I usually keep up with what the Chinese are doing, but somehow missed the new laws China has enacted that will allow them to demand source code and encryption used to help a company protect its data. George Chen (see Foreign Policy Feb 2015) says they already have stopped the use of VPNs in China. Of course this is done in the name of counterterrorism.
You have to wonder why source code becomes a counter terror weapon all of a sudden, and why the Chinese have to ask a vendor for it when they have stolen so much of it already. Why any country would give up source code as a condition of operating in China is beyond me. Can the market be so tight that the proprietary protection of source code has to be given up to operate in a country that steals almost everything it can? We need more countries to say they aren't going to give up source code as a condition of operating there, and prohibit them from asking for it. They want reciprocity. Let them start there.
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