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Comment by manlio | Hacker News Reader

Slightly OT, but I'm going to travel through China in a couple days and before reading this thread I thought I could get away with my VPN (hosted on my Digital Ocean VPS) plus eventually Tor, but now I'm not quite sure anymore.

Could anybody shed light on this?

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VPN is roughly ok as long as your IP address is not in the blacklist. But it could be unstable. The GFW may drop your connections from time to time. I am not sure about Tor but I believe it probably doesn't work any more. Private VPN/shadowsocks is now the majority I think.

Out of curiosity: what does shadowsocks do that regular SSH tunneling doesn't do?

Why is an entire program needed just to run a simple ssh command? I couldn't find any info on the matter.

Shadowsocks is (arguably) easier to use for ordinary people and better informed. Most people don't even have command line experience before. After all this is one problem limited in one country which couldn't be freely discussed so choices may not be "optimal" in some sense.

Ah thanks. So it doesn't actually offer additional functionality, then?

The best tool I've ever used was https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle , because it was far lower level than a proxy. Unfortunately, it's super unstable on modern OSX versions.

Not quite the same as what you're proposing but here's what I did. My parents were living in china for a few years and I set them up with a squid server on ec2 tokyo region micro instance with a script that would create a ssh tunnel to it and configured the browser to use it. Little hacky but it worked fine.

I've been living in China for over 4 months now, using a simple VPN I setup on Digital Ocean has been the most stable (tunnel stays open for as long as the internet connection is available)

Tor is semi-blocked here, you won't be able to establish a connection to the network without a tunnel.

VPN most likely will work if your server IP is not banned. Tor used to work but was not working last time (one ore two months ago) I tried again. Prepare a SSH tunnel as a backup solution.

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