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

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81–90 of 94 posts

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

#81
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…

> Would be a picture for the gods having the Chinese executives and CEOs abroad cut off from their email and crying "foul!" "foul!"

The government could care less about the difficulties of CEOs as long as their power is consolidated and ensured. I used to believe that the CPC's first and foremost goal is economy building. How naive I was! Their priority has always been power.

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

#82
Fucked up! Baidu should never be used to search English pages. Even you search English glossary, it will return some unrelated low quality Chinese webs. And in many professional sections, you can only find stupid shallow scraped content in Chinese even with google. When you have to search in English, Bing is the most convenient one left. The problem is I have to speak to myself loudly each time I search in Bing: "is Bing retarded!?" Maybe Bing is trying it's best to be difference from G. Then when G gets most of right results, Bing sucks so hard by bringing tons of heavily SEOed craps.

I use gmail, adsense, google calendar daily, and expecting to use facebook, twitter and other SM daily. I use 3 to 4 methods to get through GFW, none of them can guarantee a stable access. The fuckest thing is I waste 1/3 of my working time only because of the blocking. (Really, when you can’t get through or the speed is too slow, you just don’t know where you’ve surfed to and what you’ve being read for hours).

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

#83
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#84
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While true in a literal sense, it's an insane exercise in false equivalence to compare US censorship practices with the PRCs. You will not see political speech treated as if it were a physical threat here.

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

#85
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While true in a literal sense, it's an insane exercise in false equivalence to compare US censorship practices with the PRCs. You will not see political speech treated as if it were a physical threat here.

Some people need to believe that the West is just as bad as China, reality be damned.

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

#86

Could they ever possibly break an SSH tunnel over port 80/443?

I think that theres evidence they are already doing packet inspection and active interrogation for anything they deem suspicious. So if your SSH tunnel has some recognizable traffic characteristics, it's game over.

There is an option to configure OpenVPN with a fixed key that it uses to encrypt all and any traffic, leaving only random data. That's very desirable right now since there are no easy ways to detect it, but in the future I guess they'll just outright block any traffic that is just too random. Real plaintext traffic, certainly with verbose 1980 protocols like HTTP, trivially fails many randomness tests.

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

#87
Meanwhile China's new upgraded Great Firewall is DDoSing many websites in the west because of the randomness of their DNS Cache Poisoning. For example see our post about it on http://dvps.me/ddos-attack-by-torrent and many more posts like http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=9351951, http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/, http://serverfault.com/questions/656093, http://serverfault.com/questions/658433, http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/01/chinese-bittorrent-the-gift-..., https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Are+You+Piratebay+thepirat... and more.

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

#88

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…

>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?

One day about 5 years ago, I swore in disgust that I would henceforth watch or listen to no more news media. Up to that point, I was a regular listener to NPR and also watched various news shows.

Other than occasional (and usually tech related) news articles on HN, I've kept my promise. And I've been stunned at how my politics and perceptions of the world have changed in just 5 years.

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

#89
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless you are presently in China that seems like overkill - kinda like having a backup plan for your photos that can survive a nuclear war.

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

#90
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cloned this repo on my local machine in case one day all VPN and GitHub itself are blocked.

Unless you are presently in China that seems like overkill - kinda like having a backup plan for your photos that can survive a nuclear war.

Uh, I am a native Chinese in China. This would look like overkill just one year ago, but today it seems more than likely.
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