Hong Kong’s protesters use AirDrop to spread information to mainland visitors

Most visitors from mainland China are people who also own iPhones. Until the X models the iPhone did not support multiple SIM cards so visitors would buy local HK prepaid cards which means they are on HK uncensored phone systems and networks.

If you are on mainland number with roaming or even a second local HK number attached to your China SIM card you are still subject to censorship because everything data goes back through mainland servers even though your access points are in HK.

All the above I know from personal experience - lived in China 12 years and now resident in HK.

The above framing is missing a key point: after the “introduction” on milk powder, train ticket score, etc, the AirDrop contains the main message on the anti-extradition protest, which in the article is the content of second tweet by Aria Hangyu Chen for those who read Chinese.

The “introduction” is necessary, to show consequences that the rule by law in China is lacking independent jurisdiction and respect for constitution, so as to support opposing the extradition into China to face its inadequate legal system—that is, if the legal system in China is on par with elsewhere, there is less reason to oppose extradition into China.

Also, it is much harder to explain abstract concepts such as democracy and rule of law to mainlanders, given the heavy censorship and disinformation (e.g. those peaceful revolution such as Arabic Spring is staged by the US) in China, than to explain concrete examples that affect their daily life such as poisonous milk powder.

And in recent protests in July the focus on true democracy—universal suffrage for both the legislative council and the Chief Executive by 2022—is to address the root cause of all major protests (e.g. anti-national-security-law protest in 2003, anti-restricted-democracy umbrella protest in 2014, anti-extradition protest in 2019), where the government was trying to pass law despite strong opposition in public opinion to serve the interests of Beijing over Hong Kongers. Without addressing the root cause, the lack of accountable democracy, Hong Kongers need a big protest once every five years or so, which is not solving the problem. The focus on democracy in recent protest is to break this infinite loop, and is about the bigger picture.

To downvoters: please explain your rationale so we can have a civil conversation.

Android has something similar (Nearby Notifications), which AFAIK uses BLE beacons (Eddystone). I saw one once at a nearby shopping mall, when I turned on Bluetooth just to see what's there (I normally keep Bluetooth disabled).

Essentially no. As yorwba points out in a sibling post the GFW is wise to the protocols being used.

Algo doesn't work either.

Or more accurately they don't work for long. The GFW slowly degrades the connection over the course of some minutes, making it unusable after a while. This then resets every day or so.

After a series of days or weeks the IP address associated with the server is completely blocked.

The situation with Shadowsocks has more or less been the same for me. I have been unable to have a reliable connection to blocked websites with either a self-hosted (on servers outside of China) Algo or Shadowsocks server. This has meant it is impractical to run your own server with circumvention software. As far as I can tell the way that VPN providers get around this in China is to just operate a huge fleet of IP addresses that rotate in as they are inevitably blocked and leave ones that get blocked out of rotation long enough so that they are no longer blocked.

I have heard that V2Ray is the new way to go if you want to set up your own way of getting around the GFW, but it looks rather complicated to set up. https://github.com/v2ray/v2ray-core

Basically the GFW is quite sophisticated these days and the usual solutions used outside of China don't work.

I think the real reason that airdropping information into North Korea won't help is that it's a slave state held hostage by a ruling family that secures aid for itself with the threat of nuclear Armageddon and the immediate shelling of Seoul. But this is also the reason that the sophistication or lack thereof of their political belief systems is irrelevant: These are not participatory governments.

I would highly recommend The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith for a reset of one's political expectations, especially for countries with resource extraction economies. The mechanics of selectorate theory can be very, very brutal.