How would (will?) China react if Musk gets his low-earth orbit satilites providing Internet globally? I assume China could block the domestic sale of the receivers. But in the long run, a globally accessible Internet would raise interesting issues, and perhaps be seen as an act of aggression by regimes in North Korea, China, etc.
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’
#72The 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 ...
I've found that "hyper-nicheing" via twitter is a good way to go. I basically follow specific niche interests that I have and unfollow anyone who mentions any mainstream news. I just don't need those messages to achieve any of my goals. I dig deep into the message areas I'm interested in.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#73God 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.
I know China uses a lot of Linux... how the hell do they get by with SSH?! If you are an administrator wouldn't SSH immediately flag you as using a VPN?
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Scary in what sense? Could you elaborate whether you are talking in terms of security, backdoors etc. or just buggy badly organized code?
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#75The 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…
Your media is your eyes and ears. They can manipulate your actions just manipulating what you people see.
When you travel around the world, this is the first thing you learn: all the people, in all countries are manipulated by the media, controlled by the power structures.
"If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"
The Merchant of Venice
There is an almost automatic response from an stimulus you perceive. Being real or artificially created does not matter for the brain.
In the supposedly "free countries", they just control the media that most people watch. Most people just does not care.
For example, most Americans have a SouthPark puppet idea of Saddam Hussein, but he was a very smart person. As this person spoke a different language, you could portray the idea that is convenient for helping the interest of the people in power, basically invading a foreign country for stealing their oil.
Most Americans believe that they invaded Iraq because extending democracy, weapons of mass destruction or whatever. But it only takes an hour of talking with real Iraqis(or traveling to Iraq) to know better.
Just one thing, how many films have you seen about Hitler and Nazism, and how many about Stalin that killed more than Hitler. It was not convenient to portray Stalin as he was when he was alive.
Have you seen the image of Putin in the Western media today. Again, just understanding Russian makes a huge difference in how they could manipulate you.
Putin also manipulates their people, but he is not the only one.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#76At Tinfoil Security we wrote a service for generating disposable VPNs on the fly. It's open source, and I personally made use of it while in China a few weeks ago.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#77This 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…
the DNS poisoning is annoying. I'm on the receiving end of 200 requests per second from people who think I'm facebook, bittorrent trackers, various porn sites.
I finally blocked port 80 for lots of chinese IP blocks.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#78What 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…
It's not just autocracy. The US government is quite aggressive in shutting down websites that spread information it doesn't like. They also sometimes go further and arrest and imprison the operators. Examples include gambling, piracy and drug trading sites.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#79My 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.
Try to setup a cloud service that is not from Google, e.g. Amazon AWS or MS Azure.
Connection to Amazon AWS is frequently disrupted by GFW (but not completely blocked like Google's services). I don't know about MS Azure, but nothing is safe these days.
Re: China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
#80Now 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!
I cloned this repo on my local machine in case one day all VPN and GitHub itself are blocked.