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Tell HN: The Great Firewall started blocking CloudTabs for folks inside China
I guess this is achievement unlocked? But not for the folks on the other side of TGF that want to access it. Starting today I began seeing signups with the region "No servers available". That only happens when none of the 8 global servers is reachable. As there's been no down time and they're all currently reachable...that can only be because it is blocked, inside China. In case you're wondering, CloudTabs is a remote browser (sorta like a virtual desktop but with only the browser virtualized).
I base this deduction on the fact that the email addresses used to for such 'blocked' accounts, include mainland providers like 163.com and qq.com. It's worth noting that these also provide email to folks outside China, tho it's reasonable to assume most of those signing with them are from within (I haven't checked the IPs, so idk).
Interestingly the block is only on the endpoint servers themselves, not on the main hub:
https://browse.cloudtabs.net
I went looking to see if Azure provides a region in China that may be potentially less at risk of TGF restriction, but such regions are not accessible from my dashboard, and probably the folks signing up from within TGF were looking for a loophole.
It seems this 'loophole' has now been closed for folks in TGF. Oh well...poor them, I guess.
The backstory of why this 'blew up' in China is it recently was posted on HN and garnered much attention here, which, shifted forward approximately 12 - 24 hours translated into many signups from folks with Chinese email addresses.
I reflect how seriously mainland China takes its information control, and also what a market there is for ways to avoid that.