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Comment by Macuyiko | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, and if you've ever used a machine in China with that crap installed you know how well that went.

Speaking of China, it has always been strange how well ExpressVPN worked there even during high pressure moments where all other vpn operators bit the dust, with some already wondering a few years ago if there wasn't something more shady going on. Eventually I ended up using some self managed shadowsocks servers and it's been a while, so no idea what the current state of affairs is, but I'm even less convinced to use them now.

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I interviewed with ExpressVPN (NetworkGuard) not too long ago. While the founders are American and they're incorporated in the Virgin Islands, their actual base of operations is Hong Kong and they have no intention of moving out despite the recent upheaval there. So either they have serious guanxi, which seems improbable for pasty white dudes (sorry, but in China race matters), or they're very naive.

They have backdoor for the CCP, but why would they tell you?

Can you expand on the point about race mattering in China in regards to their business approach?

As of 18 months ago to my knowledge most expats still used name brand ExpressVPN, Astrill, etc. while techie types used stuff like v2ray+shadowsocks or shadowsocks alone. Shadowsocks is really underrated, once you’ve found your location, plugins and obfuscation “stack” that just work on the gfw it’s also super handy in other countries that have lighter and less sophisticated censorship.

https://www.v2ray.com/en/.

That was my experience as well. Didn't know about v2ray, thanks!

I've never been to China, but I'm curious - is it possible to connect to EC2 instances in us/eu? Anything stopping an SSH tunnel or wireguard to such a machine?

ML-backed DPI on the great firewall that cuts you off after some time. Plethora of methods to wrap traffic in non-suspicious protos have been made.

I think any VPN service not blocked in China must have backdoors.

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