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China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

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51–60 of 94 posts

Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

#51
post #29

What about i2p,Tor? Communism, dictators, some kings, like extreme religions wants to control the flow of information so the minds of the population doesn't catch dangerous memes like freedom movements.

Tor does not work in China. You can't enter the network. You need something called "bridges". You have to send an email to get IP addresses of "entry points". If I remember right, you had to have an gmail email address to receive them. I never worked for me.

Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

#52
post #43

This blocking shit is so annoying. The Chinese shoot themself in the right knee, then in the left knee and say, look, we have the biggest balls! Yes, you may have the biggest balls, but you can't walk anymore dumbo! I experienced that feeding someone his own poison is often the best medicine. Providers world wide should block email access to all China based email for a month or two. Would be a picture for the gods ha…

Well, with all the nationalism I guess they WANT an intranet. And I think they can probably pull it off. The Chinese Intranet is pretty good actually & there's a lot of pride in using home-grown services and hardware, just count the XiaoMi phones next time you're in the subway. (Brilliant brand name BTW)

Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

#53
post #36
post #5

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.

I'm expecting to see that a version of IP over Avian Carriers with Chinese Characteristics (IPoACwCC) becomes true. Actually we can setup smuggling service like we smuggles brand new iPhones, discounted Louis Vuitton and stuffs out of Hong Kong. In the next decade, for example, when you want to file a pull request to github.com from Beijing, you just place an order at Taobao.com and save your pull request well in an…

The ping would be terrible but if you ship a box of DVDs the bandwidth would be decent.

Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

#54
post #22
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry but aren't you better off with a DO VPS running an OpenVPN? I mean using a VPN service or Tor public server is like weaving a banner saying Hey I'm trying to bypass you! . I was able to browse the internet connecting through my home's OpenVPN (DDNS and all) when I was in China (for vacations mostly and some work) without any problems. Of course a home ADSL pipe is good only for 'www' and maybe not even for that…

This is exactly what I do, except that I'm using the $5/month droplet from DO, although I don't live in China (currently in Oman), and the censorship here isn't no where near as bad.

Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

#55
post #52
post #43

This blocking shit is so annoying. The Chinese shoot themself in the right knee, then in the left knee and say, look, we have the biggest balls! Yes, you may have the biggest balls, but you can't walk anymore dumbo! I experienced that feeding someone his own poison is often the best medicine. Providers world wide should block email access to all China based email for a month or two. Would be a picture for the gods ha…

Well, with all the nationalism I guess they WANT an intranet. And I think they can probably pull it off. The Chinese Intranet is pretty good actually & there's a lot of pride in using home-grown services and hardware, just count the XiaoMi phones next time you're in the subway. (Brilliant brand name BTW)

You can't afford to have only an intranet. Not if you want to be a leading power. I even had problems looking up pages from small technology companies that were blocked.

They don't have google. Baidu does not compare, not the slightest bit. Yes, they have bing. Try finding an address at bing (or baidu) maps in China. It does not work 50% of the time when google is right on the spot.

XiaoMi? Yes, some nice hardware. But the software comes from the west.

Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

#56
post #52
post #43

This blocking shit is so annoying. The Chinese shoot themself in the right knee, then in the left knee and say, look, we have the biggest balls! Yes, you may have the biggest balls, but you can't walk anymore dumbo! I experienced that feeding someone his own poison is often the best medicine. Providers world wide should block email access to all China based email for a month or two. Would be a picture for the gods ha…

Well, with all the nationalism I guess they WANT an intranet. And I think they can probably pull it off. The Chinese Intranet is pretty good actually & there's a lot of pride in using home-grown services and hardware, just count the XiaoMi phones next time you're in the subway. (Brilliant brand name BTW)

[deleted]

Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

#57
post #21

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.

Isn't that illegal in China? Or not? Are there any repercussions if you get caught evading in one way or another their national firewall?

My impression is that they don't care too much about individuals evading the firewall. It's a tool for broad social control, which doesn't need to be airtight to accomplish its goals. As long as it's inconvenient to browse to blocked sites, it redirects conversational topics to safer areas, and a small number of individuals bypassing it doesn't affect that too much.

Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

#58
post #53
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm expecting to see that a version of IP over Avian Carriers with Chinese Characteristics (IPoACwCC) becomes true. Actually we can setup smuggling service like we smuggles brand new iPhones, discounted Louis Vuitton and stuffs out of Hong Kong. In the next decade, for example, when you want to file a pull request to github.com from Beijing, you just place an order at Taobao.com and save your pull request well in an…

The ping would be terrible but if you ship a box of DVDs the bandwidth would be decent.

Relevant XKCD What if: When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx?

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

#59
post #21

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.

Isn't that illegal in China? Or not? Are there any repercussions if you get caught evading in one way or another their national firewall?

China is not a state ruled by law (, as some believe it is ruled by theft, or a kleptocracy). So it is not well defined whether this incident is illegal, and usually for controversial issues, argument for or against its legal status is not helpful at all.

Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

#60
Many VPN services now provide obfuscated access. Some use haggismn's XOR patch for OpenVPN. Others provide access via SSH, Stunnel (SSL) and/or obfsproxy (obfs3). I presume that any approach developed for Tor could be used with VPN. Using meek, traffic is obfuscated and routed through arbitrary third-party sites.
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