4 ms·

There are no such exemptions, and I don't know from where did this idea came

• newhouseb 5y ago
  I worked in Beijing at Microsoft Research in 2008 and at the time they had a fiber link to Japan that was completely uncensored and the fastest internet I had ever used at the time. Perhaps this is no longer allowed but it certainly used to exist.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    We were buying exactly same "direct physical link" to HK. It came not to be such. We connected a fibre tester, and nothing was coming out on hk side. We tried connecting to google.com, and to our surprise this "physical" link was also censored. Then the cableman basically says, use this link, and VPN over it. The speed was quite good still.
• flohofwoe 5y ago
  I worked multiple times for a few weeks at a game development company in Shanghai in 2017 which definitely had a GFW bypass in place, and it was explained to me that companies can obtain a "license" to legally do this. How much of this is true, I don't know, but I could access the global internet at full speed (minus some occasional hickups) from within the company network, but not elsewhere.
• nneonneo 5y ago
  There absolutely are, or at least were. I attended a computer security competition in Shanghai in 2016, and the organizers told us explicitly that they’d obtained an exemption to get unfiltered internet access at the site. It was indeed unfiltered - Google and such worked fine - and an IP test showed us connecting from a Chinese ISP (so, not a VPN). As this was about five years ago, the situation may well have changed, but at the time exemptions definitely were possible.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    They VPN tunnel to POP, and then advertise their net from there.