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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”

#491

Post by task_queue »

eloy wrote: post #449
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…

The Chinese authorities neither understand how FOSS works nor the Streisand Effect.

Not having to worry about != not understanding

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

#492

Post by task_queue »

rndn wrote: post #193
aikah wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, western leaders have figured out one doesn't need democracy or free speech for capitalism to function, China set an example. So with all the spying , ban of encryption , limits on freedom of the press with laws such as "the right to be forgotten" or making illegal to criticize cops or politicians in Spain , we have already entered in a post democratic era . And people in Europe take their freedom for gra…

The right to be forgotten is actually a powerful mechanism to protect individuals. Though, the law should possibly revised such that it only applies to individuals that are not a public figure, who can prove to have little or no range of responsibilities.

The right to be forgotten flies in the face of capitalism. You cannot assume you act in perfect self-interest without total and perfect information. The first can be easy to acquire, the second harder.

The right to be forgotten impedes on total information awareness and the desire to make the perfect rational decision with your money.

This is a good thing. Total information is not perfect information because of bias and context. Someone seeking such information will process it through a biased lens and never attain perfection. In that case, the individual under the lens will lose out.

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

#493

Post by hachiya »

sandyvid wrote: post #478
hachiya wrote: post #419

So how did the Chinese police find clowwindy? His contact information doesn't look readily available online. Did Chinese authorities contact Github, which readily complied with information that led to him being located?

It's really not that hard for the cops to track down someone in China. Besides, clowwindy didn't take any precautions before. I believe clowwindy once revealed the company he worked for.

Do you have a reference for clowwindy revealing his employer? I didn't see anything about that.

Cops can do a lot of things, but they don't pull information from thin air. Github would be one source of information.

It's odd that this entire, and very popular, discussion on HN doesn't delve into how this individual was found.

It's also interesting that your reply is from a new account with only this comment.

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

#494

Post by superuser2 »

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…

How do foreign organizations with email and internal applications inside the firewall do business in China? Do they simply have to make an exception to their security policies for employees based in China? Put them on Baidu email accounts instead? Or are IT departments of big lumbering fortune-500s also dependent on these tools?

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

#495

Post by rndmind »

jondubois wrote: post #311

I don't see the Great Wall of China as inherently evil. I don't think Chinese people would benefit if we (the west) had free reign to impose all our extreme capitalist beliefs on them. Maybe they are not ready for it. It's arrogant for us to believe that we are on the 'free' side of the firewall. I don't see how one side is more free than the other - Both sides are subjected to constant brainwashing by various media…

This is a very unique and insightful way to look at it. Absolutely the GFW of china is a huge way to block outside cultural influence ( manipulation and many other unwanted foreign influences )

With that said, I'm of the radical belief that no internet communication should be blocked, inspected, or analyzed etc... but thanks for such a piquant response.

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

#496

Post by MarcosDione »

0xFFC wrote: post #213
aidanhs wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I had a friend visiting Iran who wanted unrestricted access to sites. I didn't have any personal Linux servers on the internet at the time, but I did have a Windows one with Remote Desktop licenses. It turned out that RDP actually worked pretty well. I did hesitate to post this in case it's seen by the wrong people(!), though given it's a while since it was necessary to use, it may be blocked by now a…

sadly with RDP you cannot have same experience.it is not about 1 or 2 site , for example for me , my vpn connection is always on because there is not internet without it.but with RDP loging into another machine , with all lag you see , is almost impossible at least for power user like me which most of the time have 50+ tab open in chrome in site's like youtube , android dev doc's, etc.

Why nos havig a local cache like wwwoffle (someone has to reimplement such a thing) or squid? that way you won't need a connection just to browse a bunch of (mostly static?) html pages... just sayin'.

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

#497

Post by zhte415 »

superuser2 wrote: post #494
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…

How do foreign organizations with email and internal applications inside the firewall do business in China? Do they simply have to make an exception to their security policies for employees based in China? Put them on Baidu email accounts instead? Or are IT departments of big lumbering fortune-500s also dependent on these tools?

No. Big foreign corporations, like in all countries, VPN back to their home country. The same all over the world.

Internal policy dictates this, all over the world.

Email is usually on self-hosted Exchange.

Corporate firewall blocks stuff like Youtube and Facebook - also the same over the world, but some users with the business need can access whatever the business need dictates.

Some large companies just bypass the national firewall for speed reasons - this is negotiated with the government on an individual basis - pragmatically this makes sense, as the traffic is 100% encrypted back between fixed sources and destinations, and inspecting it just wastes resources for all parties. Some corporations may also have their websites for the public access bypass any filtering, also for speed reasons (for example, internet banking).

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

#498

Post by mrredbit »

mobutu wrote: post #385
kinosang wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Chinese CDN (such as Upyun, Baidu CDN, Qiniu and Aliyun) for http file downloading (with a subdomain provided by the CDN or you'll need to apply permissions at MIIT as ICP) instead of rsync or ssh tunnel. Or rsync your data to Japanese Servers (Linode, GMO, etc) and ask your customers to download through http or https.

The problem is to upload data to China, we are not downloading anything from there. "Or rsync your data to Japanese Servers (Linode, GMO, etc) and ask your customers to download through http or https." We've used Amazon CDN before even for Chinese customers and they have closest node in Hong Kong - they still(Chinese) have difficulties to download our packages. I doubt using Japanese server would solve our problem. T…

Due to political reason, I think Chinese gov seriously and actively censor package from Hong Kong

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

#500

Post by superuser2 »

zhte415 wrote: post #497
superuser2 wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do foreign organizations with email and internal applications inside the firewall do business in China? Do they simply have to make an exception to their security policies for employees based in China? Put them on Baidu email accounts instead? Or are IT departments of big lumbering fortune-500s also dependent on these tools?

No. Big foreign corporations, like in all countries, VPN back to their home country. The same all over the world. Internal policy dictates this, all over the world. Email is usually on self-hosted Exchange. Corporate firewall blocks stuff like Youtube and Facebook - also the same over the world, but some users with the business need can access whatever the business need dictates. Some large companies just bypass the…

So exemptions from the VPN detection/shutdown mechanism can simply be negotiated by those with the political clout to do so?
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