China Cracks Down on VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’
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It's a tragedy really. I am one guy, but I've since hired several developers and my little company is gaining traction -- we would have been happy to expand our footprint into China in terms of hiring a Shanghai Dev team; yet with the variable and unknown stability of our connections, it was too big of a risk, considering we can operate in Europe and the U.S. with minimal interference.
My conclusion was that it has become effectively impossible to run a western IT-oriented business from Shanghai. Would be interested in hearing stories of people who DO succeed.
Sad thing is that all the infrastructure is in place: plenty of fast finer in the big cities & the "local", balkanised version of the "internet" works fine.
I mean using a VPN service or Tor public server is like weaving a banner saying Hey I'm trying to bypass you!.
I was able to browse the internet connecting through my home's OpenVPN (DDNS and all) when I was in China (for vacations mostly and some work) without any problems.
Of course a home ADSL pipe is good only for 'www' and maybe not even for that, but now a VPS costs ~ 10 USD per month and has enough bandwidth for most people.
I finally blocked port 80 for lots of chinese IP blocks.
The problem is, government doesn't actually care. They see political stability as the top priority. To achieve it, they are willing to sacrifice foreign business chances.
Streisand in particular provides various tools for masking VPN traffic as HTTPS (Stunnel/SSLH et al) that may prove useful during crackdowns like this. As well as setting up things like a tor bridge.
One note, there is currently an issue with the Digital Ocean provisioning, which prevents it from completing initial setup, but I have easily and successfully setup instance on Rackspace and AWS recently.
Look at people who get addicted to MMOs like World of Warcraft for example. They voluntarily limit themselves to the messages they receive from the game and this influences their behavior significantly.
The proof that control of these messages and what message are received by people is an extremely valuable commodity is that advertising is a multi-trillion dollar industry.
Even if everything was perfectly truthful, there is only a small amount of time for people to digest and absorb the world with their limited perception. Thus, the control of which limited set of messages that people receive is also a huge source of power and why a commercial in the super bowl is worth more than a random banner ad on some no-name website.
Reddit, Twitter and most social media are attempts to optimize this messaging problem.
You can read it for free, courtesy of the American Studies department at the University of Virginia [2].
• "Century of the Self", BBC documentary by Adam Curtis [2].
When you travel around the world, this is the first thing you learn: all the people, in all countries are manipulated by the media, controlled by the power structures.
"If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"
The Merchant of Venice
There is an almost automatic response from an stimulus you perceive. Being real or artificially created does not matter for the brain.
In the supposedly "free countries", they just control the media that most people watch. Most people just does not care.
For example, most Americans have a SouthPark puppet idea of Saddam Hussein, but he was a very smart person. As this person spoke a different language, you could portray the idea that is convenient for helping the interest of the people in power, basically invading a foreign country for stealing their oil.
Most Americans believe that they invaded Iraq because extending democracy, weapons of mass destruction or whatever. But it only takes an hour of talking with real Iraqis(or traveling to Iraq) to know better.
Just one thing, how many films have you seen about Hitler and Nazism, and how many about Stalin that killed more than Hitler. It was not convenient to portray Stalin as he was when he was alive.
Have you seen the image of Putin in the Western media today. Again, just understanding Russian makes a huge difference in how they could manipulate you.
Putin also manipulates their people, but he is not the only one.
Im going through this now, having just returned to the UK after a number of years away. Last time I felt this way was when i left a village bubble for the bubble of London village.
That said - I'm amazed at how 'broken' everything is - schools, doctors, police, roads. And so much of London is still 'up and coming', i.e. a dump.
However, it can't have changed that much. Friends are still comfortably numb and tolerant of the entropy and propaganda. As I was before - indeed, I maintained a rosy view of Blighty all my time outside and it served as my benchmark for other countries. Im sure the change is more with me - I see this place with new eyes and feel like a foreigner tbh. It's an interesting position. Travel (not tourism) perhaps doesn't broaden the mind as much as create a cognitive dissonance. We deal with it by either denial and retreating into our set patterns or adapting. The former is a living death. Embrace change or be consumed by it.
wrt UK - gov here is stealthily setting up their own great wall. Given the well established corporate news filters, speech censorship and language planning, its no longer in anyones interest to speak openly in public. What a system we have created for ourselves!
Still as Kierkegaard reminded us: people lay so much store by freedom of expression, but not so much for freedom of thought. They can't take that away from us (yet)
One day about 5 years ago, I swore in disgust that I would henceforth watch or listen to no more news media. Up to that point, I was a regular listener to NPR and also watched various news shows.
Other than occasional (and usually tech related) news articles on HN, I've kept my promise. And I've been stunned at how my politics and perceptions of the world have changed in just 5 years.
This service is expected to work just like pigeon-based and drone-based ones, in theory. The only concern not reassured is whether Hong Kong would fall under the siege of the Great Fire Wall.
Meanwhile, I use ssh tunnel to connect to a major US-based cloud service provider at work and home in Beijing, and yes, the low speed and the long round trip time suck. And by now my own Strong VPN subscription still works.
[0] https://developer.rackspace.com/developer-plus/faq/#what_is
Need a font? Google fonts? Blocked.
Need a picture? Instagram? Blocked.
Need a video? Youtube? Blocked.
Need a CSS sheet? Use a CDN? Blocked or really slow.
Visiting a text-based website hosted outside of China [from within China] is usually pretty good. No VPN necessary.
CDNs are a Firewall quick-kill, a lazy-kill. If you host a site outside China, that you'd like to be visible within China, self-host anything you'd otherwise think about off-loading to a CDN. That makes the need for a VPN for your audience redundant.
My organization was forced to deploy a server in China with specialized content for the Chinese. That server and its content is under the CCP's censorship and control, and being an autocratic non-democratic government means that chances of reform are virtually nill. We're allowed, by the good graces of the CCP, to have a presence in China that they control. This is their end game. Controlled foreign sites hosted locally and international internet either completely cut off or just allowed for certain companies and elites.
Autocracy and freedom of information just don't work. The Chinese people, who are very nationalist, have chosen the former and are quite proud of it, often citing the "decadent west" as something they don't want to become and using the word "democracy" as an insult. Let's stop acting surprised about censorship in China. Some people prefer to be ruled by an iron fist.
With enough support from non-Chinese providers (think: Apple, Cisco, Google, etc), the transition could be entirely smooth to completely disconnect (even to the point where Apple and it's ecosystem are effective replaced by Xiaomi/Huawei at hardware/devices level).
I experienced that feeding someone his own poison is often the best medicine. Providers world wide should block email access to all China based email for a month or two. Would be a picture for the gods having the Chinese executives and CEOs abroad cut off from their email and crying "foul!" "foul!".
This being said, the Chinese are pretty good in what they are doing. What will it buy them in the long run? Even big Chinese companies in China use VPN to access the internet. The final result will be that China won't have internet but something like an intranet. Good luck with that!
They don't have google. Baidu does not compare, not the slightest bit. Yes, they have bing. Try finding an address at bing (or baidu) maps in China. It does not work 50% of the time when google is right on the spot.
XiaoMi? Yes, some nice hardware. But the software comes from the west.
Not entirely. They use (or at least have used) mediatek chipsets. Their drivers... well, do a github search for mediatek chipset-based android source code. People have placed entire dumps of Mediatek stuff on Github... and the stuff I could find in 5min is SCARY. Fucking scary. And that's just the tools for the manufacturer, their kernel drivers are a mess of ifdefs and commented out code, with the sparse comments written in some Asian language.
The government could care less about the difficulties of CEOs as long as their power is consolidated and ensured. I used to believe that the CPC's first and foremost goal is economy building. How naive I was! Their priority has always been power.
Rule of thumb.. if someone can work out what you are doing by launching Wireshark, so can a nation-scale IPS system a la Great Wall
https://idea.popcount.org/2013-07-11-fun-with-the-great-fire...
I can't comment on commercial providers, but the capability to autoblock common VPN protocols is definitely there.
These days I just tunnel over SSH or even remote desktop into a remote server.
VPNs? Well, companies need internet and EVERY company in China used them. It is so stupid and insane at the same time.
I use gmail, adsense, google calendar daily, and expecting to use facebook, twitter and other SM daily. I use 3 to 4 methods to get through GFW, none of them can guarantee a stable access. The fuckest thing is I waste 1/3 of my working time only because of the blocking. (Really, when you can’t get through or the speed is too slow, you just don’t know where you’ve surfed to and what you’ve being read for hours).
source: http://www.purevpn.com/blog/china-great-firewall-update-has-...
In other words: The services that are good enough to prevent eavesdropping are blocked, while the other services are "clear text" to the attacking party. Is that a possibility?
The truth is that no one cares. Everyone more or less knows, but it's a pain in the ass to bypass.
Communism, dictators, some kings, like extreme religions wants to control the flow of information so the minds of the population doesn't catch dangerous memes like freedom movements.
There is an option to configure OpenVPN with a fixed key that it uses to encrypt all and any traffic, leaving only random data. That's very desirable right now since there are no easy ways to detect it, but in the future I guess they'll just outright block any traffic that is just too random. Real plaintext traffic, certainly with verbose 1980 protocols like HTTP, trivially fails many randomness tests.
Port 443? Good chance if you have you own IP address that it works most of the time so so. But I have a 50% packet loss. Facebook and google (?) rarely worked over ssh.