Comment by blackgear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackgear | Hacker News Reader

This is the end of a century. People in China had used 4 kinds of tools to skip the GFW: freegate, openvpn, goagnet, shadowsocks.

freegate is a traditional http proxy or socks proxy built by Falun Gong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong). They built lots of software with the same technology: freegate gpass freeu dynapass... People share this kind of banned software sending to each others just like teenagers share adult videos. After update of GFW, it become un-available and un-usable.

openvpn turns break GFW as a business, people sells openvpn account at $1.66 a month regularly. They sell this kind of services package including pptp l2tp ssh openvpn to those who need a free network.

goagent is a free software written by Phus Lu. It use Google's application engine as server so you can use it without paying money.So it replaced openvpn since it cost $0. After China banned Google, this way become more and more hard.

shadowsock is a protocol designed by clowwindy. It become a environment. People use python, C, nodejs, golang, rust, obj-c, java to write their own client and server. Some organization share their server for free, some people sell account and provide high speed. shadowvpn works as a VPN while shadowsocks works as a socks5 proxy, but share the same technology.

This is the end of shadowsocks. I means recently more and more evidence shows that GFW has finally find a way to recognize shadowsocks's packets. Then they stopped the development of shadowsocks.

That's all. The winter of China's network comes.

> That's all. The winter of China's network comes.

Is there technical reason to believe that shadowsocks or similar technology is the last stand against automated censorship?

I would just say this is just yet another stage in the censorship/anti-censorship cycle.

I think that is what he meant. Winter is seasonal after all.

I think maybe he meant it as a Russian winter

You may not be seeing the big picture here. Censorship is about rulers cementing their rule, and may well ultimately lead to complete tyranny.

There's no guarantee that "the censorship arms race" will continue, even in your specific nation-state.

For example, I bet there's not much anti-censorship software being developed in North-Korea, because people don't want themselves and their entire families tortured to death.

The real problem here is not that we might be lagging behind governments with our anti-censorship tools. The real problem is the existence of governments to begin with, because as long as they do, they will want to control their subjects as closely as possible.

Policitians and the real rulers behind the scenes are all psychopaths.

They see us as human livestock, and any one of them would be perfectly happy with a global North-Korea, as long as they personally would be in the tiny ruling elite, with all the riches and power a psycho could ever dream of.

> I means recently more and more evidence shows that GFW has finally find a way to recognize shadowsocks's packets.

Hmm... okay, so they defeat shadowsocks by recognizing the packets.

> Then they stopped the development of shadowsocks.

But if they already had shadowsocks beat, why do they make a public show of shutting it down?

Sounds more like they recognize that they don't have the GFW technology to defeat shadowsocks on-going development over time. Which suggests all you need is a new developer.

I don't know if this is the case, but I think it's entirely possible to know that shadowsocks is being used widely without being able to do anything about it at the network level. I think that's plausibly how shadowsocks is designed to avoid the GFW in the first place.

For example, if their capabilities to identify shadowsocks traffic is not particularly specific, filtering would result in undesirable impact on other traffic. They can also have other out-of-band estimates for the extent of shadowsocks use (presence of the software on seized or searched equiment, observed chatter, informants, etc).

There's no such thing as overkill.

actually doing both makes a lot of sense.

a: build a method of detection and prevention and

b: find and coerce developer to stop improving software,

#b is required assuming the developer(s) is considered to be an above average adversary. When there is no silver bullet solution a cat+mouse game is inevitable. That further increases the value of this action.

#a being done at same time as #b has an effect on the collective behavior of the adversary. I'm sure various members for the RIAA and MPAA are wondering how they could have dealt with "filesharing" in a similar manner during the Napster days. But in the end it only buys you time in a cat+mouse games. meh, im sure there is some sun tzu art of war blah blah somewhere saying the same. more poetically of course.

Everyone can just use Lantern (https://www.getlantern.org). They already are, but in greater numbers since the Shadowsocks announcement (https://github.com/trending).

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