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“Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

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Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's china, because chinese government fears that the citizens who lived in china know about the truth of government's corruption.

Dear Alex, although this may sound like a revelation, but governments do not fear. They are fictitious entities. Non-humans. One may think about them as a software.

Dear ommunist, I think you are right, governments like "Matrix" which control every childprocess.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#102
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do multinational companies' china offices get through the firewall? For example if my company uses Google apps, how do I ensure that my china office has access?

We have colleagues in china and generally speaking, you find an alternative, and host it on premise. I believe this is the reason why they use Atlassian[1] products, where rest of us would use trello, e.t.c. [1] company that created jira

Aren't there a dozen of bugtrackers, intranet collaboration software, CI tools and git hostings that they could download and install? What's so special with the Atlassian products?

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#103
post #54

I was visiting China recently (my first time there). I thought bypassing The Great Firewall was going to be as simple as an "ssh -D" SOCKS setup, or a "ssh -w" tunnel. Oh boy, I was wrong. If you try this, or even a basic OpenVPN setup, you will quickly find out your VPN works fine for about 5 minutes, but then latency increases to 5sec, 10sec, 30sec(!), and then everything times out. After some research I read onlin…

This might sound a bit counter intuitive but they really hate OpenVPN and SSH tunnels - not to mention they are trivial to detect and the process is highly automated.

Traditional VPNs such as PPTP/IPsec as well as various forms of obfuscated proxies are generally not interfered with unless something major happens. A lot of the alleged "censorship" are actually symptoms of high latency and packet loss on home connections.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#104
On this note, we've been trying to upload gigabytes of data via rsync from Europe to China (we are software company who are trying to deliver tools to our Chinese customers..). Connection used to be fast when it was night time in China, but lately the connection has been really slow or unusable. Is there any alternative way to get lots of packages from Western countries to China?

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#105
post #54

I was visiting China recently (my first time there). I thought bypassing The Great Firewall was going to be as simple as an "ssh -D" SOCKS setup, or a "ssh -w" tunnel. Oh boy, I was wrong. If you try this, or even a basic OpenVPN setup, you will quickly find out your VPN works fine for about 5 minutes, but then latency increases to 5sec, 10sec, 30sec(!), and then everything times out. After some research I read onlin…

I've had almost the opposite experience. VPN sort of worked, but I could not open a single HTTPS connection. The VPN problems I had I could trace to a bad WiFi connection (I had to lower my MTU and it worked fine). Now, on previous trips I experienced what you mentioned. It seemed really like there was some machine learning going on, and after using a VPN for a while the connection would get bad. But I guess it might…

Actually this is classic daily life of a chinese netizen: you are never quite sure what the cause of your network woes is (not without spending time digging into it). Is it due to ISP QoS, or is it reset by GFW, or is it just mere network failure?

And what most ppl do when facing this? They choose a local service instead of Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Google. See, censorship is only a part (though a vital part) of the grand scheme.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#106
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a boot argument to the kernel, stored in NVRAM. These arguments are normally mutable. Apple had to write code to prevent modifying said arguments. Said code can have flaws. But lets say you don't find a vulnerability in SIP userland detection, and instead find a kernel exploit to get around the protection: If malware were to figure a way around it, then even antivirus software can't uninstall it. Only Apple can.…

This is absolutely FUD. Even if you're correct and malware finds a way around it, then it obviously doesn't work , which means antivirus software could use the same mechanism to kick out the malware.

Unless the malware uses the backdoor/exploit then patches it out once it's inside. It has complete system control, after all.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#107

“Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this. Today they asked me to delete all the code from GitHub. I have no choice but to obey. I hope one day I'll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code I like without fearing. I believe you guys will make great stuff with Network Extensions. Cheers!”

I find this is a very gentle warning compared to what we hear about secret law enforcement in general and China in particular. Isn't the practice to stage a suicide after deleting his repositories?

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#108

> I hope one day I'll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code I like without fearing. Can the author reach the US by whatever mean and apply for political asylum? That 'fear that they will suffer persecution due to: ... Political opinion'[0] seems legit. [0] http://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-asylum/asylum

> I hope one day I'll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code I like without fearing. Frankly I don't know if we are that country. :(

In the context of a Chinese hacker fearing prison this is awfully cynical hyperbole.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#109
post #7

While I understand what the gov is trying to do, who's to say somebody else that doesn't live in China maintains the project and puts it on GitHub for all the world to see?

Because it is a lot of hard work without much in the way of rewards or recognition. Hundreds of thousands people use clowwindy's code, some of them even make money by building services using his code, yet very few people are willing let alone be able to contribute. Until a few days ago he was complaining that the user community is now full of leechers and he is pondering when to quit. The police visit was probably the final straw.
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