Show HN: Caonima – A Proxy in the Party | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Caonima – A Proxy in the Party

caonima.io

4 pointsdanielszm5 comments

Caonima provides Shadowsocks as a service. You can think of Shadowsocks as a SOCKS5-based proxy implementation with an extension mechanism. In China, for example, you will want to install and enable the obfuscation plugin to avoid being flagged by the Great Firewall. Like a VPN, a Shadowsocks installation is your gateway to the open Internet in places where access to the network is restricted, whether due to censorship or net neutrality violations. Caonima grew out of my needs as a frequent China traveler. Current status is a minimally viable prototype servicing a handful of users. At this stage I'm interested in collecting feedback and assessing the service's ability to answer the needs of a broader audience. In return, and for the time being, the service is provided for free.

I'm not in your target market but, if I were, answering these questions on the home page might reduce the chance of me bouncing from the home page before registering:

1) What devices can I use this on? (maybe with links to Potatso Lite for iOS, and Shadowsocks for Android)?

2) What plugins do you support (e.g. kcptun)?

3) Where are the servers located? (might reassure people about throughput and latency)

These are really good points. Thank you. Currently, Caonima is optimized for China, so our VPS is located in Japan and the use of the obfuscation plugin is required. After registering, users get a link with their client configuration. Users can connect with any device on which they managed to install the Shadowsocks client and the obfuscation plugin. This seems to be a pain point. Some users do not get past that stage.

Caonima provides a ready-to-use server connection. For client installation, we refer our users to the official Shadowsocks channels. Caonima is compatible with the subset of Shadowsocks clients that support the SIP003 plugins (https://shadowsocks.org/en/spec/Plugin.html). In other words, the better maintained ones, like the C libev implementation. Shadowsocks has a good installation story on Android, too, with the app store and configuration via QR code or paste link. Last time I checked, Potatso on iOS was not supporting the SIP003 plugins.

With Caonima, I was able to watch Youtube videos in China without lag. If there will be demand, we will provide kcptun connections for further optimization.

So here are some questions to which I have no answers yet. Who needs Shadowsocks as a service? People who travel to destinations where the Internet is restricted, and for which the installation and maintenance of a Shadowsocks server is overkill? Expats who expect the best speed and performance from their proxy? ISP customers who suffer from net neutrality violations? Organisations that do business with China, whose employees travel to China, and who might benefit from a lightweight solution?

Ultimately, I hope that the service can prove beneficial to its target audience. It's true that I don't know yet who that is, but I do know that it grows everyday, unfortunately. We live in a world where open, unfettered access to the Internet is becoming less rather than more self-evident.

I tried ssh tunneling in Beijing. it was only usable for a few minutes, then they obviously detected I was using it for http. And the speed was slowed down to an unusable level.

I searched, there are tools that can hide the real message in fake http messages.

How does this tool obfuscate the traffic?

Via special purpose plugins.

Simple obfuscation: https://github.com/shadowsocks/simple-obfs Or GoQuiet: https://github.com/cbeuw/GoQuiet

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