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China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

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21–30 of 88 posts

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#21
post #6

> "No unauthorized use of VPNs through March 2018." I was wondering, "what just happened internally in China that they want to censor for a year or so?" Then it dawned on me...they want to censor everything until the 2018 Winter Olympics is over with. I was wondering if Trump had tweeted, "free Tibet," or something like that.

> I was wondering, "what just happened internally in China that they want to censor for a year or so?"

I think, in general, they've observed the rise of populist movements in other countries and have decided they're not going to let that happen in China.

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#23
End user access starts in a provincial/regional network, which is connected to a national "backbone", which maybe allows the traffic out of the country. In my experience there's massive packet loss between the province and "backbone". 40% loss is regular throughout the day. Stuff within China mostly works, but anything outside is flaky at best.

Now obviously enterprise can't put up with that crap, so there's better routes out. Say a datacenter in Guangdong province that has direct peering with Hong Kong where licensed companies are colocating. Those companies with access can take money, (or under the table their sysadmins can) to terminate a VPN or MPLS connection there, giving unfiltered access to the internet and bypassing the lossy path.

The going rate I've found for this is about USD $300 per megabit per month, plus whatever the costs are to get there. (eg. Your regular broadband connection if using a VPN or cost of MPLS/Lan extension type service from the telco) Too expensive for most individuals, but definitely worth it if you're a hotel catering to foreign guests who will be pissed off if Google, Facebook, and pretty much everything they recognize about the internet doesn't work.

In my view this document is calling for, among other things, rooting out of this kind of activity.

If anyone is familiar with this market for unfiltered internet in China I'd like to learn more about it.

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#24
post #12

Is something getting lost in translation or is this targeted at businesses and not individuals? (Still a big deal, but I thought VPNs were already banned?)

Not entirely sure, seemed banned, have vague memories of people being harassed for using proxies. In any case proxied have definitely been soft banned. If you try searching for vpn/proxy you'll get dead connections. If a url has the same, you'll also get a dead connection (as opposed to a "this is banned" page) Also perhaps of note... When a law isn't working (ie indoor smoking ban) they have been known to just re-is…

>Also perhaps of note... When a law isn't working (ie indoor smoking ban) they have been known to just re-issue it.

This is interesting. Do they re-issue it with a minor change (double penalties, increasing the radius of "indoors" by 10ft, etc) or do they just re-issue it word for word?

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#25
post #23

End user access starts in a provincial/regional network, which is connected to a national "backbone", which maybe allows the traffic out of the country. In my experience there's massive packet loss between the province and "backbone". 40% loss is regular throughout the day. Stuff within China mostly works, but anything outside is flaky at best. Now obviously enterprise can't put up with that crap, so there's better r…

$300 per megabit?? Did you mean GB or TB maybe?

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#26
post #25
post #23

End user access starts in a provincial/regional network, which is connected to a national "backbone", which maybe allows the traffic out of the country. In my experience there's massive packet loss between the province and "backbone". 40% loss is regular throughout the day. Stuff within China mostly works, but anything outside is flaky at best. Now obviously enterprise can't put up with that crap, so there's better r…

$300 per megabit?? Did you mean GB or TB maybe?

It is likely sold based on throughput and not metered transfer.

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#27
post #25
post #23

End user access starts in a provincial/regional network, which is connected to a national "backbone", which maybe allows the traffic out of the country. In my experience there's massive packet loss between the province and "backbone". 40% loss is regular throughout the day. Stuff within China mostly works, but anything outside is flaky at best. Now obviously enterprise can't put up with that crap, so there's better r…

$300 per megabit?? Did you mean GB or TB maybe?

[deleted]

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#28

And by "unauthorized", they mean "all".

I heard that Baidu and some other Internet companies in China have these kind of unfiltered connection (maybe to use Google? Haha). I don't if these are "authorized" or not.

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#29

many are using proxies instead in Hong Kong - like http://mediahint.com . Not sure about mainland. Any ideas what is used on the mainland?

Well, at least MediaHint isn't joining users to a botnet like one of the others is.

All it's doing is setting proxy autoconfig to https://mediahint.com/chrome.pac

Doing a bit more digging it seems like they're using several proxies under the name \*.mhgs.co, which looks suspiciously like a whole lot of Linode boxes.

I didn't think the 'net was filtered in HK?

Re: China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal

#30
post #25
post #23

End user access starts in a provincial/regional network, which is connected to a national "backbone", which maybe allows the traffic out of the country. In my experience there's massive packet loss between the province and "backbone". 40% loss is regular throughout the day. Stuff within China mostly works, but anything outside is flaky at best. Now obviously enterprise can't put up with that crap, so there's better r…

$300 per megabit?? Did you mean GB or TB maybe?

I confirm that is indeed megabit per month. (324 gigabytes, or about $0.93 per gigabyte)

Yeah, harsh. But hey, it's black market internet access.

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