Fang Binxing de-fanged by his own creation
The bloke who invented China’s internet censorship infrastructure, known as the Great Firewall of China, was blocked when he tried to get around his own creation.
Fang Binxing was attempting to display a South Korean website during a talk at the Harbin Institute of Technology in the Heilongjiang province of China.His intention was to show the throng how South Korea was trying to copy China’s glorious firewall technology. However the Chinese authorities had already decided to block the Korean site hosting the story.
So Fang did what everyone in China does when they are faced by silly censorship, he accessed the site through a VPN. He did this in front of all the lecture attendees.Using VPNs in China is common but frowned upon and needless to say Fang’s audience was not impressed.
Ming Pao, the Hong Kong-based newspaper, said that the university terminated a planned discussion session after Fang was criticised within the lecture and later resoundingly mocked online for having to circumvent his own creation, labelling it as an embarrassing display of the Chinese mainland’s censorship regime.
