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Comment by qybaz | Hacker News Reader

>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"

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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.

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.

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

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

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