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Comment by mystraline | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, my VPN provider explicitly has Chinese exit points. And whats funny is I can load AliPay from any CVS. (Like, seriously)

You can try to pry Qwen and Deepseek from my Graphene/Linux hands.

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What VPN provider is this? I could use it because Chinese users of my apps often complain about not being able to download things from my western hosted servers.

Just an anecdote,

I lived in China for a bit years ago and one the biggest issues accessing western websites weren't restrictions against the site. Most of the times the culprit was using CDNs or services from Google or Cloudflare which were restricted totally or partially.

I was working on a site around that time, learned about that fixed it for the chinese user base, after that users from china went up considerably.

Not sure if having point of presence (POP) managed DNS for China is of interest, but my company offers something for China traffic [0].

Disclosure: I’m an IBMer

[0] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ns1-connect?topic=started-manage...

When I was in China the only VPN that worked using China mobile and other local ISPs was Lets VPN, they route through HK.

PIA is my VPN vendor. They and Proton both support port forwarding. Port forwarding is a hard requirement of what I do.

And given Proton CEO's support of the US administration (specifically for Vance), I chose to cancel my subscription of 3 years with them.

Why do you need to "load" Alipay?

You can just have them charge your CC directly whenever you make a payment? Or is this blocked for US cards somehow?

CVS?

CVS (drugstore chain) and Walgreens were among the first major U.S. merchants to accept Alipay via QR code payments, allowing Chinese consumers (and anyone with Alipay) to pay at these stores.

This person is correct.

I pay for 2 servers running in Asia under Alibaba, using my local CVS drugstore. Im in the Midwest USA. Not a single problem at all.

Sorry, I am not familiar with Alipay, at least in the use case you're referring to; How do you exactly pay for 2 servers using Alipay from a CVS?

I can load US dollars I hand over to the CVS attendant and load it on my AliPay (Alibaba account).

I can then pay my Alibaba server bills with Alipay.

Is there an intermediary?

The cash doesn’t go directly from CVS to AliPay, right?

CVS also accepts alipay as a payment method, so they must have some kind of direct partnership. I don't see why they'd need an intermediary, although maybe they take the cash and just credit alipay some balance etc.

Super interesting and unexpected!

Thanks (to all!).

Why not just go directly from a credit card to alipay? Does that not work when physically outside of China?

Hmm I have a couple Alibaba Cloud servers located in CN Hangzhou region and I just pay with my U.S. credit card, no Alipay needed. alibabacloud.com is meant for international customers anyway. I’m not sure if aliyun.com accepts international CCs, maybe you’re using that.

I also have at times ordered deliverables on Alibaba (not aliexpress). Being able to send funds in yuan over Ali network solves almost all problems with that.

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