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Steam has been banned in China

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Re: Steam has been banned in China

#141

Post by NamTaf »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #92
ChemSpider wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That time is gone meanwhile. In late 2019 I had a very hard time getting access to my Gmail account, despite trying all the usual workarounds and staying in the best hotels in town. Even non-English news sites were blocked, sites that I could browse freely just a few years ago. Skype worked ok, but text chat only. Images never arrived.

Funnily enough, Google Fi worked just fine in late 2019. I’m wondering if foreign SIM cards are not subjected to filtering.

Foreign SIM cards on globs roaming are not passed through the GFW as traffic is carried back to the ‘origin country’ before being sent to the internet writ large. So IP lookups still think you’re in your original country. I used global roaming when working in China to circumvent the GFW (albeit at high expense for data).

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#142

Post by tombh »

honkdaddy wrote: post #71
tombh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must offer another data point. I'm British, and often find myself in these threads criticising criticism of China. Not because I'm being paid by the CCP, but because I believe that mainstream anti-Chinese sentiment tells us more about the West's psychological struggles to come to terms with its own historically unprecedented imperial past, than it does about China itself.

That's very interesting. So you think generally the news of vast human rights abuse we see coming out of China are due to the West's psychological struggles (?), and not due to actual suffering caused by the Chinese government? Do you have any Chinese heritage in your family? This reminds me of the perspective most of my half-Chinese friends had from back in college. They always felt as if it was their duty to defend…

I am 100% British. You misunderstand me. I am saying that if we truly have China's, or namely humanity's best interests at heart when we criticise China, then we could profoundly increase our effectiveness if we demonstrated even just a basic understanding of context. Namely that the West is defined by its colonialism, its power and influence comes from exploitation of more than half the world.

To give an example, if a government truly wants people to wear masks and socially isolate, then the prime minister (Boris Johnson of the UK in this case), should not throw private parties.

We can argue about whether what the West did was net good or bad, but I don't think we can argue about whether the effectiveness of one's words are diminished by acts that are contrary to those words.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#143

Post by whimsicalism »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #92
ChemSpider wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That time is gone meanwhile. In late 2019 I had a very hard time getting access to my Gmail account, despite trying all the usual workarounds and staying in the best hotels in town. Even non-English news sites were blocked, sites that I could browse freely just a few years ago. Skype worked ok, but text chat only. Images never arrived.

Funnily enough, Google Fi worked just fine in late 2019. I’m wondering if foreign SIM cards are not subjected to filtering.

I used Google Fi in early 2020 in China.

iirc it really just depended on where you were... Sometimes Fi let me break through the GFW, but it definitely did not in Beijing.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#144

Post by ganzuul »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #5
ganzuul wrote: post #3

In my eyes, the attack on 'effeminate men' is the nail in the coffin for the government of China. They are as dead to me and my actions will reflect it. Down with Emperor Pooh!

[flagged]

It's not about an amount of caring like liters of water. Even then the things you mention are effects and not causes.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#146

Post by zokula »

gunfighthacksaw wrote: post #55
OtomotO wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you resurrected Lenin, took him for a walk around Shanghai or Beijing and explained the deal to him he would be proud since so much of their political system is derived from Leninism, ergo communism. Even their market economy seems like a redux of Lenin’s NEP. Don’t try pulling that tired old “not real communism” schtick, we all see through it. Another thing, if they weren’t communists, where is the incentive to k…

Lenin wasn't a communist. China doesn't even practice real communism.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#147

Post by foverzar »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #99
foverzar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is indeed a country full of contradictions. Over the years, I came to understand that contradictions are almost always just false assumptions.

At least in this case, there aren’t any “false assumptions”. For a country governed by a so called “communist” party, there are glaring inequalities. If we limit ourselves to free Internet usage, it’s clear that the system is designed so poor or uneducated people would only be able to consume government approved content, whereas elites could have access to anything.

Not sure that I understand your take.

How does having "a communist" party imply that there would be no inequalities? Especially given that merely a few decades ago China was poor like hell and everyone outsourced all the cheap labor there?

> it’s clear that the system is designed so poor or uneducated people

Isn't education in China largely sponsored by government?

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#148

Post by whimsicalism »

mrjin wrote: post #80
blahgeek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not true that chinese don’t has “access to global internet”. Many sites are blocked (including most top sites), but still it’s a blacklist instead of a whitelist

I thought so too until one day I suddenly found myself was able to access google.com etc. without any issue for days until I search some sensitive keywords when I was in mainland China. So the blocking seems to be heuristic instead of a blacklist. And also it seems GFW is able to filter SSL contents as I have always been using HTTPS if I can.

The GFW is not a monolith, it seems to differ depending on where you are. I think ISPs implement it differently.

The Beijing ones were the most sophisticated

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#149

Post by whimsicalism »

flohofwoe wrote: post #67
idxoutofbounds wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a small minority of college educated youth that speak english and are able to use VPNs to bypass GFW.

I might be wrong, or it may changed in the meantime, but I had the impression that VPN traffic is also slowed down extremely. While it allows you to connect to any foreign service, it's so slow as to be nearly useless. I only tried VPN services that were located outside China though. Maybe there are Chinese VPN services which have a 'fast route' to the outside world (I'd be very surprised if this is legal though).

Only if the GFW identifies you as likely VPN traffic do they throttle. I used Googles VPN service thingy and kept switching hosts everytime it slowed.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#150

Post by the_af »

siva7 wrote: post #25

What is going on here with the comment section? Seems like it's flooded with pro ccp activists

Can you provide some examples of this alleged "flood of pro CCP activists" in this comments section?

I'm reading some minor disagreements. Is this activism in your worldview?

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