Sources: on Tuesday, China’s internet regulator told Tencent, ByteDance, and others to grow censorship teams, focus on protest content, and censor info on VPNs (Liza Lin/Wall Street Journal)

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Fortinet confirms a critical remote authentication bypass vulnerability in FortiOS, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager is being exploited; a patch is available  —  Fortinet has confirmed today that a critical authentication bypass security vulnerability patched last week is being exploited in the wild.

Ben Jiang / South China Morning Post:
Sensor Tower: Tencent earned $4.4B revenue from its apps in H1 2022, the highest globally; ByteDance was second with $1.3B, demonstrating China’s market power  —  Tencent Holdings and ByteDance were the world’s top-ranked companies by app revenue in the first half of 2022, according to a new report …

Emily Baker-White / Forbes:
Web novel apps backed by ByteDance and Tencent are running hundreds of Facebook and Instagram ads showing sexual assault, violent erotica, and acts of self-harm  —  Some of the ads include descriptions of sexual violence, paired with images of battered women and photos of male fitness influencers, which were used without permission.

Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:
A look at Iranian activists’ fight for internet access amid the regime’s crackdowns, including using Tor servers inside Iran to bypass internet blockades  —  Activists in Iran are working with outsiders to fight the regime’s censorship  —  As protesters flooded the streets of Iran in September …

Wall Street Journal:
Chinese protestors are holding up blank pieces of paper as a protest against censorship, leading platforms and censors to quickly remove the images  —  Protesters are using few or no words in public and online demonstrations to speak out against Beijing’s zero-Covid policies

Wall Street Journal:
How Twitter users in China have been circumventing the nation’s Great Firewall and fighting spam to get footage of protests out to the rest of the world  —  Chinese users employ VPNs to get videos and images out of the country, while fighting spam  —  Why Tesla’s China Ties Could Be a Problem for Twitter