Not sure about what the norms are where you live, but most people in the US have to sign 1-year agreements for Internet service, and those who don’t typically either pay more or would pay before because they’re on a cheaper, older rate that is grandfathered in and is no longer offered by the Internet service provider.
Please read the article. I hate when people upvote bullshit just because it says things they like to hear. I dislike Elon Musk as much as anyone else, but the jury’s findings were this:
Wireshark can’t but there are other methods, such as checking for the known OpenVPN protocol opcodes in the headers:
I don’t know how they update their IP list. My university is an American university which I believe has no ties to China, but I can’t say for sure. According to friends who use the clandestine OpenVPN services, they pay about 20 CNY a month and every month they are issued a new OVPN configuration file. Only occasionally do their servers get blocked before this, and then they have to issue new config files to everyone.
As for myself, I have been to China two times using the OpenVPN server that I deployed on a US-based VPS I rented from a German hosting provider. Each trip lasted about one month. So far, the IP has not been blocked. The government’s philosophy regarding the firewall and VPNs seems to be “make it as annoying as possible for the average uninformed layperson to bypass and go after people selling illegal VPNs, but otherwise, we don’t give a shit”. I do not sell access to my VPN to anyone else. It is strictly for my own use.
Both times I was there, the firewall didn’t apply to cellular data because they do not apply the firewall to holders of foreign SIM cards using their cellular service. I purchased a SIM from a Hong Kong carrier (SoSim) with a few gigabytes of data in both Hong Kong and mainland China for 100 HKD. The firewall doesn’t apply within Hong Kong. It worked fine, though I do note that surveillance laws meant that I had to upload my passport to activate the service. I’m not a big fan of that, so I kept the VPN connected at all times, though normally-blocked websites did indeed work on cellular data even without the VPN. I checked on my cell phone’s settings, and I know it connects to China Mobile towers when in mainland China. Note that China Mobile is owned by the Chinese state.
I also confirmed that it doesn’t apply the firewall when I have my T-Mobile (my US cell carrier) SIM in there. My carrier provides unlimited worldwide roaming at 2G speeds but I can confirm that it also connects to China Mobile towers and I could successfully access Wikipedia, a blocked site, without the VPN.
Attached below is a Wireshark trace I obtained by sniffing my own network traffic.
I want to draw your attention to this part in particular:
Underneath “User Datagram Protocol”, you can see the words “OpenVPN Protocol”. So anyone who sniffs my traffic on the wire can see exactly the same thing that I can. While they can’t read the contents of the payload, they can tell that it’s OpenVPN traffic because the headers are not encrypted. So if a router wanted to block OpenVPN traffic, all they would have to do is drop this packet. It’s a similar story for Wireguard packets. An attacker can read the unencrypted headers and learn
Take China for example. There is a common misconception that all VPNs are illegal in China. That’s not fully true. In China, VPNs are legal and must obtain a licence from the Ministry of Public Security, like all other online businesses. This also means that they have to agree to monitoring and censorship from the Government, so you can’t use legal VPN services to bypass the firewall in China.
The Great Firewall doesn’t block by protocol. If you set up your own OpenVPN server, you can still connect to it. I’ve done this many times in my trips to China, and it’s worked fine. That being said, they still do seem to throttle connections to international servers, though this happens to all servers, even those that are not blocked. There are many clandestine VPN operators in China who spin up their own VPN servers and sell the service. They are mostly OpenVPN-based.
My university used Cisco AnyConnect, and I was able to successfully connect to the university VPN servers as well.
The limited experimentation I have conducted seems to indicate that the Great Firewall blocks by IP and not by protocol.
Agreed. Gamers are probably one of the demographics which are most likely to care about the enshittification of their operating system, while most other users who only want Microsoft Office and their Web browser could not care less. The former can be swayed to endure a small amount of temporary inconvenience to switch while the latter will not.
Cannot agree more. I say things all the time here that people hate and downvote me for but the numbers are even more useless here than on Reddit so it’s difficult to care.
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Flathub is almost the perfect distribution system for software on Linux. The only thing it’s missing is a billing system. If it had that, it would probably attract more game developers to make their games available as Flatpaks.
Did any distro give concrete reasons for why they have actively chosen not to package it, or perhaps they just haven’t given it much thought yet?
This is not what I would consider a “political reason”. A political reason would be something like refusing to package it because of what political party Howard supports.
There is plenty of software you’ll find in these repositories that aren’t under the GPL. CMake uses BSD, the Apache web server uses the eponymous Apache license, LibreOffice and Firefox use MPL, Godot and Bitcoin Core use the MIT license, and I’m sure there are plenty of other software licenses that I haven’t thought of yet.
It’s not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.
Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, “eh, why not”. The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the “gold standard” for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.
You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.
Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you’re trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you’re a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don’t.
Almost none of the people who are excited about AI know anything about computer science. I say this someone who always encounters idiots claiming my computer science degree will soon be obsolete because of AI… lol
What are the implications of this?
I thought I was commenting on a different post. Sorry about that
I hope you realise that the comment you replied to is really just a reference to the Succulent Chinese Meal video.
The source is this article.
It’s not just “technically difficult” to eavesdrop. Properly implemented, it’s computationally impossible to eavesdrop on a connection secured with TLS.
You can do that in the US as well, but it will cost more because you wouldn’t be agreeing to a fixed term. For example, my ISP charges $25 a month for 200 mb/s if you agree to a one-year term, but it’s $40 a month if you do not agree to a one-year term. And there’s also the added inconvenience of having to go to one of the ISP’s physical stores every month and put cash into their kiosk.
They will ask for your name here when signing up, but nothing prevents you from lying about your name if you’re going to be paying in cash. They ask for an e-mail address as well, but you can say you haven’t got one, and they’ll create one for you using their own e-mail service and assign it to you. You don’t actually have to use it, but it is for receiving their bills and notices.