China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
1–10 of 94 posts
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#2This is the reason I no longer work from Shanghai. Attempting to do anything in the tech spave while constantly playing cat and mouse got to be such a productivity killer that it was becoming impossible to work. You'd rarely know if failures were because of some Firewall nonsense or something else.
It's a tragedy really. I am one guy, but I've since hired several developers and my little company is gaining traction -- we would have been happy to expand our footprint into China in terms of hiring a Shanghai Dev team; yet with the variable and unknown stability of our connections, it was too big of a risk, considering we can operate in Europe and the U.S. with minimal interference.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#3This is the reason I no longer work from Shanghai. Attempting to do anything in the tech spave while constantly playing cat and mouse got to be such a productivity killer that it was becoming impossible to work. You'd rarely know if failures were because of some Firewall nonsense or something else. It's a tragedy really. I am one guy, but I've since hired several developers and my little company is gaining traction -…
I was in Shanghai last month & in previous years bypassing the firewall was not too much of a hassle. When I arrived in Shanghai for the holidays this year my old VPN provider didn't work anymore, plus they added DNS poisoning and bandwidth throttling. I actually upgraded TO StrongVPN, which seems to be one of the affected VPN services now.
My conclusion was that it has become effectively impossible to run a western IT-oriented business from Shanghai. Would be interested in hearing stories of people who DO succeed.
Sad thing is that all the infrastructure is in place: plenty of fast finer in the big cities & the "local", balkanised version of the "internet" works fine.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#4This has been going on for some time now, I'm surprised it is being reported again now.
Rule of thumb.. if someone can work out what you are doing by launching Wireshark, so can a nation-scale IPS system a la Great Wall
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#5I'm living in Shanghai. Still connected fine over a IPSec tunnel. I run my own VPN server on Rackspace/AWS (only 2 public IPs), the connection is and has been relatively stable (about a year). 12MBit/s from Shanghai to the IPSec server in Hong Kong, 38ms consistent ping (100MBit/s connection). Using a Cisco SMB router, so the connection is pure IPSec and standard ports.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#6This is the reason I no longer work from Shanghai. Attempting to do anything in the tech spave while constantly playing cat and mouse got to be such a productivity killer that it was becoming impossible to work. You'd rarely know if failures were because of some Firewall nonsense or something else. It's a tragedy really. I am one guy, but I've since hired several developers and my little company is gaining traction -…
You are not alone. According to reports, many IT businesses relying on stable internet connection have moved away from China Mainland to other countries of Asia like Singapore.
The problem is, government doesn't actually care. They see political stability as the top priority. To achieve it, they are willing to sacrifice foreign business chances.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#7My old company has its dev team in Shanghai, we used multiple VPNs: openvpn and a Cisco vpn; we setted them on company's router.Normally it's ok except some special days like every year's session.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#8Does anyone know if there is technology out there which would allow for VPN traffic to blend in with other traffic, or to bypass DPI in any way?
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#9This is the reason I no longer work from Shanghai. Attempting to do anything in the tech spave while constantly playing cat and mouse got to be such a productivity killer that it was becoming impossible to work. You'd rarely know if failures were because of some Firewall nonsense or something else. It's a tragedy really. I am one guy, but I've since hired several developers and my little company is gaining traction -…
I was in Shanghai last month & in previous years bypassing the firewall was not too much of a hassle. When I arrived in Shanghai for the holidays this year my old VPN provider didn't work anymore, plus they added DNS poisoning and bandwidth throttling. I actually upgraded TO StrongVPN, which seems to be one of the affected VPN services now. My conclusion was that it has become effectively impossible to run a western…
Uhm, many of the larger companies have direct connections out of China that don't cross the GFW, even Chinese companies. If you are important and rich enough...
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#10This has been going on for some time now, I'm surprised it is being reported again now. Rule of thumb.. if someone can work out what you are doing by launching Wireshark, so can a nation-scale IPS system a la Great Wall
That's true but just to be clear, they are not blocking VPNs at protocol level but "manually" blocking the IPs of specific providers. They do the same with Tor: block all public Tor relay IPs.