This is the end of a century. People in China had used 4 kinds of tools to skip the GFW: freegate, openvpn, goagnet, shadowsocks. freegate is a traditional http proxy or socks proxy built by Falun Gong ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong ). They built lots of software with the same technology: freegate gpass freeu dynapass... People share this kind of banned software sending to each others just like teenagers…
Hmm... okay, so they defeat shadowsocks by recognizing the packets.
> Then they stopped the development of shadowsocks.
But if they already had shadowsocks beat, why do they make a public show of shutting it down?
Sounds more like they recognize that they don't have the GFW technology to defeat shadowsocks on-going development over time. Which suggests all you need is a new developer.