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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”

#131

Post by halfelf »

mobutu wrote: post #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?

If this happens day to day, you may consider opening a subsidiary in China, with applying for special network. Foreign company in China can have network without GFW.

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

#132

Post by halfelf »

jglauche wrote: post #110

So, isn't the real question how to get you into a more liberal country so you can continue your work?

That's true. But immigration for Chinese is much more harder than you think. Even in China, it is not completely free to move from one province to another.

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

#133

Post by halfelf »

loser777 wrote: post #91
mrb wrote: 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…

Very interesting... I was just in China recently and was sshing into a box I had in the states for an impromptu SOCKS proxy. I did notice that things would work fine for up to an hour or so before things started bogging down. I would start seeing "channel x: open failed..." errors. However, closing the session and reconnecting would fix the problem... until it started lagging out again. I thought it was just a conseq…

Working in such network 24/7/365 means I have to spend about $90 per year on my vpn service, and keep vpn connection all the time when working. (otherwise google and SO will not come to save me from problems.)

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

#134

Post by olalonde »

mrb wrote: 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…

> Encryption is not enough.

I use an unencrypted PPTP VPN and the connection is really fast and stable here (Shenzhen, China Telecom). I have tried OpenVPN and ssh but both were much slower. FWIW, I don't believe using a VPN is illegal in China (though operating a VPN service without a license most likely is) and pretty much every single foreigner I know uses one.

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

#135

Post by kijin »

Laforet wrote: post #103
mrb wrote: 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 connecti…

I suppose that means OpenVPN and SSH are too secure for the Chinese government to eavesdrop on. PPTP, on the other hand, has been known to be insecure for ages.

So... could you avoid detection by passing an SSH tunnel through a PPTP VPN? Add enough layers, and the censors might not bother to unwrap all of them.

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

#137

Post by JonnyGreenwood »

verroq wrote: post #40
hipaulshi wrote: post #27

For people who are not aware of this: Shadowsocks is a popular and very simple tool to circumvent Great Fire Wall in China. It is written to reduce characteristics in network traffic so that GFW cannot easily block it by deep traffic analysis. clowwindy is the original author.

Who is the target audience of this software and how does it work? Do non technical users set this up on a VPS provider and then connect to it? I'd imagine most developers in China would just SSH tunnel their way out.

There are many import/export companies in China, they are also the target audience of this software. Gmail is important for them.

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

#138

Post by grondilu »

> I have no choice but to obey.

Did he ask a lawyer? Because it looks to me there are two possibilities. One, he was not doing anything illegal in which case the police had no authority to stop his activities. Two, he was indeed doing something illegal in which case he can be glad he got out of it with what appears to be only a warning.

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

#139

Post by hipaulshi »

mobutu wrote: post #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?

setup a server with aliyun. the cloud service provider from alibaba. And relay the traffic from there.

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

#140

Post by 0xFFC »

mrb wrote: 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 am in Iran , you cannot believe it , same here , They use deep packet inspection too, they will shut every package down. every open vpn , cisco vpn , etc connection will lose connection every 2-3 min . Connection to outside web is almost impossible.

I have noticed they have multiple situation, for example when everything's quiet internet is not so bad (despite the fact bandwidth is extremely low for huge amount of people), but when some news came out about government corruption, guess what ? some vpn does not work . In 2009 green movement they closed every https connection.(maybe that was red alert situation)

p.s : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection

p.s. : I use vps from netherlands for bypassing firewall. but It takes huge amount of time and a little money.but the point is 99.999% people don't have this option (I use shadowsocks, sometimes another tunnels) so they use internet the way is or some software like freegate and other but with extremely low speed unbearable lag.

p.s. : pptp, l2ps and others are closed right now. even president rohani couldn't manage the situation . I have heard he did want to do something but supreme leader and his people stopped him.

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