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Honestly, the blocking doesn't make any kind of sense. You can literally create a vpn from within china itself on any cloud provider and surf on anything you wa
by bsaul 9y ago
Honestly, the blocking doesn't make any kind of sense. You can literally create a vpn from within china itself on any cloud provider and surf on anything you want, in less than 10 minutes using softwares like algovpn.
It's now a moment of truth for internet in china : either they start blocking vpns for real (although good luck doing that without collateral damage to the economy, because that would mean shutting down a ton of services), or they just open it.
My bet is that they'll open it. They have services on the same quality as US ones, some even more advanced like wechat , they're already 1 billion user strong, i'm pretty sure they'll benefit tremendously from opening the gates.
- lostmsu 9y agoIt's a matter of principle. Also, unacceptable if you can be prosecuted for posting stuff.
- dageshi 9y agoThe overwhelming number 1 priority of the Chinese Communist party is to remain in power and remain in control. Everything comes second place to that. Economically it would make sense to do what you say, but to do so would be an unacceptable loss of control over the ability to monitor and curtail communication in China, so they won't do it. Additionally, they do certainly have the ability to detect and shutdown VPN's based on traffic analysis, for the most part they don't do this most of the time but during specific sensitive political events they can and will.
- bsaul 9y ago"remain in control" is also what i thought, but then i changed my mind and now think the reason is now (almost) purely economical. The reason is that : - google maps is blocked, but apple maps isn't - google is blocked, but yahoo and bing aren't - youtube is blocked, but other video sites such as rutube.ru are accessible, and just searching sensitive keywords led me to things like that https://rutube.ru/video/49d364dd24dc25c5855aa9113c107567/?ref=search https://rutube.ru/video/49d364dd24dc25c5855aa9113c107567/?re... and the list goes on and on. Once again, it doesn't make any sense.
- dageshi 9y agoGoogle very publically and explicitly said they would not abide by China's rules regarding their services about a decade ago. I wouldn't be surprised if those other services have local chinese servers which are serving the requests from China and are effectively subject to chinese laws.
- pertymcpert 9y agoVPNs are now unreliable, they're using ML to detect traffic patterns that look like VPNs.
- kurthr 9y agoThat you can (or have in the past) used a VPN does not mean that it is legal (or feasible now even with ExpressVPN). See this link for travelers below. Other than commercial "private" company VPNs which are themselves regulated in China using a VPN can lead to various forms of punishment and may not work as well as you would hope. It really depends on how you connect (e.g. mobile or wired), where you connect from (Beijing or Urumqi), and what you are viewing (english email or chinese video). https://www.travelchinacheaper.com/is-it-legal-to-use-a-vpn-in-china https://www.travelchinacheaper.com/is-it-legal-to-use-a-vpn-...
- goatsi 9y agoThe goal isn't to block things 100%, it's to make it enough of a hassle to use them that the Chinese population turns to domestic alternatives.