For years, China's net censors turned a blind eye to a major loophole.
Anyone who wanted access to blocked overseas websites like Twitter, Facebook, and more recently, the New York Times, only needed to download foreign software called a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent the Great Firewall.
But in recent weeks, even these tools have begun to falter, frustrating tech-savvy Chinese and foreign businesspeople who now struggle to access Internet sites as innocuous as gmail.com and imdb.com.
The tightening appears to be part of a broader and continuing campaign by China to rein in the country's Internet, which has nearly 600 million users and challenges the government's monopoly on information.
State media have been running editorials regularly about the dangers of an unregulated Internet, citing an uptick in rumormongering and misinformation.
Read more: China closing Web loophole - latimes.com
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