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Comment by volemo | Hacker News Reader

> A simple, decentralized mesh VPN with WireGuard support.

How does it square up against DPI censorship techniques that successfully block WireGuard?

From personal experience, the great firewall picks up on wireguard usage when tunneling to my home computer (not in China) and throttles the connection. I am guessing that this would have similar limitations when using wireguard.

This is a Chinese project (hosted inside China), so probably not very well.

Au contraire, it is usually developers of Chinese origin that build some of the widely used anti-censorship techniques & protocols.

Ironically, it was American companies that sold firewall tech to the CCP: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-internet-providers-and-g...

Yes, but they don't host those projects inside China. This site is hosted inside China and has an ICP number.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this project (and website) essentially illegal in China?

VPNs in their basic sense are legal in China, many large companies provide them/use them and so on. VPNs designed to bypass the Firewall without government approval are a subset of VPNs which the police do not like.

OK so real VPNs are illegal. Then you have a subsets of VPNs that are regulated by the CCP and therefor legal. And useless for many use-cases.

I would assume EasyTier devs use it to connect their devices within China so the great firewall isn't involved. Attempts to cross the firewall with EasyTier are detectable without things like Tor's pluggable censorship evasion transports.

Why would hosting this website and creating this project be illegal in China?

They're not offering this as a SAAS or something...

Distribution of software that subverts censorship laws.

>China relied on two U.S. companies--Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks--to help carry out its network upgrade, known as "CN2," in 2004. This upgrade significantly increased China’s ability to monitor Internet usage. Cisco also sold several thousand routers (IHT) used to censor web content, and "firm’s engineers have helped set it to spot ’subversive’ key-words in messages."

What's ironic about that? Cisco sold them networking equipment and the CCP used it to censor.

I don't think the issue is about the developers being Chinese at all.

I think the problem comes mainly from the CCP having direct power to pressure the developers.

In any case, I have to say Chinese tech has surely evolved impressively.

Yeah – the shadowsocks developer is Chinese and the government went after them for working on an iOS VPN app back in the day on GitHub. That was a while ago, before the CCP had direct control over the App Store with law.

Surely not publicly on government-licensed websites.

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