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Comment by manuelabeledo | Hacker News Reader

It is indeed a country full of contradictions.

I was there in 2016, and besides the usual, like Google, Netflix, Facebook or Twitter, most western sites seemed to work, just very, very slow for some reason.

Also, some high end hotels did provide unfettered access to the Internet for some reason, so I guess anyone could go there and browse Facebook for the price of an expensive coffee.

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That time is gone meanwhile. In late 2019 I had a very hard time getting access to my Gmail account, despite trying all the usual workarounds and staying in the best hotels in town. Even non-English news sites were blocked, sites that I could browse freely just a few years ago.

Skype worked ok, but text chat only. Images never arrived.

Funnily enough, Google Fi worked just fine in late 2019.

I’m wondering if foreign SIM cards are not subjected to filtering.

Foreign SIM cards on globs roaming are not passed through the GFW as traffic is carried back to the ‘origin country’ before being sent to the internet writ large. So IP lookups still think you’re in your original country. I used global roaming when working in China to circumvent the GFW (albeit at high expense for data).

I used Google Fi in early 2020 in China.

iirc it really just depended on where you were... Sometimes Fi let me break through the GFW, but it definitely did not in Beijing.

It should always, because the APNs (gateway for your IP packets) for Google Fi are in the US no matter where you are roaming from. That’s standard fare for any cellular service: you always connect to the internet gateways in your provider’s home country when roaming.

During my last visit using GoogleFI, the mobile phone shows a US IP when running whatismyip. So even though the phone is connected to the local telecom 5G network, traffic is segmented and routed back to the US carrier (T-Mobile in AWS US east IP ranges if I remember correctly) before hitting any website. So phones with GoogleFI sim works like a US client with a bit higher latency. This was really nice, but attempting to tether another device to the phone was a highly frustrating exercise as it did not work reliably whatsoever.

Google Fi, along with many other mobile telecoms, tend to limit the speed that you can attain from tethering, especially when roaming. Since computers don’t usually expect this, programs tend to misbehave on such metered connections.

In fact, I built a tool to specifically circumvent this: https://github.com/nneonneo/iOS-SOCKS-Server. It provides a SOCKS proxy through which you can tunnel any TCP connection, and have the connection appear to originate from your phone (and thus not be subject to the tethering rate limit). I used this when I was in China recently (2019).

From what I read, the way mobile data roaming is designed is basically like a VPN that connects you to your own home provider. Thus if you're roaming in China you don't get the renowned GFW hospitality. That's why some local people use foreign / HongKong sim cards for GFW-less mobile data.

> It is indeed a country full of contradictions.

Over the years, I came to understand that contradictions are almost always just false assumptions.

At least in this case, there aren’t any “false assumptions”.

For a country governed by a so called “communist” party, there are glaring inequalities. If we limit ourselves to free Internet usage, it’s clear that the system is designed so poor or uneducated people would only be able to consume government approved content, whereas elites could have access to anything.

Not sure that I understand your take.

How does having "a communist" party imply that there would be no inequalities? Especially given that merely a few decades ago China was poor like hell and everyone outsourced all the cheap labor there?

> it’s clear that the system is designed so poor or uneducated people

Isn't education in China largely sponsored by government?

> it’s clear that the system is designed so poor or uneducated people would only be able to consume government approved content

That's not by design, that's just the virtue of human ingenuity. Give us something we ain't supposed to do, and people will invest a lot of effort to still make it work.

Case in point; For a while Germany wanted to put Internet filters in place, based on DNS blocks [0]

Trivial to circumvent for anybody remotely familiar with networking, yet seemingly impossible for the vast majority of people who have no expertise in the field.

Was it designed like that to lock out the poor, uneducated, Germans?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugangserschwerungsgesetz

>Also, some high end hotels did provide unfettered access to the Internet for some reason, so I guess anyone could go there and browse Facebook for the price of an expensive coffee.

Practically everybody who is knowledgeable with computers uses a VPN - restrictions are only for "the plebs"

Whenever I read about countries banning sites, people post "just use a VPN, lol". But I wonder: If China really wants to, couldn't they just block VPNs? At the worst, just whitelist a bunch of sites and services and literally block everything else?

Technically, VPN apps are banned, and VPN usage by individuals is illegal in China. Don't know how much this is enforced though, probably not much.

The GFW is evolving. Many VPN protocols or servers that worked in the past works no longer. It’s definitely not as simple as “just run a VPN”, but more like a cat and mouse game.

I think this would make unworkable way too many things. Is it even the internet at that point?

They do. They fingerprint for OpenVPN in real time and block it. In 2018 I was cycling through multiple VPNs at a time. The only thing that worked was Shadowsocks.

Can confirm. I setup a Shadowsocks VPN using Streisand on a DO instance at the Singapore data center. That was the only way to get through the firewall.

That’s how I remember a friend advertising Ultrasurf to me — a vpn used in China

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