Ask Slashdot: Is There a Way To Experience the Chinese Internet From Outside? (fffff.at)

dryriver writes: In 2008, a bunch of crafty developers created a Firefox plugin called China Channel. It apparently allowed you to connect to a proxy server in China, and experience the -- heavily censored and filtered -- internet as Chinese citizens experienced it back then. The nearly decade old plugin doesn't seem to work anymore. My modern Firefox browser couldn't install it. So the question: is there a way to surf the internet as if you were inside China, and experience for yourself how much of the experience is censored or filtered? It would be interesting to experience firsthand what the Great Firewall of China lets you see of the free world and internet as we know it in 2017, and what it does not.

Comments

No

[Anonymous Coward]

Internal Chinese internet is extremely fast, you can easily stream 4K video, search results load instantly. The majority of people in China think the internet is very good. Now when it comes to foreign websites or almost all websites outside of china without a vpn it is nightmarishly slow. Even non blocked websites run slowly, especially at peak times of the day when people are using the contested international links. Local torrents including every tv show / movie will download in a few minutes even if they are 6gb or more

Blocked websites are not particularly interesting you simply get a "the website unexpectedly disconnected" message or something similar as the GFW computers send a disconnection request.

The good side of things is that 100mb down/4mb up costs 1400rmb per year (200 usd) and if your in shanghai they've started rolling out gigabit internet. Makes life good for downloading torrents.

Re:No

[lkcl]

the "fast" websites you're referring to are things like the universities, and the "big commercial" websites. things that the majority of smartphone-addicted chinese citizens use every waking moment of their lives. things like wechat and other companies. wechat *has* to be fast because it's now used pretty much everywhere, for paying for everything from bills to groceries. the average medium-sized business however is still stuck with ridiculously-slow internet access. component suppliers in shenzhen simply cannot tolerate maintaining a decent web site because it's so slow that they just don't perceive there to be any benefit at all in doing so. i uploaded a stack of datasheets to my server on behalf of one of my suppliers, because for them to do it the speed would be so ridiculously slow they might as well not bother, and to just email them to clients on request: it's quicker and more reliable. note that's CHINESE clients.

some insight:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/ch...

this gives you an idea of what it's like to try to browse websites. literally every single problem that you've ever encountered arbitrarily and very very occasionally, perhaps maybe once every two to twelve months if that: HTTPS errors, socket errors, timeout errors at the network layer, timeout errors at the SSL layer, SSL certificate errors, cache inconsistency errors - LITERALLY every single possible network-related error - occurred on a regular and unending excruciatingly monotonous basis.

trying to log in to https accounts.google.com just to enable IMAP took me TWO HOURS and over TWENTY refresh attempts. eventually enough got into the browser cache for it to take ONLY five minutes for the page to load... but the AJAX-controlled radio button refused to update properly, so i had to repeat the process. offlineimap (and running cyrus imap server *on my laptop*) was the only way to gain access to the 50,000 emails in my gmail inbox. it took five days to sync them all down.

the chromium team have accidentally marked this bugreport as "related to and problem is directly caused by VPN" but it's not. you can emulate this behaviour (answering the OP's question) by setting up a network filter (which you can do with a userspace tun/tap program written e.g. in python) that randomly and arbitrarily drops between 20 and 80% of packets, and limits the traffic rate to between 15 and SIX kilobytes per second. also you should add huge packet latency as an option: up to around 20 seconds should do the trick.

access to the UK is particularly bad (15k/sec); access to the USA is slightly better (around 70k/sec). during that massive DDOS attack (i happened to be in shenzhen at the time) all speeds dropped to around 5-10k/sec and packet loss was consistently around 80% (i run a constant "ping" in a window).

the worst latency i saw on openvpn was around 120 seconds, when using TCP instead of UDP. yes you read that right: not 120 MILLI-seconds - one hundred and twenty SECONDS. the connection was so bad that the bandwidth throttling option of openvpn simply did not work. i had to constantly change from TCP to UDP and back, and to regularly change the port number of the VPN.

as i have a server with a fixed IP address i gave serious consideration to writing my own userspace traffic proxy/router - not even a VPN, just a NAT/forwarding service - that would automatically make multiple connections over an arbitrary and random series of TCP and UDP connections, XOR something over the top of every packet, add a sequence number in front of the packet (exactly like TCP) and then reassemble the stream in-order at the other end of the connection.

basically with all my contacts being outside of china, there was absolutely no way that i could conduct business in china. every single software developer that i met INCLUDING CHINESE NATIONAL CITIZENS had a VPN connection. every foreigner trying to do business had a VPN connection. every tourist th

Google and social media

[shashindk]

Currently living in China as an expat and it's surprisingly easy to live with the level of censorship in place here. As mentioned by another, Google CDN is blocked which makes some sites inaccessible. The only google related service I've found to work here is translate.google.cn. The most annoying is aspect is not being able to search for things via Google, but having to rely on Bing or other accessible search engines. Almost all mainstream western social media are blocked, with the exception of LinkedIn which works without any issues. Non-western sites like vk.com seem to work fine. Most international messaging apps are also blocked in China, which isn't much of an issue since everyone here uses WeChat (or Weixin in Chinese) which serves not just as a messaging app and micro blogging service but also as a mobile payment platform with a plethora of integrated serves such as paying your utility bills, ordering taxis, buying train and flight tickets, booking hotels, etc. once you link a Chinese debit or credit card. It also integrates the option to have membership cards and related benefits linked to your WeChat account. That coupled with Skype for work-related video calls should cover most people's needs when here. Some news media (mainly American ones) such as bloomberg, wall street journal and the economist are blocked, while others like financial times, usa today, the washington post and los angeles times works fine. In the cases where you do run into issues, VPN services like ExpressVPN and Astrill VPN does the trick. Just make sure to get them before entering the country. Alternatively get the ExpressVPN plug-in for Chrome if that can cover your needs.

Use FlyVPN

[nsxdavid]

The FlyVPN service will let you connect to a lot of different servers in China and experience what it's like.

We use it to test our path out of China for various mobile games as they prepare to launch with our partners in China.