New problems with VPNs
 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ternet-control

How accurate is this report?

There was a slightly more in depth article on the same topic as the NPC was drawing to a close in late October, which I found to be more illuminating than this piece, but both contain the same basic observations.

The upshot of it is that the Chinese know we are using VPNs, but for the most part, they honestly don't care about us or their home grown FB addicts. Furthermore, their army of net nannies can easily cripple any VPN service that they decide to target, though some of these new VPNs that access 1000s of servers simultaneously are a bit of challenge for them.

In the past, I've advised people to steer clear of long term plans because you never know how long your favorite VPN will continue to evade the radar, but honestly, even as 2012 is drawing to a close, the larger VPN companies are still going strong (NPC was admittedly a HUGE hiccup, though), and are doing their best to stay in front of the curve.

If this is the case, why do they still block access to it?

AFICT, they basically see no point on trying to reign in the 小白领 set, many of whom have already studied/traveled abroad. And, let's face it, the next revolt is unlikely to spark up from the office buildings in Lujiazui.

And that's the point of my question. If they see no point in it, why still try by blocking access? (And yes, I realize the futility of trying to find rationality in the government's policies).

Because there still is a VAST population who are not discovered the world outside of China, who have had the ability to visit other parts of the world. Its the masses that the government is trying to block - not the relative few who know that things are not exactly what they hear on the radio or see on the TV.

I am currently living in a provincial level city in China. Most people do not know where Canada is, they have heard of it but have no idea. In fact, most people say, "It's part of Asia right?"

The younger population is aware but it is scary how many people do not know so many basic things we take for granted.

My middle school students in Shenzhen (in 2007) thought that all people from the US had "yellow hair and blue eyes." Perhaps a banality in the China forum, or even amongst travelers to China, but they never know what to say when I ask them about Chinese-Americans. AND then there's the NBA which these days lends its quite non-yellow haired and blue eyed professionals to Chinese basketball teams... further comments about US citizens from my students were much less kind.

Yes, I understand that, and that puts moondog's comment in a different context for me. I guess his point is that the gov't isn't concerned about blocking access to the younger, well-traveled, educated city-folk. But they ARE still terrified about information getting to the masses from sources not sanctioned and censored by the central government.


Reminds me of the time 25 years ago when I was buying eggs in a mom & pop grocery in Taiwan. The owner, an older man, asked me in complete seriousness if we had eggs in America. I assured him that we did, but that they were "this big" [used my hands to indicate the size of ostrich eggs]. :D

My current VPN provider (initially recommended on this board -- Expr**) is currently playing up badly....the usual access routes are blocked, and although there is a tedious workaround, it's nowhere near as good as before.

I can't currently be bothered to go shopping for a new one, since it's barely functional, but may need to do so soon...anyone with a very good recommendation can PM me, will be appreciated.

tb

Mine has been working fine through the recent madness, holding strong (ahem) if you will, no workarounds have been needed, though definitely noticed some slowness.

I work in an MNC, with mostly local staff and a smattering of overseas returnees and expats. All the expats are VPN savvy, only some of the overseas returnees, and pretty much NO local chinese. Heck even though instructions for setting the company proxy server is available on the intranet FAQ, until I showed people what it meant no one had bothered to change their settings.

I decided years ago not to use a VPN connection while in China. This decision has made sites like Baidu, Youku etc. a lot more familiar which I am not too unhappy about. Localization if you wish...

Also, while at it, I hope we do not get too political here in the China travel forum, for obvious reasons. Happy festive season to all! :)

Fair enough: but I have yet to find a search engine as competent as google. Not to find where to go for a burger, but for work-related information.

And given one of my four email addresses is gmail, that adds an added incentive.

tb

It's more than just using Youku or Baidu as alternatives. My new sources are stuck behind the firewall, and I'm not trading that no matter what.

In the middle of last week several of the access points of the service I use could no longer be connected to. Also even when using the VPN I noticed that some sites that should normally be accessible were blocked. I received a workaround but it's not as convenient as it was before... Thank you GFW... not! :mad:

美国的月亮比较圆

And the air is fresher too...LOL

Does this affect personal VPNs as well?
 

I don't use a VPN service. Instead, my router is configured to support VPN and I connect directly (I've never been comfortable with 3rd party services). Will I have problems connecting to my home system? This can be problematic, because I routinely use my VPN to access my files remotely.

I have a friend that does the same thing, connecting to his home system using a personal VPN without problems.

If you can do this also it might be better than a 3rd party service because 1) it's free and 2) I suppose it's more likely to be under the radar of the GFW since it's not public.

However the news article posted by the OP seems to say that the GFW has learned to detect VPN connections (versus I suppose censors manually blocking the IP of the access points), so I can't say how well this will work in the future.

Also if your home VPN system goes down you'll need someone back there to restart it.

This is easily fixed if you use a cheap virtual hosting service in the US or wherever. Costs can be as little as $3/month.

As to your private VPN being disrupted by the GFW, just pick a technology that's used by most corporate VPNs, i.e., IPsec. That way you're bound to be safe as they won't be so stupid as to disrupt corporate traffic (and if they did I suspect things will be so desperate that it'd be time to get out of the country).

The GFW seems to have learned to recognise OpenVPN traffic (likely based on headers) sometime in the past few weeks. You can test this yourself by setting up an OpenVPN server of your own; you'll be able to connect at first, but within a few hours, no new connections will go through until you switch the server's IP. A lot of the commercial VPN providers have been using OpenVPN, as it offers a nice combination of security, speed, and ease of administration. They can get away with killing OpenVPN off because nobody important uses it.

PPTP isn't being automatically blocked by our beloved Net Nannies at present, but there are blacklists of known providers, and it's not as secure as other options.

L2TP/IPsec is the best choice. It's the biggest pain to set up and configure, particularly for the server admins. The Net Nannies won't dare implement a blanket ban on IPsec VPNs, as these are what's used by almost all major corporations. Unfortunately, most commercial VPN providers don't offer IPsec...a handful of the most expensive providers do (PM if you want some names that are tested working here in SH), but using your company's is the best bet.

This depends on the ISP. I tried connecting to an IPsec VPN with Unicom and it doesn't work, but it works fine on Telecom.

Every instance of IPsec blocking I've seen so far is a DNS poisoning issue or block of a known IP address rather than the protocol itself. There are easy workarounds for this (use alternate DNS or a different IP to connect), as opposed to the new OpenVPN auto-detection issue. Telecom and Unicom use different DNS blacklists, so that likely explains what was happening.

This may soon become a moot point, though, as if recent editorials in state are indication of the thoughts on such matters, all signs seem to point to things getting worse, despite any potential backlash from business owners both domestic and foreign...

http://news.ifeng.com/mainland/speci...359378_0.shtml (Chinese)

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/artic...ares-crackdown

haha,that's funny