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Comment by yellow_lead | Hacker News Reader

In the introduction, they lightly recommend VPNs. I would recommend using a SOCKS5 proxy instead if you're in China and looking to get past the firewall. Shadowsocks is purpose built for this [1]. You can easily set it up on a droplet or vultr before you travel. If it gets blocked, changing the port number can usually suffice.

[1] https://shadowsocks.org/en/index.html

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Actually , shadowsocks can be easily detected and got blocked nowadays , try to use V2Ray instead . Here is the website : https://www.v2ray.com/en/index.html

Shadowsocks usually works fine. Source: I'm posting though it right now.

GFW enforcement varies considerably by provider and region. In my experience, 广东省 is less strict than most other provinces.

This looks quite good. I'll try it next time I'm in China, thank you.

You can also just use a phone plan with roaming, as they aren't affected by the firewall. The guide says it's pricey, but Google Fi doesn't charge extra for roaming. I got around China last year with it, including some fairly remote parts.

+1 on Google Fi. I go back to China every year and Google Fi works out well.

Or stop by Hong Kong first and get your SIM there (from a mainland ISP.) Because it's a mainland ISP, you'll have coverage anywhere in China without roaming; and since the SIM was issued for Hong Kong, it won't route through the Great Firewall, even when in the mainland.

FWIW, I went to China last week, and sadly found out that Google Fi doesn't (yet?) support tethering while roaming on iOS. It's an annoying restriction; I worked around it with a local SOCKS5 proxy running on my iPhone, but I would have preferred not to have to hack around it at all.

To be fair, having an iPhone and Fi automatically makes me a bit of a second-class citizen with Fi, but hey, it's the cheapest way for me to have international roaming.

You can use Streisand to setup VPN on digitalocean (or linode, AWS, GCP, etc.)

It includes Shadowsocks: https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand

What are droplets and vultrs?

A droplet is a VPS instance on digitalocean.com.

vultr is for another provider that I haven’t heard of. (I use linode.com)

Vultr is just another host provider. They have cheap instances. Vultr.com

Droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/

Vultrs: https://www.vultr.com/

Is this better than an SSH socks proxy?

Yes because SSH is easily detectable using deep packet inspection and is usually blocked by the GFW; whereas Shadowsocks is (still?) hard to detect.

Shadow socks is being detected today unfortunately but it takes a few days. There are many tricks that could be used to fool DPI, but not many options out there unfortunately. Good project idea for sure.

As of this August just gone, SS and Wireguard were my go-to options. I also had my parents use Wireguard about 2 months ago with no issues.

The great firewall picks up the traffic pattern of SSH tunneled socks and kills your connection within a couple of minutes.

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