41–50 of 62 posts
Before travel to China, create a throwaway email account on a service, possibly Yahoo. Don't touch your real email accounts while you're there, if possible. The only time I've ever had an email account hacked is following use in China.
Before travel to China, create a throwaway email account on a service, possibly Yahoo. Don't touch your real email accounts while you're there, if possible. The only time I've ever had an email account hacked is following use in China.
Having been there, this is honestly very good advice.
Here is a real test for Anonymous; take down the worlds most notorious firewall.
The lulz does not seem like a fair reward when the adversary's not even slightly squeamish about abducting you and your family and selling your organs.
This sucks for travelers and ex-pats, but for China's future this is a very, very, very big deal. I lived in Shanghai last year, and Chinese Internet surveillance is unreal. I could use gmail chat to talk about tiananman square, but as soon as I did all of my Google apps would suddenly be unavailable. I can only assume that when i used certain keywords my every chat was being monitored. A VPN was the only way I could…
Or does China not allow connecting to foreign websites via HTTPS?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh wow, this is not good. Is it possible to evade this sniffing? I have my own Linode VPS, and have learnt to use Tinc VPN software. I'm learning Mandarin and plan to travel to China in a year or few, so this censorship makes me sad and hits my motivation.
Many of us on the mainland ("us" being the type of people who would read HN) have switched to SSH proxies over port 443. Sshuttle [1] is highly recommended. 1. https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle
I wonder how much longer till Chinese avoidance VPN tech needs to resort to stenography in images to transfer data. Masking data as cat pictures would be slow but not automatically detectable.
I used to run a relatively successful internet-oriented startup in mainland China. Having spent most of a decade there since 2001, in fact the majority of my adult life, I considered it home. Unfortunately, the government - who initially woeed me to return to China with a reasonably lucrative scholarship - keeps making shitty decisions that just make it less and less attractive to live in. Increasing levels of intern…
I used to run a relatively successful internet-oriented startup in mainland China. Having spent most of a decade there since 2001, in fact the majority of my adult life, I considered it home. Unfortunately, the government - who initially woeed me to return to China with a reasonably lucrative scholarship - keeps making shitty decisions that just make it less and less attractive to live in. Increasing levels of intern…
Out of curiosity, what was the startup?
I gave up on it because, despite basically winning Europe's largest travel-industry VC event in London in 2009, I didn't find a viable source of venture capital to expand our marketing, once the system was proven and almost break-even on self-funded capital. Basically locals wanted to take over, and foreigners didn't trust the Chinese legal system. I write it off as my 'Chinese MBA' now, and happily take a salary and less stress instead.
I'd be interested to pick it up again, if I found the right backers.
PS. Oh! David! Hey .. I think we corresponded once before. :)
Time to create Bitcoin-enabled p2p VPN market? I have thought about the idea for some time. The marketplace operator could take something like 30% cut. Any private invidual could sell their internet connection to the chinese and earn some bitcoins in the process. There could be some rules which could stop the chinese goverment from knowing which IP's operate in the market. For example, someone could buy certain VPN/I…
This is nothing new. They have added more IPs to the VPN blocklist. I have no idea why this is news. This happens several times per year. This cat and mouse game has been going on for years. Every time this happens it is just a pain in the ass to find a new VPN that isn't blocked. If you are technical, it is best to just setup your own VPN on linode or amazon. That way you have less problems with blocked IPs.
This is what they used to do, but they've gotten more sophisticated - I've been running VPNs for China for my family on EC2 for a while. As far as I can tell, they almost never flat out block an IP. Initially they block a DNS hostname from resolving to a specific IP, then they start filtering out various different ports (including the default VPN ones). You can normally change to a random port and get OpenVPN to star…
This sucks for travelers and ex-pats, but for China's future this is a very, very, very big deal. I lived in Shanghai last year, and Chinese Internet surveillance is unreal. I could use gmail chat to talk about tiananman square, but as soon as I did all of my Google apps would suddenly be unavailable. I can only assume that when i used certain keywords my every chat was being monitored. A VPN was the only way I could…