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Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by chickenzzzzu on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:23AM (#44958874)
Think of how many people who have remote jobs with American companies couldn't connect to their meetings while they "work from home" while secretly being in China!

Normally they have to fight VPN issues anyway, but having a sovereign state inject your packets is certainly a fun new one.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by veunes on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @02:44AM (#44959297)
How many people suddenly "lost internet" mid-meeting and had to blame it on their router...
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by ChrisMarshallNY on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:34AM (#44958922)
I suspect those connections worked fine.

It’s good to know the boss.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by chickenzzzzu on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:37AM (#44958935)
I definitely appreciate that a percentage of so called "employees" are actually just full fledged Chinese nationals, living permanently in China, paid a salary to pretend to be an American who had their identity stolen.

But there absolutely is also a non-negligible number of Chinese and Indian nationals, who have some type of visa status in the US (especially a green card) who spend many months in their original countries making $200,000 or more per year while living like royalty in their home countries :)

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by bapak on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:50AM (#44958997)
The green card isn't citizenship, you lose it if you don't live in the US. It's not like they don't know when you enter or exit the country.
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by chickenzzzzu on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:54AM (#44959029)
6 months is a very long time.
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by johnisgood on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @03:45AM (#44959655)
Not with my amount of doctor visits it is not.
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by Wolfbeta on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @02:04AM (#44959080)
2019 feels like 6 months ago.
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by esseph on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @02:10AM (#44959111)
Feels more like 20 years ago.

So much has happened since then...

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by buckle8017 on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @02:22AM (#44959177)
There is no magic amount of time.

If you get a green card and leave the us for any amount of time, on return the border agent makes a determination on the spot if you intended to live abroad.

Less than six months is simply less suspicious than more.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by chickenzzzzu on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @12:19PM (#44963280)
And what are you supposed to do if they make a determination against you, return to your passport holding country and hire a lawyer?

If the answer is yes, well then it is yet more proof that the US immigration system operates basically extrajudicially just like the IRS and ATF, and only occassionally do the courts pull them back in after much hardship for the plantiff.

Words and policies are supposed to have meaning, and I doubt we'll get any charts or graphs on border refusals per amount of time spent abroad for GC holders.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by buckle8017 on Thursday August 21, 2025 @09:48PM (#44980256)
Well yes the actual please has meaning.

Green cards are for people who intend to continuously by resident in the united states.

If you go home for 3 months and get a job and rent a house then you no longer continuously reside in the united states.

It's that's simple, but there's no hard or fast rule on how many days.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by tietjens on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:38AM (#44958940)
How common can this really be? And what kind of companies? I’m finding it really hard to imagine this to be widespread.
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by Ayesh on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:48AM (#44958986)
I live in a popular Digital Nomad friendly country, and myself included, work with Europe/American companies roughly matching their time zones.

Now, the people I work with know that I'm not really located in the same time zone, but I know people who don't bother to mention it. I rarely get phone calls, but I have a roaming connection active for banking/OTP/etc. Plenty of cheap cafes with great WiFi (500mbps+ almost everywhere), and several times cheaper too.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by esseph on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @02:08AM (#44959108)
Lookup the North Korean version of this with the laptop farms

Example: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by chickenzzzzu on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:53AM (#44959020)
Sadly much more common than it should be. The durations vary widely, but with the price of airline tickets and the nature of corporate software engineering jobs, it's extremely easy to self-justify a month abroad. The US government allows 6 months officially for green card holders.

If it wasn't literally 10x cheaper to live abroad than it is to live in Seattle/San Jose, it wouldn't be as prevalent. And not to mention, the quality of life is often better at the 10x cheaper price as well.

I can give you as much proof as you would like!

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by wkat4242 on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:50AM (#44958999)
Yeah if I'd sneak off to work from another place I'd pick somewhere really nice. Not China.
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by djtango on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @02:32AM (#44959240)
China spans 9.6M km. It has some of the biggest and most modern megacities (Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen to name a few) and features ancient historical wonders like the Great Wall, Forbidden City and Terracotta Warriors.

The nature spans salt lakes and rainbow mountains akin to South America, to the Northern Lights in Mohe down to karst formations of Guilin shared with Vietnam's Halong Bay.

The cuisine is diverse and dishes popular in places like Xi'an reveal lasting influences dating back to the Silk Road.

If you can't find "somewhere really nice" amongst the myriad people and locations you haven't tried.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by donkeybeer on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @05:47AM (#44960346)
None of that matters when it's not a safe place to be.
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by wkat4242 on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @09:19AM (#44961702)
I don't want to try when they have an authoritarian government.

Visiting somewhere means submitting yourself to their laws. With China's, that's not an option for me. Having restricted communication with home is a dealbreaker too. I would not let that stand so I'd have to break their laws.

It may be a beautiful country but it's not a beautiful place to be. At least not for someone like me.

Though having said that there are many places I refuse to travel to. The US is currently one as well for obvious reasons.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by dbetteridge on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:59AM (#44959053)
Have you ever been to China?

Because they have some of the most beautiful scenery and buildings I've seen and I've been to dozens of countries.

Personally I wouldn't go there for remote work, because the internet interference is a pain but a holiday definitely.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by wkat4242 on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @09:22AM (#44961724)
No I have not. And I never will unless their government gives up its autocratic tendencies. I would never submit to that. Because of that it doesn't matter how beautiful it is, for me it will not be a nice place to be.
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by chickenzzzzu on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:54AM (#44959028)
You say that because you don't hold a Chinese or Indian passport. Now think of those who do, who have family obligations, food preferences, local bank accounts.
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by thaumasiotes on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @04:27AM (#44959891)
> You say that because you don't hold a Chinese or Indian passport.

Not really. People like it in China, regardless of whether they're Chinese.

I took an English teaching certification course in Shanghai. The teachers for that course were used to rotating around the world as the company held courses in various random locations.

One day the teachers asked what was apparently a standard question for them, "are you planning to stay here after you get the certification?"

And they were flabbergasted when everyone answered yes. Apparently in most of the locations that offer CELTA courses, the majority of people come for the course and get out as soon as they can.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by chickenzzzzu on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @11:46AM (#44962981)
We are agreeing with each other
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by thaumasiotes on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @11:24PM (#44968755)
I didn't think so. There were only two or three students in that course who held a Chinese passport. There were almost as many Ethiopians. A clear majority was Americans, some ethnically Chinese, some white.

The teachers, incidentally, were British and New Zealander, and they were firm about instructing us in teaching British pronunciation. I assume most of the students went on to ignore that part of the curriculum.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by gradientsrneat on Thursday August 21, 2025 @02:47PM (#44976539)
Microsoft was caught doing it for the US federal government, so presumably Chinese software engineers are working on other Microsoft products too.

I'll just say Microsoft is not the only company doing that, and there are also Chinese-owned SAASes which American companies pay for.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by Shank on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @05:31AM (#44960250)
Anyone operating in/around China who needs a real VPN has a service they pay for and use that isn't mainstream that isn't blocked (using V2ray or similar). There's a reason why Shadowrocket is the number 1 app on the app store. I'm sure there are a lot of cases of people using e.g., off-the-shelf VPN apps and have trouble, but power users in China are always running a VPN, usually to Japan, that doesn't have this problem.
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by chickenzzzzu on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @11:49AM (#44963003)
How do you propose users in China will magically get around a nation state injecting packets?
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by Retr0id on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @02:52PM (#44964981)
> using V2ray or similar
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by appease7727 on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @08:56PM (#44968047)
That's literally what VPNs are for.

If you aren't aware: a Virtual Private Network creates a fully encrypted link between you and a remote node. So long as your encryption keys are secure, there's no way for anyone (even a global superpower) to listen to or intrude on that connection. There is no possible way to break into this connection, even with the entire planet's computing resources.

From the outside, all you can see is a stream of encrypted data between two nodes. You cannot tell where the traffic goes once it exits the VPN server or what it contains.

The only way to compromise a VPN connection is the most straightforward and pedestrian: compromise the VPN host and directly spy on their clients with their own hardware.

The GFW certainly can and has detected such encrypted streams and blocked them for being un-inspectable. With a VPN you can perfectly hide what you're doing and you can perfectly prevent intrusion. You cannot prevent someone noticing you're using a VPN. China can simply blanket ban connections that look like VPN traffic. But they cannot tell what you're doing with that VPN.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by chickenzzzzu on Thursday August 21, 2025 @03:45AM (#44970185)
Thanks for the reply. In order to connect to the VPN, your first call must be over https, from China, to the VPN. How does that circumvent the phenomenon in the article, where a nation state was injecting TCP to cause your connection to hang up, thus no VPN connection?
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by nijave on Thursday August 21, 2025 @08:54AM (#44972163)
VPN doesn't need HTTPS nor does it need TCP
Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by estimator7292 on Thursday August 21, 2025 @01:57PM (#44975936)
You do not establish a VPN connection in the clear. You must give your client the encryption key before connecting. All transactions are fully encrypted from the beginning.

Besides that, when negotiating a secure connection through unencrypted channels you typically use Diffe-Hillman to establish the encryption keys. As far as I'm aware, this method cannot be broken. Both nodes compute their own private encryption key and do math to create unencrypted data that must be verified by the other node's key. Even if you had full control of the data stream, you can't determine those private keys and cannot break into the encrypted connection that follows.

Also VPNs are typically UDP, but there's no hard requirement as far as I know.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by chickenzzzzu on Thursday August 21, 2025 @02:57PM (#44976657)
Awesome thanks for all of that. Then it sounds like the only way a nation state could block VPNs is if they decided to "go nuclear" and do what the person above said-- block anyone who they detect is using a VPN/encrypted channel.

Based on that information, the theory for why a nation state would block https like this for a moment is either an accident, or to only block the low hanging fruit of people who don't use a VPN.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by lossolo on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:08PM (#44963764)
> Normally they have to fight VPN issues anyway

There are special virtual SIM cards that provide access to services from mainland China, as well as VPNs that function normally without issues. I used both while I was in China.

Re:Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on Aug... by kotri on Thursday August 21, 2025 @01:06AM (#44969212)
Yeah, have used one. Mine was a downloadable eSIM and meant for foreign travelers with 1-week plan. It actually establishes an IPsec VPN to the origin country. Beijing dare not to block foreigners' roaming services.