Last year, computer scientist Amir Houmansadr was writing a paper about the new version of TLS, the underlying encryption mechanism for HTTPS, which is used by the majority of websites to protect internet users’ data. Houmansadr, an associate professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, issued a sharp warning: be quick and quiet about the adoption of the newest encryption method or else censors in repressive countries across the world will start blocking it. If the new version was censored in some countries before it had the chance to become widely popular, he worried, there would be less incentive for websites to adopt it globally.
This July, his prediction became reality when China started doing just that. According to a joint report published by three groups that track Chinese censorship — iYouPort, the University of Maryland, and the Great Firewall Report — the Chinese government has started blocking HTTPS traffic that uses the most recent version of TLS, short
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