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My 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.
This 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.
https://idea.popcount.org/2013-07-11-fun-with-the-great-fire...
Does 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Yep, as always money buys everything in China. I was wondering how the smaller indie IT people do it though: to me it just seems like a cat-and-mouse game not worth the effort.
I'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.
This service is expected to work just like pigeon-based and drone-based ones, in theory. The only concern not reassured is whether Hong Kong would fall under the siege of the Great Fire Wall.
Meanwhile, I use ssh tunnel to connect to a major US-based cloud service provider at work and home in Beijing, and yes, the low speed and the long round trip time suck. And by now my own Strong VPN subscription still works.
My company hires freelancers for China-related research. Contributors from Mainland China would be ideal. But my reliance on services like Google Drive means that I typically end up with people from HK, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. It's simply much more convenient.
Need a font? Google fonts? Blocked.
Need a picture? Instagram? Blocked.
Need a video? Youtube? Blocked.
Need a CSS sheet? Use a CDN? Blocked or really slow.
Visiting a text-based website hosted outside of China [from within China] is usually pretty good. No VPN necessary.
CDNs are a Firewall quick-kill, a lazy-kill. If you host a site outside China, that you'd like to be visible within China, self-host anything you'd otherwise think about off-loading to a CDN. That makes the need for a VPN for your audience redundant.
Could they ever possibly break an SSH tunnel over port 80/443?