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Developer vs The Great Firewall of China

Sam Williams on November 17, 2017

Working remotely can be beautiful. Working as a developer whilst travelling is amazing, whether working remotely or on personal projects. Unfortuna...
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21yunbox profile image
21CloudBox

Thanks for the write-up. Haven thru the same pain, now I'm helping businesses to get their sites to load fast in China, so you guys don't need VPN and still able to access it within China.

If anyone needs to their site load fast and stable in China, check out: launch-in-china.21cloudbox.com

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Is dev.to accessible from China? 😀

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samwsoftware profile image
Sam Williams

I can get to it on my local mobile data which suggests it is. I'm currently in a hotel where there is a VPN on the WIFI which is amazing. I've not been anywhere else where I've had that.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Thanks!

BTW as an aside note: have you thought about the fact that VPNs that work up there might be permitted to work because they gave the government access to their traffic?

Maybe it's not true but it's worth considering :D

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samwsoftware profile image
Sam Williams

I hadn't thought of that, good point. I know that both ExpressVPN and NordVPN use encryption and no logging but I don't know about the security of TurboVPN. I've looked on their website and found their privacy policy which states that they don't log any of the users information. This doesn't mean they don't give the government access to see your traffic at the time of access which the government then log.
This is all just guesses, if anyone knows more then let me know.

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hero76 profile image
Francis Miyoba

Yes

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21yunbox profile image
21CloudBox

not able to get on from Shanghai without VPN (2021 Jun, 17)

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bgadrian profile image
Adrian B.G.

I guess OpenVPN is easily detected by their spoofers and blocked? Would be cheaper to install your own VPN in theory, because you been the only user of your server, maybe isn't attracting attention and get blocked.

Anyway, I hope it worth the trouble by going there.

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samwsoftware profile image
Sam Williams

I think that all of the information needed to be a tech hub is available, but you have to use a Chinese search engine like Baidu.com. I tried using it once or twice but all of the top ranking sites are in Chinese. That was even less useful for me than Bing.

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hero76 profile image
Francis Miyoba

This is the pain I have had to undergo as an international student studying computer science in China. Dev.to is not blocked

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samwsoftware profile image
Sam Williams

Living here for 3 months I've found the firewall really annoying, studying CS here must be even worse.

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magnumwesoft profile image
magnum-wesoft

Unfortunately, turbovpn only available in the US market.

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samwsoftware profile image
Sam Williams

Are you sure? I got it and I'm from UK and I know friends from Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Austria who have all got it.
Where are you from?

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magnumwesoft profile image
magnum-wesoft

I just figured out the reason: I searched “turbovpn” rather than “turbo vpn”. I’m from HK and thank god, 1 country 2 systems still honored by Apple.

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Tiago Celestino

Can you be arrested if the government discover that you use VPN to access blocked websites?

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samwsoftware profile image
Sam Williams

I don't know but I very much doubt it. Some of the restaurants and bars have a vpn on their WiFi. I think they are working at stopping the root of the problem, not targeting individual users.