China has been trying for a decade with zero success, best of luck
I spent years living in China. Do you really mean zero success?
OpenVPN stopped working in 2017. Deep packet inspection prevents the initial handshake. I hosted my own SS for a number of years before switching to wireguard, with more success… however, they IP ban a majority of VPS IP ranges, so the providers Linode/DigitalOcean were messed up.
And everyone experiences VPN slow down during CPC conferences.
It can only be worse now.
I mean zero practical success in banning vpns or stopping vpns from functioning correctly, yes.
They scared non-technically-minded people who already didn’t use vpns into not trying them, but everyone I know in China who used and uses vpns without a problem for years are still using them today.
I know nothing about running a server, I’m just talking about my experience from the user side of the equation.
Ah ok. Well, as I said I lived there for years and i’m telling you they can and do block VPN traffic (not all, another commenter mentioned Astrill) quite well. To say zero success is incorrect.
Location (and peering) might be a factor, so if you/your friends lived somewhere different to I your experience may differ.
I mentioned astrill too, they do pretty well.
Vpns are working in Ningbo, Tianjin, urumqi, Chengdu, Beijing, Chongqing, Guangzhou, xian right now, idk, I haven’t seen or heard of the problems you’re describing, but I’m heading back over for the new year this year, so I’ll check.
I think failing to block increasing, constant vpn use around the north, South, east, West, and center of a country for a decade despite constantly declaring vpns illegal and banned and stopped by government firewalls counts as zero practical success, yes.
My sister still lives there and from what she says it’s not too difficult. Some VPNs work, others are on the ‘no longer work’ list and at big events they mysteriously stop working.
She’s not technically minded, she’ll just be using an app.
Are you hosting it through a provider such as AWS or Azure? That might be why. I had no issues when setting it up on my own.
I have 2x ISPS and through that multiple raspberry pis. Set up docker, then you can set up multiple VPNs (e.g. OpenVPN which I used just before pandemic) so after 2017. It always worked but these days I would also esim it - they can’t block roaming mobile due to the way roaming works and the travel Sim prices are quite competitive these days.
Tldr no issues hosting on personal internet rather than through a cloud provider.
Example ones I use, simple to set up via docker files.
https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/openvpn-as https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/wireguard
Yep, precisely this. It’s extremely hard to block arbitrary internet traffic and everyone who thinks China lives in a propagandized bubble with no exit is deluding themselves.
FWIW, VPN enforcement is much more strict in Xinjiang and Tibet so I think Chinese authorities have the capability, they just choose to not exert it most of the time (to avoid an ever-escalating arms race lol).
What’s the reasoning for this? Surely it’s not that difficult to block all traffic pointing to “vpn.protonvpn.com” (simplified url for the sake of argument)
Even if a VPN provider had 100 URLs to tunnel traffic through, they would all be found in a matter of time, no?
The difficulty is that a VPN isn’t just a product like ProtonVPN, it’s a huge family of software and protocols.
You can block vpn.protonvpn.com, but since most operating systems come with VPN functionality out of the box, you’d have to start listening to all traffic (not just DNS lookups) and blocking ALL packets that might be VPN traffic without causing regular disruption to non-vpn traffic.
TL;DR: it’s easy to prevent unmotivated users from downloading a VPN app. It’s practically impossible to block a motivated user from using a VPN, and they’re the users you particularly care about.
I’m just a user, but afaik if the server you’re routing through is outside of China, they have no right to block the traffic.
I think it’s some international agreement that no country is allowed to block external traffic because that interferes in other countries’ affairs something something, but I don’t know the specifics.
Lmao.
Got any suggestions for software?
I run openvpn normally and I’ve tried shadowsocks but neither have gotten through the vpn blocks I’ve tested against.
Tor. It’s free, it works, and there’s nobody to sell you out when the cops come knocking.
I’m looking for something self-hosted for secure access to my LAN, not just to reach open internet unfortunately.
If you’re just looking for remote access, openvpn on port 443 should (in theory) be indistinguishable from normal https traffic.
Wasn’t Russia able to block traffic from Tor?
If they did, I haven’t heard about it. China has been trying and failing to block tor for decades though, so I kinda doubt Russia managed to beat them to it overnight.
Both astrill and protonvpn sashayed straight past the great firewall when I visited. There was some free Chinese vpn, greenvpn I think, that worked too, but was slow.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Demand for VPN services soared after Russia restricted access to some Western social media after President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into Ukraine in February 2022.
Senator Artem Sheikin said an order from the Roskomnadzor watchdog would come into force on March 1 that would block VPNs.
“From March 1, 2024, an order will come into force to block VPN services providing access to sites banned in Russia,” Sheikin was quoted as saying by state news agency RIA.
Phone calls to the number listed by Roskomnadzor as its press service were answered by a voice message with the Bobby McFerrin song “Don’t Worry Be Happy”.
Sheikin said that it was particularly important to block access to Meta Platforms (META.O), which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
“I would like to note that it is especially important to restrict citizens’ access to the products of Meta which is recognised as an extremist organization,” Sheikin added.
The original article contains 216 words, the summary contains 152 words. Saved 30%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
That is new. Meta is absolute shit, but I never thought to classify it as an extremist organization. A Russian propaganda outlet maybe, but extremist?
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But but what about USA 😭😭😭
It’s far from being a CIA company. It wouldn’t surprise me if three letters orgs have used it for psyops though. Russia has launched campaigns on social media platforms in attempt to cause chaos for many countries. The most notable of which is happening in Africa now.
Russia does use social media for misinformation, and lots of it. I have personally researched how the Russian government does this and it’s a nasty sight.
Shortly after RT America was shuttered, reporters who were associated with it went full-bore into spreading misinformation. They would launch anti-Hunter Biden campaigns on Gab, publish many fake reports from “the war zone” in Ukraine and just cause general chaos.
There was one “reporter” who finally blocked me after she published a report from “the front lines” after I geolocated the film to an area inside of Russia.
It doesn’t take much to uncover their bullshit as it’s done in a very typical, lazy Russian fashion. Russian propaganda is only skin deep and propagandists don’t even bother to cover their tracks back to the Kremlin.
Stories about Ukraine are the worst. They get recycled dozens of times while the details hardly change. Because of that, it’s easy to search the history of the “news” back to its original source.
You even spread propaganda that is generated by the Kremlin. You love to bark about how the west is evil and Ukrainians are all Nazis. Your history is just a compilation of tired Kremlin talking points and whataboutisms. Russia is just a paper tiger after all.
I hope you enjoy having your VPN access cut next year, if you are a Russian like I think you are. Enjoy the xenophobia, brohan!
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Lol! I just go directly to the source of Russian propaganda and look for the source of all the trash you spout. It’s not hard.
Look at the methodology in your reply. You go straight to insults. You are making assumptions about where my information is coming from, ie. tHe dEmoCratS.
I am just pointing out what I have found out directly from Russian media. Russian reporters and propagandists shaped my opinions, not my political beliefs. Really, it’s not hard to research this stuff and maintain objectivity.
Russian corruption and media manipulation is well known and it’s easy to prove. People like you are victims, TBH.
Learn the definition of xenophobia.
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All you do is toss insults on the wall hoping one is going to stick. I don’t know what your reasoning is for that. The only reason I am responding to you is to show others how fanatical people like you can get. It’s a very predictable cycle: Repeat false narratives, insult, rattle off whataboutisms, deny and insult again then toss in some conspiracy theories for flavor. You are doing nothing unique and following the same exact patterns as all other fanatics.
It is very clear that Russia didn’t start the war in Ukraine because of Nazis. Russia is just attempting to take land and steal resources. The real reasons for the war have been leaked a thousand times already by Russian politicians and state controlled media reporters. The goal was never to save Ukraine, but exterminate them. You can see that in Russian battle methodology where scorched earth is the preferred method of taking a city.
If the Kremlin actually gave a fuck about Nazis, there are better targets than Ukraine to go after. Every country has their share of them, even Russia.
The corruption and lazy attitude to planning showed itself when the invasion of Ukraine started. Russia had years to plan for this and could have taken Ukraine in a week. The planning and communication was so bad, the war continues to this day. The corruption shows in all aspects of its military. The most glaring example is in the Admiral Kuznetsov, an aircraft carrier that never seems to get fixed because the money keeps disappearing. I think someone has already jumped out of a window because of that debacle.
Even at the high level, the generals report false numbers. The best examples are when Russia was claiming that 19 HIMARS launchers and over 600 rockets were destroyed when we had only given Ukraine 16 launchers to begin with. This doesn’t include every single time that Russia says “all rockets and drones were destroyed” while civilians are posting multiple angles of destruction. Lulz.
Isn’t it curious that Russia is having to import munitions from Iran and North Korea? Russia keeps denying that Iranian drones are being used while also reporting that Iranian drones are being used.
OMG. Do we even need to get to the threats of Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine? That is the dumbest rhetoric I keep hearing… from Russians.
Where is the SU-57? The T-14’s? The BMPT Terminators? Don’t they exist? Was Russia even lying about its capabilities? We won’t talk about the hypersonic missiles they can hardly build because they use western tech. Where are these miracle weapons of Russian propaganda?
The list goes on and these were points that you can actually verify.
Again, I get a ton of information from Russian media about what their viewpoints are. It’s not difficult to separate fact from fiction. Putin is the worst, btw. Take PMC Wagner, for example: He flip-flopped a dozen times about their existence. I think his latest stance is that they never existed. It’s hard to keep track.
It’s really an economic protectionist scheme. Currently, Russian money is flowing into American pockets, and that’s obviously undesirable.
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