[Canada]

Everything is censored. You have to tunnel pretty much everything. Massive packet loss is par for the course. You can't have a routable address. You can't just fire up a VM in minutes, you can't even have a VM without a registered company with a license to run a web server.

Things we take for granted like attaching a 2mb file to an email or a simple Google search can take several minutes to accomplish.

[seanmcdirmid]

Reddit, hackernews, quora aren't censored.

[b6]

This may or may not be true in some places in China at the moment you posted, who knows. But the internet in China is comprehensively sabotaged.

[seanmcdirmid]

Oh, after living in china I know. Weird thing is, when I arrived in 2007 almost nothing was blocked. But after the 2008 olympics, they decided they didn't need to pretend to be open anymore. What's even weirder is that when I lived in china previously in 2002, CNN was blocked and nytimes wasn't. Now it's the other way around.

[Canada]

Correct. It's not everything, but it's a lot, and a lot of things that aren't censored load subresoures from things that are, so they're half broken without a VPN anyway.

And really.. having to wait 6 minutes just to attach an invoice to an email is infuriating, more so when it fails and you have to try again.

And don't even get me started on all the time wasted switching between various VPN endpoints and protocols to find the one that sucks the least in that moment.

[seanmcdirmid]

I never bothered with vpns and just accepted that I could only use those sites at work on our corporate internet. Weird, I worked at MS and would use Bing at home, but I would use google at work because it was the only place I could use it (well, after it was blocked).

And actually, youku isn't that bad for video once figure out how to navigate it. Xiami for streaming music was also very effective. Still annoying, but I dealt.