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“Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

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Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#511

Post by sciguy77 »

hussong wrote: post #504
guard-of-terra wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oppression causes civil wars. If they are using oppression to avoid disorder, they better have long term plan. Otherwise they are digging their own grave. Not many people fear of chaos in the USA and not because they have the best firewall.

Millions of doomsday preppers may disagree.

> Millions

There are not millions of doomsday preppers in the US. And their obsession is not representative of public will or sentiment.

The comment you're replying to said: >Not many people fear of chaos in the USA and not because they have the best firewall

So you seem to be saying that if the US had a Great Firewall the nutjobs who spend half their salary on underground bunkers and armament wouldn't. That's a pretty silly argument.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#512

Post by mejari »

seesomesense wrote: post #488
njloof wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And let's not forget BlueCoat. These are our colleagues designing and implementing these tools of oppression. We should ask them why they exercise their talents in this way.

"Of the ten conflicts in human history with the highest death tolls, five were civil wars in China. Chief among these was the Three Kingdoms War when up to 40 million are reckoned to have perished in military operations and from the destructive consequences of warfare. This is an enormous number, considering that the global population at that time is unlikely to have exceeded 400 million. More recently, the Taiping R…

Wait, I may be misunderstanding your comment, but are you saying you support censorship by the Chinese government on the basis of some paternalistic "those dang Chinese can't handle themselves and start a-killin' if they get to know too much, so it's better to keep them in the dark"?

Also, when quoting large blocks of text it is usually helpful to source that quote.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#513

Post by fisheuler »

fxckgfw wrote: post #332
leoc wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allegedly it's mostly or at least originally Cisco's technology: https://insidersurveillance.com/cisco-huawei-and-semptian-a-... .

At first China also used Cisco's stuff, but soon they could't keep up with the requirements of the Chinese govt. After that a man usually criticized to be "the father of GFW", FANG Binxing, came up and built more powerful censorship hardware and software for the govt at Beihang U. It is said that they now use supercomputers to parse, analyse and block (and even inject, remember GitHub?) all packages going through the…

There's one mistake on your statements. It's at Beiyou U that Fang Binxing get all those things dones.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#514

Post by i336_ »

Rangi42 wrote: post #10

This wasn't a thorough deletion. The shadowsocks-iOS project has been switched to the 'rm' branch, but the 'master' branch still contains all the source code: https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-iOS/tree/master There's also a downloadable 2.6.3 release with a built .dmg and source code: https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-iOS/releases Even if it does get completely removed, a duplicate exists on GitLab:…

http://1drv.ms/1MLKiTr

Someone in this subthread mentioned something about a commit hash. This is important.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#515

Post by joshYarnspinner »

superuser2 wrote: post #500
zhte415 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Big foreign corporations, like in all countries, VPN back to their home country. The same all over the world. Internal policy dictates this, all over the world. Email is usually on self-hosted Exchange. Corporate firewall blocks stuff like Youtube and Facebook - also the same over the world, but some users with the business need can access whatever the business need dictates. Some large companies just bypass the…

So exemptions from the VPN detection/shutdown mechanism can simply be negotiated by those with the political clout to do so?

Indeed. The point of the GFW is to prevent political unrest. MNC's workers are unlikely to be fermenting dissent at work. Deploying the GFW on their connections doesn't really aid the government as a whole in terms of staying in power, but it does mean that MNCs will get pissed off and may reduce their presence in China.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#516

Post by mainguy »

ColinWright wrote: post #186
loser777 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting... I was just in China recently and was sshing into a box I had in the states for an impromptu SOCKS proxy. I did notice that things would work fine for up to an hour or so before things started bogging down. I would start seeing "channel x: open failed..." errors. However, closing the session and reconnecting would fix the problem... until it started lagging out again. I thought it was just a conseq…

I'm always brought up short when someone says/writes "24/7/365" because it really doesn't make sense. "24/7" means 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "24/365" means 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. "24/7/365" means 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 weeks a year? I know, I know, it's become an idiom, and it's like "I could care less", and you can't try to understand it except as an atom that caries a meaning, but it…

24/7/52 does seem more logical...

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#517

Post by rahimnathwani »

vpndada wrote: post #484
sdm wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience ... spending a lot of time working in China ... most people use Astrill or ExpressVPN. I'm surprised no one has mentioned them here yet. They own the VPN market in China. Almost every senior developer I've met here subscribes to one or the other -- with Astrill being far ahead in terms of user base. They both champion their "stealth" options and other than the odd day you don't really notice the GFW.…

Yes, Astrill and Express VPN has been popular in China. But probably because they are too well-known, their services are not totally reliable. Instead, some smaller VPN providers now offer better services. Check out this test result: http://www.vpndada.com/best-vpns-for-china/

I visited your page expecting to see details of a testing methodology, along with results for a number of providers. However, the information you provide is no better than that provided by friends' anecdotes.

"Reason for Recommending: Reliable connection, fast speed. Fast customer support."

What do you mean by 'reliable'? What do you mean by 'fast'? Are you talking about latency or throughput?

"Reason for not recommending: sometimes hard to connect"

How many times out of ten? Using which VPN protocol(s)? Was this using PPTP, or OpenVPN over stunnel?

I run my own VPN servers (for myself and friends) but of course there is some ongoing maintenance effort to add new servers to replace those for which latency and/or throughput have declined. If there were a site with specific data about different companies' performance (over time), that would help me to decide whether it's still worth the effort.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#518

Post by rahimnathwani »

gonehome wrote: post #335
mrb wrote: post #54

I was visiting China recently (my first time there). I thought bypassing The Great Firewall was going to be as simple as an "ssh -D" SOCKS setup, or a "ssh -w" tunnel. Oh boy, I was wrong. If you try this, or even a basic OpenVPN setup, you will quickly find out your VPN works fine for about 5 minutes, but then latency increases to 5sec, 10sec, 30sec(!), and then everything times out. After some research I read onlin…

This is a great talk about some of the methods China and other governments use to block the Tor network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMr8Xl7JMQ It's a pretty sophisticated arms race that's lead to some cool stuff, notably pluggable transports (like the obfsproxy you mentioned): https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html.en Unfortunately the companies that enable this deep packet inspection are oft…

Note: that video is from 2011, and in my experience China's VPN blocking has changed significantly over that time. In 2011, I could use OpenVPN over UDP reliably, as long as I didn't use the same port for every connection. That is no longer the case, and I'm grateful for Shadowsocks as it's easy to set up (both server-side and Android client) than OpenVPN over stunnel.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#519

Post by rahimnathwani »

loser777 wrote: post #91
mrb wrote: post #54

I was visiting China recently (my first time there). I thought bypassing The Great Firewall was going to be as simple as an "ssh -D" SOCKS setup, or a "ssh -w" tunnel. Oh boy, I was wrong. If you try this, or even a basic OpenVPN setup, you will quickly find out your VPN works fine for about 5 minutes, but then latency increases to 5sec, 10sec, 30sec(!), and then everything times out. After some research I read onlin…

Very interesting... I was just in China recently and was sshing into a box I had in the states for an impromptu SOCKS proxy. I did notice that things would work fine for up to an hour or so before things started bogging down. I would start seeing "channel x: open failed..." errors. However, closing the session and reconnecting would fix the problem... until it started lagging out again. I thought it was just a conseq…

Were your DNS queries going over SOCKS?

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#520

Post by rahimnathwani »

kuschku wrote: post #276
gozo wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Apps will drain your battery when they can't access Google's servers. Roaming with a China Unicom Hong Kong sim card, like the cross border king, will give you gfw free access.

> Google Apps will drain your battery Google Apps will also drain your battery if you are in a region where Google has no network-location data yet, because then Google will turn on your GPS, and send to their servers the pair of GPS-coords and strength of networks. If you live in a suburb in Germany where almost no networks are known to Google, this means if you enable location services your GPS will try to get a fi…

I think you can turn this off. My phone has a setting called 'Scanning always available', which says "Let Google's location service and other apps scan for networks, even when Wi-Fi is off.". If I turn off this setting, and turn off wi-fi, then the problem you point out should be avoided, right?
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