I have been enjoying (from a safe distance) the spectacle of Freedur these days. Very interesting, and I am just glad I have not given any private information to that particular organization. Otherwise, this would not be such a light post.
Today the status has not changed, at least from where I sit: Going to the site from within China gets one nowhere, but going through a proxy gets you the position of the earlier-maligned Chris Mathews. The magic of dns is indeed confounding.
The assertions about corporate ownership status intrigued me, so I decided to look around. These things are all freely available, you know.
First of all, the claimed company Stackfile in California exists, but is suspended at present:
[singlepic id=75 w=340 h=260 float=center]
And Freedur was registered as a fictitious business name in April this year:
[singlepic id=74 w=340 h=260 float=center]
The document numbers match up, so that could be a real document scan there on the site, but I do marvel at the lack of a date anywhere on it. State law requires that within 30 days the registrant must publish a statement in a newspaper of general circulation in the county in which the principal place of business is located once a week for four successive weeks, and Mr. Mathews could point to evidence of that requirement being met as further proof of his ownership.
There also will likely be business contracts coming out too, as this continues.
So, I will let everyone judge for themselves, with the comment that software development projects don’t usually go from development to sales within two months. I can only assume this app was not completely created and rolled out within that time frame.
In any event, I would caution that a lot of data goes through your proxy, and you should be concerned about who has access to this data, just as you would for your credit card information.
Regardless of who is telling the truth here, and of that I state no opinion, there has been a serious breach of data.
But the best part, the icing on the cake, so to speak?
Shanghaiist, now:
The ONLY thing we can confirm is that Chris bought ad space from us. We can’t confirm that StackFile owns Freedur – in fact we’d never heard of them until two weeks ago, or that Chris was just a marketing rep. We’re not saying he wasn’t, we’re just saying this is all we know for sure.
Oops! What he really bought was a nice, friendly, informative blog post!
What is a proxy? For those in the dark, we decided to hit up the fine folks at Freedur, creators of a downloadable proxy, for the scoop on proxies, firewalls, and our chances of ever (fingers crossed) being able to watch Hulu in China
But that is a minor quibble, isn’t it now?