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

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

#61

Post by mschuster91 »

tiatia wrote: post #55
c1sc0 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. B…

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

Not entirely. They use (or at least have used) mediatek chipsets. Their drivers... well, do a github search for mediatek chipset-based android source code. People have placed entire dumps of Mediatek stuff on Github... and the stuff I could find in 5min is SCARY. Fucking scary. And that's just the tools for the manufacturer, their kernel drivers are a mess of ifdefs and commented out code, with the sparse comments written in some Asian language.

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

#62

Post by sholanozie »

narrator wrote: post #41

The whole Chinese way of doing things makes me think that most people live in enormous Skinner boxes. It makes me reflect on my own media consumption. What messages am I receiving? How are processing those messages affecting my view of the world? What experiences or opportunities am I missing out on because of the messages I am receiving and processing and how they are affecting my internal model of the world? Look a…

You might be interested in Walter Lippman's 'Public Opinion' from 1922. It basically lays the groundwork for manipulating and influencing a population's collective mindset by exploiting our inherent cognitive limitations and biases [1]. It has strongly influenced Western governments over the past century.

You can read it for free, courtesy of the American Studies department at the University of Virginia [2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_%28book%29

[2]: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/Lippman/cover.html

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

#63

Post by atian »

God is the internet annoying there. They randomly drop packets just to disrupt VPN connections. One method may work today but not tomorrow. I've had luck with alternating between obfsproxy and ssh and l2tp.

The truth is that no one cares. Everyone more or less knows, but it's a pain in the ass to bypass.

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

#64

Post by nosuchthing »

sholanozie wrote: post #62
narrator wrote: post #41

The whole Chinese way of doing things makes me think that most people live in enormous Skinner boxes. It makes me reflect on my own media consumption. What messages am I receiving? How are processing those messages affecting my view of the world? What experiences or opportunities am I missing out on because of the messages I am receiving and processing and how they are affecting my internal model of the world? Look a…

You might be interested in Walter Lippman's 'Public Opinion' from 1922. It basically lays the groundwork for manipulating and influencing a population's collective mindset by exploiting our inherent cognitive limitations and biases [1]. It has strongly influenced Western governments over the past century. You can read it for free, courtesy of the American Studies department at the University of Virginia [2]. [1]: htt…

See also: • Edward Bernays, "Public Relations" (1945) [1]

• "Century of the Self", BBC documentary by Adam Curtis [2].

[1] https://archive.org/details/publicrelationse00bernrich

[2] https://vimeo.com/85948693

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

#65

Post by brandon272 »

How do foreigners doing business in China deal with this? Presumably there are a lot of large companies doing very important work and very important deals in China and being able to connect to the company network while they are in China over VPN is necessary?

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

#66

Post by univerio »

brandon272 wrote: post #65

How do foreigners doing business in China deal with this? Presumably there are a lot of large companies doing very important work and very important deals in China and being able to connect to the company network while they are in China over VPN is necessary?

I'm not clear on the details, but the last place I worked at had a (very expensive) tunnel through Hong Kong to our US data center.

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

#67

Post by r00fus »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #42
zhte415 wrote: post #38

What stops meaningful visits from visitors within China to sites hosted outside of China today is, thanks to the prevalence of CDNs, the CDN. 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…

I imagine the things you list are, to the CCP, a feature and not a bug. The harder it is for Chinese to leave the censorship bubble the better. I imagine the end-game for China is a completely cut off internet. Once they have enough domestic services it'll be safe to do. They're just not there yet. My organization was forced to deploy a server in China with specialized content for the Chinese. That server and its con…

Another feature (for the CCP) of disconnecting from the Internet-at-large (and recreating whatever they want within a walled garden) is that then they can work on making the rest of the Internet dangerous or unusable for other countries [1].

With enough support from non-Chinese providers (think: Apple, Cisco, Google, etc), the transition could be entirely smooth to completely disconnect (even to the point where Apple and it's ecosystem are effective replaced by Xiaomi/Huawei at hardware/devices level).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8931827

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

#68

Post by sholanozie »

nosuchthing wrote: post #64
sholanozie wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in Walter Lippman's 'Public Opinion' from 1922. It basically lays the groundwork for manipulating and influencing a population's collective mindset by exploiting our inherent cognitive limitations and biases [1]. It has strongly influenced Western governments over the past century. You can read it for free, courtesy of the American Studies department at the University of Virginia [2]. [1]: htt…

See also: • Edward Bernays, "Public Relations" (1945) [1] • "Century of the Self", BBC documentary by Adam Curtis [2]. [1] https://archive.org/details/publicrelationse00bernrich [2] https://vimeo.com/85948693

Great - thanks a lot for that link to 'Public Relations'. I'll add it to my reading list.

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

#69

Post by jlund »

Joe8Bit wrote: post #15

Now is another good time to remind people of projects like Streisand[0], who make setting up censorship avoiding tools simpler that they otherwise would be. Streisand in particular provides various tools for masking VPN traffic as HTTPS (Stunnel/SSLH et al) that may prove useful during crackdowns like this. As well as setting up things like a tor bridge. One note, there is currently an issue with the Digital Ocean pr…

The DigitalOcean provisioning issue was recently fixed, and creating new droplets is working properly. Making the mirroring segment more resilient to failures is high on my list of priorities. Thanks for the positive feedback!

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

#70

Post by jkaunisv1 »

c1sc0 wrote: post #48
narrator wrote: post #41

The whole Chinese way of doing things makes me think that most people live in enormous Skinner boxes. It makes me reflect on my own media consumption. What messages am I receiving? How are processing those messages affecting my view of the world? What experiences or opportunities am I missing out on because of the messages I am receiving and processing and how they are affecting my internal model of the world? Look a…

Agreed 100%. The media you (choose to?) consume has a profound influence on how you think / feel / react. The only way to win this game is not to participate. But that makes you a loner, "anti-social" etc ...

Well, we do have subcultures/countercultures. You can live a pretty comfortable life consuming non-mainstream media that is just as good and entertaining/informative as the Big stuff.
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