are accidentally helping revive an invented Martian language - Quartz

Accordingly, the President has signed another law requiring that chat apps identify users through their phone numbers after January 1st, 2018. Some messaging clients already encourage you to attach an account to a phone number, but this makes it mandatory -- Facebook and others can't reject the idea if they're prefer to give you some kind of anonymity. The measure also demands that operators limit users' access if they're spreading illegal material.

The timing likely isn't coincidental. Russia is holding a presidential election in March, and banning technology like VPNs will make it harder for voters to see news that questions Putin's authority. Likewise, you may be less likely to organize a protest if you know that the police can trace anonymous chats back to you through your phone number. As with China's VPN crackdown, Russian officials are trying to control the online conversation at a crucial moment to make sure the powers that be go unchallenged.

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Russian censorship law bans proxies and VPNs - Engadget - Engadget

By Andre Damon 31 July 2017

Between April and June, Google completed a major revision of its search engine that sharply curtails public access to Internet web sites that operate independently of the corporate and state-controlled media. Since the implementation of the changes, many left wing, anti-war and progressive web sites have experienced a sharp fall in traffic generated by Google searches. The World Socialist Web Site has seen, within just one month, a 70 percent drop in traffic from Google.

In a blog post published on April 25, Ben Gomes, Googles chief search engineer, rolled out the new censorship program in a statement bearing the Orwellian title, Our latest quality improvements for search. This statement has been virtually buried by the corporate media. Neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal has reported the statement. The Washington Post limited its coverage of the statement to a single blog post.

Framed as a mere change to technical procedures, Gomess statement legitimizes Internet censorship as a necessary response to the phenomenon of fake news, where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.

The phenomenon of fake news is, itself, the principal fake news story of 2017. In its origins and propagation, it has all the well-known characteristics of what used to be called CIA misinformation campaigns, aimed at discrediting left-wing opponents of state and corporate interests.

Significantly, Gomes does not provide any clear definition, let alone concrete examples, of any of these loaded terms (fake news, blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive, and down right false information.)

The focus of Googles new censorship algorithm is political news and opinion sites that challenge official government and corporate narratives. Gomes writes: [I]ts become very apparent that a small set of queries in our daily traffic (around 0.25 percent), have been returning offensive or clearly misleading content, which is not what people are looking for.

Gomes revealed that Google has recruited some 10,000 evaluators to judge the quality of various web domains. The company has evaluatorsreal people who assess the quality of Googles search resultsgive us feedback on our experiments. The chief search engineer does not identify these evaluators nor explain the criteria that are used in their selection. However, using the latest developments in programming, Google can teach its search engines to think like the evaluators, i.e., translate their political preferences, prejudices, and dislikes into state and corporate sanctioned results.

Gomes asserts that these evaluators are to abide by the companys Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which provide more detailed examples of low-quality webpages for raters to appropriately flag, which can include misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories.

Once again, Gomes employs inflammatory rhetoric without explaining the objective basis upon which negative evaluations of web sites are based.

Using the input of these evaluators, Gomes declares that Google has improved our evaluation methods and made algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content. He again asserts, further down, Weve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content.

What this means, concretely, is that Google decides not only what political views it wants censored, but also what sites are to be favored.

Gomes is clearly in love with the term authoritative, and a study of the words meaning explains the nature of his verbal infatuation. A definition given by the Oxford English Dictionary for the word authoritative is: Proceeding from an official source and requiring compliance or obedience.

The April 25 statement indicates that the censorship protocols will become increasingly restrictive. Gomes states that Google is making good progress in making its search results more restrictive. But in order to have long-term and impactful changes, more structural changes in Search are needed.

One can assume that Mr. Gomes is a competent programmer and software engineer. But one has good reason to doubt that he has any particular knowledge of, let alone concern for, freedom of speech.

Gomess statement is Google-speak for saying that the company does not want people to access anything besides the official narrative, worked out by the government, intelligence agencies, the main capitalist political parties, and transmitted to the population by the corporate-controlled media.

In the course of becoming a massive multi-billion dollar corporate juggernaut, Google has developed politically insidious and dangerous ties to powerful and repressive state agencies. It maintains this relationship not only with the American state, but also with governments overseas. Just a few weeks before implementing its new algorithm, in early April, Gomes met with high-ranking German officials in Berlin to discuss the new censorship protocols.

Google the search engine is now a major force for the imposition of state censorship.

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Google's chief search engineer legitimizes new censorship algorithm - World Socialist Web Site

BEIJINGApple Inc. is removing software from its app store in China that allowed users to circumvent the countrys vast system of internet filters, according to makers of the apps.

Several popular apps giving users access to virtual private networks, or VPNs, that tunnel through Chinas sophisticated system of internet filters disappeared from the mainland China version of Apples App Store on Saturday.

One service, ExpressVPN, said in a blog post that Apple AAPL, +0.46% had notified it that its iOS app was removed from the Chinese App Store. ExpressVPN published a copy of the notice, which said the app included content that was illegal in China.

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Another company, Star VPN, said on its Twitter account that it had also received the notice. Searches in the China App store for a number of popular VPN apps turned up no results Saturday evening.

Were disappointed in this development, as it represents the most drastic measure the Chinese government has taken to block the use of VPNs to date, and we are troubled to see Apple aiding Chinas censorship efforts, the ExpressVPN blog post said.

An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com

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