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Comment by asteroidburger | Hacker News Reader

If I can afford a seat above economy with room to actually, comfortably work on a laptop, I can afford the couple bucks for wifi for the flight.

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If you are assuming that your Hainan airlines flight has wifi that isn't behind the GFW, even outside of cattle class, I have some news for you...

Getting around the GFW is trivially easy.

ya ya, just buy a VPN, pay the yearly subscription, and then have them disappear the week after you paid. Super trivially frustrating.

VPN providers are first and foremost trust businesses. Why would you choose and pay one that is not well established and trusted? Mine have been there for more than a decade by now.

Alternatively, you could just set up your own (cheaper?) VPN relay on the tiniest VPS you can rent on AWS or IBM Cloud, right?

The VPN providers that get you to jump the cloud in China are Chinese, and China is not yet a high trust society, just like how they’ll take your payment for one year of gym fees and then disappear the next week (sigh). If AWS or IBM cloud find out you are using them as a VPN to jump the GFW, they will ban you for life, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, aren’t interested in having their whole cloud added to the GFW block list. Many people have tried this (including Microsfties in China with free Azure credits) and they’ve all been dealt with harshly by the cloud providers.

Woah there Mr Money, slow down with these assumptions. A computer is worth the investment. But paying a cent extra to airlines? Unacceptable.

The $3000 that a MBP M3 Max with 64GB of RAM costs might cover a round trip business class ticket for a trans pacific…if it is on sale (a Chinese carrier probably with GFW internet).

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