Beijing spackles cracks in Great Firewall ahead of military parade

Beijing is cracking down on tools used to circumvent its Great Firewall internet filtration system, with virtual private network (VPN) service provider Astrill warning users that they may suffer outages between now and the upcoming military parade in the capital for the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, South China Morning Post reported. On Tuesday, US-based code repository GitHub said it experienced a distributed denial-of-service attack – in which a malicious party directs overwhelming traffic to disrupt a site – that caused global connectivity problems for several hours. Prior to the attack, two Chinese developers removed their anti-censorship apps from the service after alleged police pressure.