Re:China's internet: A giant cage
by seanmcdirmid on Saturday April 13, 2013 @10:35PM
(#5545610)
I have a good job here; I probably couldn't get anything else like a research position for a software company (Microsoft Research Asia) anywhere else in Asia.
Ya, last year was when they really started to crack down on VPNs. Life is quite harder, however, failure to adhere to IP rights makes local video streaming sites very useful compared to YouTube, so its not all bad (well, its not fair to the IP-right holders either).
Beijing is going through some tough times right now; the pollution is driving people out and preventing people from coming. This is probably a bigger problem than internet censorship.
Re:China's internet: A giant cage
by guard-of-terra on Sunday April 14, 2013 @04:20AM
(#5546303)
"failure to adhere to IP rights makes local video streaming sites very useful compared to YouTube"
You should definitely register on vk.com after you get off china if it's important to you.
Re:China's internet: A giant cage
by seanmcdirmid on Sunday April 14, 2013 @07:02AM
(#5546589)
I would just get Netflix if I went back to the states. I'm happy to be a lawful consumer of media; I just find things on Youku or Tudou because I have no other options otherwise.
Re:China's internet: A giant cage
by contingencies on Sunday April 14, 2013 @04:15AM
(#5546293)
Hrrm. Good luck in Beijing.
On the plus side, sounds like you can probably swing a fat company-internal IPv6 pipe.
Re:China's internet: A giant cage
by seanmcdirmid on Sunday April 14, 2013 @07:11AM
(#5546604)
On the negative side, food in Bangkok is much better. And you guys have real shopping malls! We always go down to decompress there on holidays.
My experience was that 2012 was the year they really broke the internet with some forms of rate limiting and other attacks against VPN protocol streams. I found over the last few months the fastest/simplest way to get reliable arbitrary HTTP(S) links from within the country on IPv4 was to use SSH with port forwarding to a squid proxy, ie: ssh -N -L localport:tertiaryhost:tertiaryport user@server ... then configure your browser to use 127.0.0.1:localport as a proxy. The old OpenVPN-based methodology was far too unstable. Tor has been effectively cut, unless you do the email-hoop-jumping secret and possibly short-lived endpoint request process and then put up with absolutely pitiful performance.
I suspect IPv6 solves most of the current issues; unfortunately my shot at getting it to work for this purpose didn't succeed, perhaps due to crappy NAT devices.
Anyway, I got sick of China's hassle (and economic bubble pricing vs. reducing quality of life, re: pollution of all kinds, visa hassles, etc.) for the moment, so moved to Thailand. Internet is so much better here.