Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check the comment history for people who post “whatabout” comments when people criticize China. Some accounts do it a lot, on many comments/posts critical of China.
This breaks the HN guideline against insinuating astroturfing without evidence. Please don't do that—it's one of the most toxic things we see here. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
So you want your app/website to work in China
161–170 of 178 posts
Re: So you want your app/website to work in China
#162It’s really interesting how many HN users continuously engage in whataboutism and praise China every time any criticism of China comes up.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-a...
Re: So you want your app/website to work in China
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
how do you imagine they would police it?
They already do it: first of all, by controlling of import/sales of equipment, and by incentivizing citizens to tip police. Also, there are frequency control inspections which keep maps of radiotransmitting activity. It's easy to spot any new transmitter.
That only works with a small number of transmitters. If Samsung or Apple released a phone with native satellite default support, it would be impossible to police.
Censorship is doomed.
Re: So you want your app/website to work in China
#164Re: So you want your app/website to work in China
#165Re: So you want your app/website to work in China
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
They already do it: first of all, by controlling of import/sales of equipment, and by incentivizing citizens to tip police. Also, there are frequency control inspections which keep maps of radiotransmitting activity. It's easy to spot any new transmitter.
That only works with a small number of transmitters. If Samsung or Apple released a phone with native satellite default support, it would be impossible to police. Censorship is doomed.
To be sold in a particular country every model needs certification which obviously may be a very complicated thing if that country's authorities are not happy with counter-censorship capabilities. Moreover, in many countries (including AFAIK Russia, and Chine) every shop selling satcom needs a separate certification. I am not sure Samsung, or Apple will ever risk to invest in something which cannot be legally exported to a large number of countries.
Finally, you should not underestimate how far a state can go to keep the status quo. Did we hear already: - What, they will check every phone? - What, they will demand our passwords? - What, they will slow down all out-of-country traffic? - What, they will block millions if websites, and look into every network packet? All of these were asked sarcastically, yet every point is happening now on a massive scale.
Actually, in late 90s there were a lot of talk about 'new era', because 'internet made censorship impossible'. Hold my beer! - said state bureaucracy everywhere.
Of course, technology can sometimes leapfrog gov't capabilities, but as a rule it's a very temporary thing. Censorship is a political, and cultural problem, and it needs political, and cultural pressure to be resolved.
Re: So you want your app/website to work in China
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
They already do it: first of all, by controlling of import/sales of equipment, and by incentivizing citizens to tip police. Also, there are frequency control inspections which keep maps of radiotransmitting activity. It's easy to spot any new transmitter.
That only works with a small number of transmitters. If Samsung or Apple released a phone with native satellite default support, it would be impossible to police. Censorship is doomed.
Btw, I don't think it only works with a small number of transmitters. In the UK they has been taxing TV watching, and managed to have a huge fleet of specially equipped vans cruising streets, identifying where are TV sets (and it's harder task then scanning for transmissions), and checking addresses against national registry. Nowadays, I suppose methods are different due to internet broadcasting, but it seems they are still capable of taking pennies for it quite successfully. FWIW, state officials love massive budget disbursements, creation, and expanding of departments, and they can use modern technologies for large-scale operations too.
Re: So you want your app/website to work in China
#168I'm Chinese. It's not that bad. * I've been hosting my Chinese blog in US vps since 2009 and it works fine. * I have Gitea hosted in US vps and it works fine too. * GoDaddy has Alipay (sort of China's PayPal) up for a long time. * ICP Licenses are easy to get (at least for Chinese) and typically take less a month. I've done it for my company's websites and my clients' websites. * ICP licenses are required only if you…
> Hosting in China is ridiculously expensive and many Chinese go out of their way to host elsewhere If I host in Europe or US would the speed of traffic going into China be very slow? If I get a 1Gbps server in EU most likely I can serve 1Gbps to USA. Will I be able to serve 1Gbps to China from that EU server? > For 9$ a month you get 1 cpu, 1G ram and 1MBit bandwidth That is insanely expensive. How can startups in C…
Having used Alibaba Cloud for the past few years, and having been in China for the past month, I would say:
> If I host in Europe or US would the speed of traffic going into China be very slow? ... Will I be able to serve 1Gbps to China from that EU server?
Not sure about 1Gbps, but I've seen my 200Mbps band basically saturated. It's rather spotty though -- definitely not 200Mbps all the time. Latency is a very big problem here, so make sure you do TCP tuning right; without TCP tuning you might see awful speeds.
> That is insanely expensive. How can startups in China handle that kind of hosting cost? Where do they host their websites?
The insanely expensive part is bandwidth. For instance with Alibaba Cloud, a 1 vCPU, 1G RAM, 20G SSD instance with pay-as-you-go network billing is like $6/mo so it's not that bad, and there are promotions year round so if you're committed for say one year at a time you can usually get it for maybe half the list price, but outbound bandwidth is a whopping $0.123/GB (which is actually not that different from AWS/GCP's Asia pricing).
I don't know about startups but I suppose it's fine if you host static assets through a CDN and only use the expensive bandwidth from compute for truly dynamic content.
Re: So you want your app/website to work in China
#169I host sqlalchemy.org on Linode, it has a google analytics loader on it, and I've had several complaints that the website cannot be loaded in many regions of China.
It's not GA which is not blocked in China; I think sqlalchemy.org itself somehow ended up on the GFW blocklist (beats me why that would happen).
I'm in China right now, and
$ curl -v http://sqlalchemy.org/
* Trying 45.33.79.102...
* TCP_NODELAY set
Re: So you want your app/website to work in China
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about Recaptcha?
I'm thinking that generally it works but the other night during the nightly internet apocalypse I had to disable it all to use my own site. Will have to double check...
yep, during the day you don't really notice cause VPNs work etc but once it gets to night, everything stops working