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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”

#521

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?

Register your VPN with the authorities. We are atm doing this for a office in Beijing.

Is the primary purpose of your VPN to bypass GFW, or to provide access to your corporate network? I guess the latter would be considered a good reason.

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

#522
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 currently use a mixture of PPTP and Shadowsocks. Shadowsocks (even to the same servers) seems to successfully connect a little more often, and drop a little less often. Otherwise, performance seems similar, and goes up and down.

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

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might just fundamentally disagree an the whole tool ideology. Imagine this device: It only has button, pressing it will torture every human beeing in earth for 100 years and then wipe out what's left. Trying to disassemble or analyze it will do the same. Would this still classify as "just a tool"? (peaceful uses: explaining the importance of restraint etc.) This is not supposed to be an analogy, but a serious ques…

Guns alone don't kill people (at least if they're not programmed to do so automatically), but as humans sometimes act irrationally, one could say if the population had less guns then there will be less deaths by gun shot.

The sole purpose of a gun is the kill/destroy more efficiently because knives and forks were not.

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

#524
post #172

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…

> That's all. The winter of China's network comes. Is there technical reason to believe that shadowsocks or similar technology is the last stand against automated censorship? I would just say this is just yet another stage in the censorship/anti-censorship cycle.

You may not be seeing the big picture here. Censorship is about rulers cementing their rule, and may well ultimately lead to complete tyranny.

There's no guarantee that "the censorship arms race" will continue, even in your specific nation-state.

For example, I bet there's not much anti-censorship software being developed in North-Korea, because people don't want themselves and their entire families tortured to death.

The real problem here is not that we might be lagging behind governments with our anti-censorship tools. The real problem is the existence of governments to begin with, because as long as they do, they will want to control their subjects as closely as possible.

Policitians and the real rulers behind the scenes are all psychopaths.

They see us as human livestock, and any one of them would be perfectly happy with a global North-Korea, as long as they personally would be in the tiny ruling elite, with all the riches and power a psycho could ever dream of.

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

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Of the ten conflicts in human history with the highest death tolls, five were civil wars in China. Chief among these was the Three Kingdoms War when up to 40 million are reckoned to have perished in military operations and from the destructive consequences of warfare. This is an enormous number, considering that the global population at that time is unlikely to have exceeded 400 million. More recently, the Taiping R…

Oppression causes civil wars. If they are using oppression to avoid disorder, they better have long term plan. Otherwise they are digging their own grave. Not many people fear of chaos in the USA and not because they have the best firewall.

Historically, I believe it would be much more accurate to say that opportunity creates civil wars. People start wars because they think they can win.

Incidentally, in most of those Chinese conflicts (4 out of 5 I believe), they were right. Many other wars were similar : starts with "immigration", numbers increasing, conflict, open conflict (and mass death), repression (of the losing side). Extermination is often tried but rarely succeeds. Well it succeeds in causing mass death, but it doesn't succeed in the sense that extermination is the result.

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

#526
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the second amendment and of cause and effect.

oh god, another "Guns don't kill people" nut. not sure why you're defending an antiquated amendment that helps the NRA sell more guns.

I'm ambivalent about the 2nd amendment (and in fact lean left on it) but flat-out blaming it for the state of personal safety in the US is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. "Guns don't kill people, people do" at least points to the important and relevant truth that murder and homicide is a human behavior with complex motives, even if that alone wouldn't be enough for me to support private gun ownership. "You're not safe in the US because of the second amendment" is just a stupid lie.

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

#527
post #480
post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the tech field, everyone is very very aware. I can't speak about other fields though. In my experience, pretty much anyone who is middle class or above knows about it. Granted middle class and above is only about 300 million of the almost 1.4 billion people -- so very much a minority. Granted China is huge and I mainly move in tech circles so YMMV. It's not just international companies. Chinese companies are all a…

Thanks for your info. As a graduate student major in civil engineering in China, people around me come across the firewall when they need Google Scholar, which is rare also. Sometimes they come to me for help to get access to sites like Google Scholar. But, believe me, they don't care about what is GFW or anything about the censorship. yes, the big brother is watching and they want to be good netizens. Traditional in…

As an undergraduate student majoring in software engineering in China, I'm interning for a foreign company and we have access to free internet through proxies. And in my experience, most programmers regard free network as a necessity. And for people in large cities, it is true that they don't actually care about GFW, but I think many of them are at least aware of the existence of it, and sometimes break through it out of curiosity.

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

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Apps will drain your battery Google Apps will also drain your battery if you are in a region where Google has no network-location data yet, because then Google will turn on your GPS, and send to their servers the pair of GPS-coords and strength of networks. If you live in a suburb in Germany where almost no networks are known to Google, this means if you enable location services your GPS will try to get a fi…

I think you can turn this off. My phone has a setting called 'Scanning always available', which says "Let Google's location service and other apps scan for networks, even when Wi-Fi is off.". If I turn off this setting, and turn off wi-fi, then the problem you point out should be avoided, right?

Yes.

But if you turn on WiFi and Location at the same time (which is not uncommon), then it will suck your battery dry in seconds. Turn any of those two off, and it works.

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

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always brought up short when someone says/writes "24/7/365" because it really doesn't make sense. "24/7" means 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "24/365" means 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. "24/7/365" means 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 weeks a year? I know, I know, it's become an idiom, and it's like "I could care less", and you can't try to understand it except as an atom that caries a meaning, but it…

24/7/52 does seem more logical...

365 means they don't close for holidays. I don't know what 52 would mean.

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

#530
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about all the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions (PNE)? The nuke is extremely destructive and extremely dangerous, but its not inherently wrong, they have been used to close gas wells by the Russians, and I am pretty sure the US had the plowshares program. There are definitely some arguments that we could have used conventional explosives for those purposes, but my point is that a nuke is just a tool, its the people wh…

We might just fundamentally disagree an the whole tool ideology. Imagine this device: It only has button, pressing it will torture every human beeing in earth for 100 years and then wipe out what's left. Trying to disassemble or analyze it will do the same. Would this still classify as "just a tool"? (peaceful uses: explaining the importance of restraint etc.) This is not supposed to be an analogy, but a serious ques…

I might quibble on the definition of "technology".

For instance, yes, a gun is a tool designed to kill a thing. Some guns are specifically designed to kill people.

But the technology of gunpowder propelled projectiles has peaceful applications. For instance, one of the early uses was to propel a rope to distressed boats and ships so that passengers could be rescued.

Likewise with the hypothetical device you have described. Sure, sounds terrible. But what are the underlying technologies it is built upon? Unless you've tapped into some sort of fundamental evil force of the universe, there are probably some pretty awesome technologies involved, that would have peaceful, useful applications in another device that wasn't so awful.

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