Haters are continuously mocking Fang Binxing after he was reportedly forced to bypass the censorship system, which he helped create during a public event. Interestingly, this happened during his lecture at the Harbin Institute of Technology in the mainland.
Known as “Father of China’s Great Firewall,” Fang tried to access a website hosted in South Korea while he was giving a lecture on internet security at Harbin Institute of technology. According to Hong Kong-based Ming Pao, there was a warning that appeared on the projector saying that the URL had been blocked when he typed in the address bar. To continue his speech, he then turned on a VPN in full view of the audience to access the website. Also, the scheduled Q&A session with the audience had been cancelled to avoid the embarrassment.
Though no reference of this news was found on the mainland, BBC says it was being widely shared on social media like Sina Weibo. People are mocking him for being so dedicated to his work that he didn’t even leave a backdoor for himself in the system.
Being a member of the Chinese Communist Party, Fang is well known for his leading role in China’s censorship system. In 1999, he joined China’s network emergency response technical team. Before that, he was a lecturer at Harbin Institute of Technology. He was in the leading position of the development of China’s controversial filtering and blocking system. This system is known as the Great Firewall of China, the technology responsible for blocking Facebook, Twitter.
No doubt that his contribution in Great Firewall has made him the hellhound among certain Chinese internet users. Hanjunyi, a Chinese blogger threw shoes at him in 2011 as a protest against online censorship. “His work made me spend unnecessary money to get access to the website that is supposed to be free,” said Hanjunyi during an interview with CNN.
China has tried to put an end to all VPN services people are using to dodge the firewall but has not succeeded yet. A Recent study shows, 29 percent of internet users in China used a VPN during the last three months of 2015.
