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Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

The article says the lift is only for foreign visitors, and because they plan to turn those parts of Hainan into free-trade zones. Could this be a trial for rolling out the same thing in other places (i.e. SEZs) where foreigners concentrate? Then they could get the benefits of domestic censorship without foreigners loudly posting about how they can't reach Facebook for the next 2 months, and making China look bad.

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It’s probably not so much about not looking bad and more about enabling productivity. I’m sure they are getting pushback from many companies which interact with foreign nationals whose work is affected by the GFoC.

> It’s probably not so much about not looking bad and more about enabling productivity. I’m sure they are getting pushback from many companies which interact with foreign nationals whose work is affected by the GFoC.

Anecdote time: I once met a mainland Chinese software engineer who told me that his department pays for a VPN subscription so they can access the uncensored internet for work.

I can imagine it's impacting productivity in a negative way for software. The VPN isn't going to work 100% of the time and when it does not work you will have half of the docs you need not replicated enough on the local internet.

They could also just lease a line directly out from China telecom.

I was told by someone high up in IT, 99% of wealthy mainlanders all use V-P-N. Not going to fool or pull wool over eyes of the intelligent with big money.

I visit China every couple of years. I used to work remotely while I was there, but these days I’ve given up on the idea. It used to be easy, just ssh tunnel to a friendly server and you’re all set. Now they block every technique I can come up with and fuck up the entire connection if you make a wrong move. There are specialist VPN services that still work, but it’s a real pain to figure out which ones work and which ones used to work and are now broken, and you can’t count on anything continuing to work.

With the risk of sounding like a shill, I have been using HMA Pro for almost 5 years now to connect to social networks and Apple's messaging services. Aside from power/local internet outages I have not had issues connecting to "blocked" services.

I don’t care if you are shilling, I’m glad to know about more stuff that might work.

Amusingly when I go to their homepage Chrome hits me with NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID. All I know is that I use it and it works, albeit slowly.

Mosh over any vpn worked when I was there.

They're currently cracking down hard on VPNs from what I've heard.

I was just in China, this worked most of the time although slow: https://getoutline.org/en/home

If you have ssh access to a friendly server you can use shadowsocks. It is easy to set up (no certificates and mucking with firewall rules like VPN), and works perfectly, at least for me.

Last time I tried, ssh worked fine for interactive command line use but got throttled to death if I tried to proxy other traffic through it. It seems like they’re doing traffic analysis to see which connections are acting like VPNs.

Yeah, one other thing that works is to use a foreign wireless connection (of course it is carried by ChinaTelecom etc) like AT&T or BT. I've rarely seen those connections blocked, even when hotel/local wired connections and the company VPN were all... "slowing down" for certain sites.

I haven't been to Hainan though so I don't know about any particular issues there.

It works because the local telco is actually relaying the data frames back to the home telco (beyond the firewall) instead of terminating the data session themselves within the firewall.

I know they block roaming sims from certain countries after few month in the country

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