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Here's my translation as a Chinese native, though I'm no technical expert. Companies that provide IDC, ISP, CDN services, without authorization, are prohibited to set up or lease connections (including virtual private networks), to conduct business operations across borders. I guess it means if you're a ISP etc, you're not allowed to sell VPN services without authorization. It says nothing about individuals purchasin…
> "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.
Official content link:
http://www.miit.gov.cn/n1146295/n1146557/n1146624/c3554573/c...
Side-by-side translation provided by Peking Univ. (partially pay-walled)
http://www.lawinfochina.com/display.aspx?id=2407&lib=law
Also, an interesting article in Chinese talking about the topic
> "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.
The timing March 2018 does not carry significant value here, it just means the campaign period is slightly longer than one year.
How would they discriminate between business people traveling to China (who probably wouldn't travel if their VPN was blocked) vs Chinese citizens?
I'm in Shanghai as an exchange student and I get very different connection quality depending on whether I'm using the WLAN on campus (fast, some Google-owned services work even without VPN), using my mobile connection specifically catering to foreigners (4G, no noticeable slowdown with VPN) or the "citizen grade" connection at the flat I'm renting. I have observed speeds of 10 MiB/s connecting to servers on campus, but VPN is usually capped at 10 KiB/s.
Ironically, I was downloading a YouTube video overnight (using a VPN, of course) and after midnight the speed skyrocketed to breathtaking 200 KiB/s! No idea whether that has anything to do with this announcement.
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?
Linode JP has decent routing to CN afaik.
many are using proxies instead in Hong Kong - like http://mediahint.com . Not sure about mainland. Any ideas what is used on the mainland?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
$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.
A megabit is a million bits, or an 1/8 of a megabyte, what do you mean 324 gigabytes?
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…