Doesn't even let me decline cookies not required for operation of the website, yet wants me to trust them with my data?
gtfo.
if you have contact out of the country you're already part of a very small elite. if not, you cannot use this. they are so oblivious to the demography they claim to help that the site requires js, a big no if you want to be seen by really f** people having to use tor browser.
all this does is placate some small elite. it helps china/Russia more than anything else.
If necessary anyone can be canceled. Everybody is "guilty" but select few are prosecuted.
Therefore the real power belongs to those who decides what issues can be ignored.
In the West there is a long History of institutions(like cities) that went against the abuses of the people in charge. You were a servant, you entered a city(burg) you became free, the city protected you. This happened for centuries. In China something like that happened at specific periods, but eventually the Emperor took all the power.
In China the Emperor or the Tzar in Russia could do anything. In Russia those that wanted freedom lost every single time. If a servant entered a city and the city did not deliver the fugitive, the Tzar will burn the city. The same happened with the Soviets. You want your own food? We will kill you all and send your children and wife to Siberia. Everybody else(not the Emperor) were servant. Now Xi or Putin are the new emperors, like Lenin, Stalin or Mao were.
I have lived in China as a privileged engineer/expatriate.
Basically most people have no idea what a country without rule of law(like China) is.
>If necessary anyone can be canceled. Or you can cancel them. You consider yourself a victim, a nobody, but people can get public and get a million views and could do real damage to those in power.
In my West people are jailed without trial (Guantanamo, and other secret prisons) or cases are fabricated to bring them to jail (Assange).
> I have lived in China as a privileged engineer/expatriate.
> Basically most people have no idea what a country without rule of law(like China) is.
So you give up priviledges to return to a country where the rule of law is observed.
No further comments.
The laws are written in specifically vague verbiage as to be interpreted in favor of state actors by judges whenever they need to be. You may be clear in the letter of the law in your mind, until a charge is brought up against you using another law, etc.
To be honest, I think they are blocking anything that exchanges a lot of data with oversesas IPs, after hitting a certain threshold.
If you want to have some fun understanding this better, call up (for example) Verizon and have them send you the data they have on you. It's surprisingly detailed, including timestamped logs of every DNS query (in addition to specific profiling data, like "how likely you are to buy a new phone" or "household income", etc).
https://www.verizon.com/support/download-and-view-vpd-file/
After doing this myself, I always (at a minimum) use a privacy centric DNS and never the ISP's default.
Comcast is the only non-56k ISP available in my area still in 2024. So I use them... but I also have to make sure to protect myself from their attacks. If I did what they're doing I'd go to prison. But some types of legal persons have more rights than human persons.
At least shadowsocks was well researched in the past, I'm not sure about v2ray.
The state, any state, often employs such tactics to make people believe they are protected, and therefore said people will act more openly. There are a myriad of such known cases, in fact the examples are endless.
So if one is in Russia... beware, for ways to get around blocking which work, may be ways secretly controlled by the Russian state. An example is a VPN service which is secretly run by the state, regardless of where it is incorporated or physically located.
Another example is blocking products which are effective, but letting products which are easily MITM by the state to "work", thereby providing the illusion of security and safety.
These tactics are thousands of years old, the employment of such methods is all that has changed. Make those which you distrust, use methods you control to organize. An example; the pub which is uses for meetings, is actually owned by state sympathizers, who claim otherwise.
Fortunately, however, there is equally years of some of the smartest minds on the planet working to bypass Chinese censorship, so there are some great OpenVPN alternatives.
I really encourage you to look into something like Shadowsocks which Chinese people have found great success in using over the last several years.
In your case, however, it's worth mentioning that if you can't connect at all then it's likely they've blocked the commercial IPs of the VPN nodes.
It's quite sad that projects like Streisand[0] were archived, but I'm sure there are other alternatives that might make it just as easy to roll onto a server.
[0] https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand