In the Days with VPNs and Proxies
Monday, 23 January 2017The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has announced that a clean-up on the Internet access network services market will be carried out across the country from now until March 31, 2018. The MIIT stated that it is not allowed to set up or run a VPN service without authorisation.
The MIIT will investigate and punish illegal activities such as illegal operation, over-scale operation and sub-leasing in Internet Data Centre (IDC), Internet Access Service (ISP) and Content Distribution Network (CDN) market, in order to strengthen the network information security management, maintain a fair and orderly market, and promote the healthy development of the industry.
It's been a while since the Chinese government tried to monitor/ block the VPN services in Mainland China. Years ago I used to deploy my own PPTP VPN in the UK/US, I remember that my PPTP VPN was inaccessible from China, while Glype-based standard web proxy with SSL was still able to bypass the GFW. Back to then my free proxy network was built with Glype clusters on multi-domains and was quite popular among thousands of US high school students and Iranian youngsters. I thought I supported the Internet freedom by investing hundreds of pounds every month on dedicated servers. A single node of my free proxy network could hit 120,000 PV in 24 hours, using round-robin A records setting at DNS level to balance the server load between clusters. I also leveraged some public services to host static home pages and prevent hacking activities.
I did hope those people could get the information they need and bypass the Internet restriction with my support, no matter they are in Iran, US or China. While sometimes things could be different when I checked the server logs and found that many traffic were directly from Iran to US porn sites via my proxies. Naughty Iranian boys! Also OpenDNS used to have a function for webmasters to report and block proxies in their intranet, I could see that there are always people put my proxy network promotion/ tutorial on Youtube, while some others tried to add them to the banned list through OpenDNS. I shut down the entire free proxy network in 2012 due to high cost of hardware, it was the time when cloud computing was not so popular. I guess I could make the infrastructure more elastic and robust if I built them using today's technology.
Since I returned to China in 2012 I mainly depend on self-hosted SSH service to access blocked Internet services, now I'm on ShadowSocks to browse Blogger.com and post this article. I don't use any commercial VPN service because my own hardware has been running pretty well. However it's said that GFW is able to detect the traffic pattern of VPN protocol and ShadowSocks through machine learning. I understand that this Government could manipulate many things within the boundary, so I'll not be surprised if the upgraded GFW blocks all VPN traffic under special circumstances in future. I've seen someone use satellite Internet as a back up for accessing their Twitter and FB, well, maybe a flight ticket to Hong Kong is more feasible for now.
Posted by Guoyu @ 17:20,
