I still visit semi-regularly (once a year, approximately) and my observations remain valid now as then (for me at least).
Same goes for my experiences going into and coming out of Russia, for that matter.
https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.1.WxB4yL&id...
Nineteen Eighty-Four is more interesting, apparently, there are hundreds of vendors selling it on taobao.com, including the Xinhua which was started/owned/managed by the Communist Party of China.
https://list.tmall.com/search_product.htm?q=Nineteen+Eighty-...
(In all due deference, Capitalist Realism is a very anti-capitalist argument, so...)
Only once has customs had the slightest look at our bags and that was when the airline left them behind and we had to pick them up later. I was wheeling out a cart with 4 checked bags, no carryons and that drew the interest of the customs guy. The entry stamp two days earlier also drew his interest. He started running the bags through his x-ray, at that point my wife caught up and explained what had happened (she's a native speaker, I figured it was easier to leave any discussion to her) and that was the end of it. Nothing was ever opened.
Even the day my wife set off a nuke alarm at customs produced no response. (She had set off a previous alarm also, which was resolved with a short discussion. They never checked what the actual radiation source was and the card from the lab that explained why she was hot was sitting at home in the pocket of the jacket she didn't wear.)
Now, if my employer was some big company I would be concerned with espionage but that's all. Since my employer doesn't do anything remotely of interest to the Chinese I don't worry about it. Besides, we stay with relatives, my laptop has never seen a Chinese hotel room.
However if you brought any book that attacks current government, for example books about the 64 event, you would be in very big trouble.
You seriously believe that she is less influential than a few books? If Chai Lin is allowed to enter and stay in China, what is the point stopping a few books?
Its an only state where during my travels on the way out of the country (Russia here) in addition to usual security scan and passport control you have an additional booth maned with rusia official/military personel only judging if they can let you out. Again: this was in addition to passport control due to destination etc.
Source: me at s petersburg airport 2016.
P.s. Overall Russia experience was very good and eyes opening (comparing to what you get from media)
My point is perhaps you were profiled to your benefit as well.
Edit: I'm from the US.
I wouldn't say the experience of getting into China is the best, because you still need a Visa to study/work there. But I'd say that it might have been the easiest Visa to get.
On the other hand I've never been through so much aggressiveness and difficulty with the American border. It probably is the worst border in the world (or at least that I've been through).
(In my travels to various unremarkable destinations, there's one country that stands out as having far and away the grumpiest, officious, unpleasant and sour people in immigration: the UK.)
Some of my experiences:
- ~2013 on an Australia -> US (1 month) -> Mexico (1 month) -> Australia via US stopover (~8h) trip, I was detained by customs at the stopover for ~3h and had all my luggage opened and unpacked in front of me for no reason that I can tell other than that I was coming from Mexico and looked tired. About 2h of the 3h were spent waiting in line and nobody told me why I was in line or what to expect.
- Mid 2014 on an Australia -> Malaysia (6h) -> Turkey (2w) -> US (2w) -> Australia trip, I was detained on the way into the US for ~2h by immigration and was asked the question "did you ever step foot in Syria" about 10 times (I wish that was an exaggeration). Again, nobody was friendly, nobody told me what was happening and I spent most of the time waiting and wondering whether I was about to be denied entry for some reason.
- Late 2015 on a US -> France (3d) -> US trip, I was pulled aside prior to boarding the plane because I had an SSSS mark on my boarding pass, which meant I was one of the 10% "randomly" selected for extra screening.
- Early 2016 on a US -> Switzerland (8d) -> US trip, I was pulled aside in Switzerland because once again I had an SSSS mark on my boarding pass. This was the second time in a row.
- Late 2016 on a US -> Germany (3d) -> US trip, I was again had an SSSS mark, for the 3rd time in a row.
Aside from my travel history which I don't think is particularly out of the ordinary, I don't believe there's anything else particularly interesting about me. I'm a young white male with a bachelor's degree, my father works for the Australian government, my mother is a nurse and I've never been a member of any major religious or human rights organization.
YMMV.
I've been in most of the Iron Curtain countries--most of which searched us in far more detail than anything I've gotten from the US.
And I've been subject to some fairly through searches in Africa looking for anything that carried those forbidden words "Product of South Africa". Never mind all the stuff written in Afrikaans with the forbidden words blacked out.
ironically, you don't get comparable Internet speed or cost (my 200mbps Internet costs me $180/year, or I can upgrade it to 500mbps for $400/year) in most "free" countries. I'd be protesting really hard if I have to pay some unfair cost, say $50/month or more, to suffer from the so called uncensored broadband running at tortoise speed such as 50mbps or less.
We developed shadowsocks for the exact purpose of battling machine learned DPI head on.
The real challenge is the (poor) quality of the networks and the topology of censorship body all around China. The Blackbox nature of such state system made each improvement feel like experiment at best, simulated annealing at worst.
1. shadowsocks is a good example that certain vpn/proxy can survive after becoming popular. 2. GFW blocks sites/pages/connections based on content, it has been doing this for more than a decade. whether shadowsocks can fool GFW or not doesn't change the nature of GFW.
So, 1. Chinese gov don't care about those who just want to paste a photo on twitter, they blocked website such as twitter because it's known by even some Chinese farmers or workers. They are supposed to be susceptible, which means, danger.
2. It is said that China will block by whitelist instead of blacklist(maybe like North Korea), but they didn't do that.
3. Usually, someone who can buy and setup a server for himself is clever enough to distinguish between lie by terrorists and the truth.
Have you lived in China? If so, please tell me what VPN service you're talking about. If not, I think you might not be aware how sophisticated and annoying the GFW is.
Start here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...
I'm curious if ssh access to eg: digital ocean is allowed?
If so, you can simply use ssh as a socks5 proxy:
ssh -D 8080 [email protected]
# Set your browser to use 127.0.0.1:8080
# as a socks5 proxy for dns lookup and
# traffic, via eg foxyproxy for firefox
try IPSec or PPTP based vpn, they turn your encrypted communication into plain text. then think about the scale - they do this on almost 1 billion users.
With ssh, restarting the connection would help for whatever reason. So I had a little script rotating a set of connection behind haproxy.
EDIT: oh and Hong Kong. HK VPSes seemed to work the best.
https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks
"Removed according to regulations." vs:
https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks/tree/master
Is it the shadowsocks project dancing around github censorship, or github allowing ss to dance around chinese censorship?
https://web.archive.org/web/20150822042959/https://github.co...
BTW, I have noticed a trend to block port 22 in international hotels. It's annoying!
um... so what's social harmony? The exact same words are used by chinese gov. when trying to be 'vague' about their censoring activities...
So as long as you're not doing political activism, it's fine. I know people who've had private messages apparently censored when they contained anti-government ideas. They don't get arrested. It's not something to fear. The tech companies just monitor and delete politically risky content. If you are a real dissident, then you know you're breaking the law, however vaguely it's worded, and you know you're in danger.
You tell me how Nazi could possibly raise to the very top without the help of that very beneficial revolution? maybe time to read more history books and come back with better trolling skills?
I do agree that it is always good for some political speculators.
What about the Cultural Revolution which put the ruling party itself in power? It's a bit hypocritical for the government to categorically condemn revolution when they wouldn't even exist without it.
And yeah, while the French Revolution was probably a good thing in the long run, it was pretty terrible in the short run: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
First of all, the Cultural Revolution didn't put the ruling party in power, and second of all the CCP (and China) of today is very different from the CCP (and China) at the time of the Cultural Revolution.
Another dimension of threat is the targeted threat model. Examples of this include the French Secret Service leaving audio recording devices in the first class seats, so they could distribute economic espionage to French state-owned companies. Or of some country (NSA, MSS, BND) trying to get a toehold into some company's internal systems as preparation either for cyber defense, cyber attack, defending their country against the pernicious dissident movement, etc. There have been stories about laptops left in Chinese hotel rooms getting outfitted with keyboard bugs or other free hardware "upgrades". It's not clear how true those stories are, but again, since they are targeted attacks, just because you've never seen it happen doesn't mean much.
Perhaps simply you never noticed the free hardware upgrade. Or the country has laws that prohibit using intelligence agencies from giving an advantage to that country's companies; or you are a citizen of that country and that automatically gives you significant protections over anyone else, for which anything is fair game because that country doesn't recognize privacy as a fundamental human right or views non-citizens located outside of the country as not having any constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Or perhaps you simply don't work for a US defense contractor, or a large social media or search company, and so you were deemed too unimportant to bug. (Don't take it personally.)
So the question of deciding what is the right level of paranoia is a tricky one, and I wouldn't be too quick to judge. Is wearing a seat belt in a car being too paranoid? After all, the vast majority of the time you don't need it. Does that mean you are a crackpot for insisting that you and your passengers wear a seat belt?
Finally, note that the person who wrote the article is responsible for providing IT for kernel.org, Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H, and other kernel developers who have their git trees on the kernel.org system. How much security protections do you think we should be providing to make sure no one is trying to introduce a backdoor into the Linux kernel?
somehow, a plane is so noisy that I cannot imagine this working :D
You might as well say that it's unlikely that tapping 60s era cars on the highway will work. I'm fairly certain it did.
Well, the Cultural Revolution was a crazy time.