Is anyone playing in China?

[mowz]

I am moving back soon to do some work over there and I was wondering if anyone is there playing online poker. I know that they don't take kindly to illegal gambling establishments there and I wondered if the situation was similar for playing online.

[signal]

I heard some months ago on an internet news site that the Chinese government performed some sort of "crackdown" against Internet gambling.

Ah, found something here and I don't think they like it .

[mowz]

Thanks for the quick reply! From reading through both articles though I think the same thing would happen if it took place in America. They seem to be going after big fish that are actually running internet gambling sites from within the country. It seems very similar to the US situation now in that it isn't strictly prohibited *yet*.

My favorite line though is "In the case of gambling, both gamblers and organizers definitely carried out their activities for financial gain, while relatives and friends just play for fun." Basically they are saying that if you are gambling for fun and not profit, you are fine. I thought the reason gambling is usually prohibited is because it is more fun than profit.

[cwes]

Let's consider the chinese internet access an 'untrusted network'. Let's consider your internet access at home a 'trusted network'.

Maybe you can set up a vpn tunnel out of the untrusted network to the trusted network and then route all internet traffic through the tunnel. That way they couldn't observer your internet traffic.

There might be other problems, though. It might be illegal to a) export encryption to China b) use encryption in China.

HTH

[mowz]

Does anyone know the legality of doing such a thing? It seems to me like it may attract more attention than merely playing poker would.