China’s volunteer programmers work in the shadows to keep the internet free
Al Jazeera
Open-source platforms such as V2Ray are gaining popularity amid Beijing’s crackdown on commercial VPNs.
Taipei, Taiwan – Chinese programmer Chen earns his living working remotely for a Western tech company.
But in his free time, he answers to a higher calling: helping his fellow citizens jump the Great Firewall that blocks them from freely accessing China’s internet.
Chen is a volunteer “maintainer” who helps run V2Ray, one of a number of open-source virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxy servers that are gaining in popularity amid China’s crackdown on commercial VPNs, which are illegal to use without government authorisation.
Like commercial offerings such as ExpressVPN and NordVPN, V2Ray, whose original developer is unknown, allows users to avoid censors and mask their internet activity.
But unlike those platforms, free-to-use V2Ray requires some level of technical knowledge to set up and features a range of customisation options.
