Chinese man sent to jail for helping online users evade government blocks
A Chinese man has been sentenced to nine months in jail for helping people evade government controls on where they can go online.
According to court papers, Deng Jiewei was charged with illegally selling programs known as virtual private networks (VPNs).
VPNs let people avoid avoid government monitoring of what they are doing and are therefore prohibited.
The sentence is part of a larger crackdown on the use of VPNs in China.
In 2015, Deng began selling VPNs. A year later he was arrested for selling software which lets users "visit foreign websites that could not be accessed by a mainland IP address", the South China Morning Post said.
The Chinese government has a huge monitoring system, known as the "great firewall", to control what people do and say online. It also blocks access to sites such as Facebook and YouTube.
A VPN securely directs browsing traffic to off-shore servers so people can browse the web unimpeded.
Earlier this year, the government launched a campaign to stop people using VPNs.
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