ssh -D8888 - SOCKS proxy port 8888. SSH is not VPN ;)
China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February
71–80 of 141 posts
Re: China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February
#72Time to get funds for 443 port vpn startups. ;) Hint: TLS encrypted traffic following an appropriate browser-style handshake cannot be distinguished from "legitimate" https.
Yes, it can. By watching the size and timing of flows with 'regular HTTPS' traffic vs 'VPN HTTPS' traffic, it can be distinguished.
It should be https-inside-https (or http2 or even plain TLS) scheme for multiple AWS IPs. A bit laggy but will do the job.
Wildcard blocking of these would break too many legitimate services, including banking, airlines, etc.
BTW, the task of DPI-ing of all https traffic on the operator side is intractable.
Re: China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
DPS will give you nice and beautifully encrypted payloads. Now what? Emulating a standard browser TLS handshake is a no-brainer.
The handshake is only one of the many giveaways of a VPN connection. A single HTTPS connection has a certain normal pattern of traffic that is very different from a VPN connection. VPN connections often persist, with bursts of activity as pages are loaded. Even if you repeatedly put up and tear down the VPN connection, you're exchanging large amounts of traffic with a single IP address, which is not typical of normal…
There are lots of corporate VPNs and RPCs. Blocking of these will result in a disaster. So, just mimic, say, one of hundreds Microsoft Windows 10 user data collecting services.
AWS traffic also never will be blocked.
Notice that a selective blocking is not the same as real-time https inspection and filtering, which is an intractable task.
Re: China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February
#74Expats/foreigners/immigrants make heavy use of VPNs according to friends I have. I don't live in China but if I did and this was successful this would be a serious reason to consider leaving for me, access to the internet and www is just too important nowadays.
Re: China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
GFW does not just inspect traffic, it actively probes server IP:ports looking for its responses, can replay packets you sent legitimately, and can impersonate IP addr behind GFW. As in, it is not only a passive observer periodically resetting connections, it will also make its own to test the waters
I would love to see a write up about that. Got a source?
Here's a few that I dug up from 15 mins of googling:
- In-Depth Analysis of the Great Firewall of China. Has other good sources at the bottom: http://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/116/archive/fall2016/ctang.pdf
- How China is Blocking Tor: https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0447
- Summary of "How China is Blocking Tor" from MIT Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427413/how-china-blocks-t...
Re: China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
thanks for giving me that information... Well, I noticed there had been a pattern for my multiple posts on this topic that, for several times, each time when a post was downvoted, it was double downvoted... So either it was a very synchronized move by several independent minds, or more likely, it was from a same mind who operates several accounts... Edit 1: I personally would not mind at all that any of my posts has…
I downvoted your initial post because, even if I don't think information restriction is right, I don't think it's on the same moral level as slavery. And additionally, modern archeologists don't believe the workers constructing the pyramids were slaves as such. They were citizens working for the state. In some theories, the arrangement is arguably a form of slavery, but I think we'd usually call the arrangement serfd…
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Re: China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't downvote people who reply to you, so more likely is that rather than being 'double downvoted' by someone, multiple people find your argument unpersuasive.
thanks for giving me that information... Well, I noticed there had been a pattern for my multiple posts on this topic that, for several times, each time when a post was downvoted, it was double downvoted... So either it was a very synchronized move by several independent minds, or more likely, it was from a same mind who operates several accounts... Edit 1: I personally would not mind at all that any of my posts has…
> So either it was a very synchronized move by several independent minds, or more likely, it was from a same mind who operates several accounts...
The latter seems unlikely. You can't downvote until you've accumulated 500 karma (might even be higher now).
That means that in order for someone you replied to downvote you twice, they'd need two separate 500+ karma accounts in addition to their main account (which they wouldn't be able to use to downvote you from).
That's a lot of work just to be petty in the case someone online disagrees with you.
If multiple posts of yours are receiving multiple downvotes, then some reflection might be in order before casting aspersions elsewhere, because it's likely the posts that are problematic.
(And complaining about downvotes is almost guaranteed to get you further downvotes).
Re: China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like it or not, the GFW helped to created the "most dramatic periods of economic development" in Chinese history. Back in 2010, when Google chose to exit China, many argued the exact same that China is isolating itself from the outside. Such feeling is understandable from a western point of view, I mean for anyone from a western background there is simply no Internet if google/twitter/fb etc. are all unavailable. How…
Where are you in China? I just spent a week in a relatively small city in Shandong and there were so many places that were cash only. Couldn't even use card, let alone mobile.
I live in Shanghai. You can still see people paying cash here but mostly from those who don't use any tech/electronics. Not talking about big/fancy businesses, most street food vendors accept/encourage mobile payment, beggars are holding their printed QR code signs asking for changes paid by mobile.
Re: China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
thanks for giving me that information... Well, I noticed there had been a pattern for my multiple posts on this topic that, for several times, each time when a post was downvoted, it was double downvoted... So either it was a very synchronized move by several independent minds, or more likely, it was from a same mind who operates several accounts... Edit 1: I personally would not mind at all that any of my posts has…
I downvoted your initial post because, even if I don't think information restriction is right, I don't think it's on the same moral level as slavery. And additionally, modern archeologists don't believe the workers constructing the pyramids were slaves as such. They were citizens working for the state. In some theories, the arrangement is arguably a form of slavery, but I think we'd usually call the arrangement serfd…
Thanks for letting me know about that, and kindly took the time to provide your reasoning to justify your downvoting...
Well, as I previously stated, that there were multiple concurrent downvotings cast to my multiple posts on this topic, all in a short period of time, and then there weren't many downvotings afterwards...this well synchronized pattern, occurring multiple times, would make one to think, there is a certain level of dependencies behind these actions (and in short, from a statistical point of view, a normal distribution can be normal only because its data are independent -- and by standard normal distribution, we could maximize our information output -- and I thought that is the goal of this forum)...
There had been known information manipulation effected by the Chinese government over many information outlets even outside that country -- so combined with my previously stated observation, I have enough reason to doubt that the coordinated downvoting is a manipulated result...even if there is only one downvote from you -- as there are more than two downvotings, without giving a single word of counter-argument, until your post....
As for the second point, either "slavery" or "serfdom" is only a term, used to describe the situation of severe economic inequality in a society...and this inequality, and information manipulation are my argument points -- actually, I am more interested in the current situation in China than that in the ancient Egypt...
As for the third point,
> modern archeologists don't believe the workers
> constructing the pyramids were slaves as such
Lastly, it's okay for you to downvote my post about the fact that my posts were downvoated...even if you are going to downvote that based on the sole reason that you took it for complaining or so, I am still going to voice out my observation there...
Re: China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February
#80I'm headed to china next week for a few weeks. I need access to at least Gmail. Are there any suggestions here on an easy way to get around it for a VPN noob? I'm usually fine using PrivateInternetAccess but I'm sure that is blocked there.
Shadowsocks-libev on a Linux box hosted at AWS Tokyo region works great. Digital Ocean Singapore region is awful, at least right now. I find ExpressVPN performs very poorly most of the time. Not sure about PIA.