With this move, China will effectively choke off all VPN usage

China wants you to know it means business on its new censorship rules.

The government has told three telecommunications carriers to completely block users from accessing virtual private networks (VPN) by Feb. 1, 2018, according to a Bloomberg report.

This is huge. Many people in China rely on VPN providers to access information from dozens of popular websites that are blocked in the country. We're talking Google, Facebook and Twitter, to name a few, not to mention foreign news sites.

And although China has been talking about shutting down VPN providers for some time now, this latest announcement comes at the internet service provider (ISP) level, meaning users can't simply hop to another VPN provider if their favourite one gets shut down. Read more...