[evanb]

> There are roughly two usecases where you might want to use a VPN:

>

> You are on a known-hostile network (eg. a public airport WiFi access point, or an ISP that is known to use MITM), and you want to work around that.

I think that covers the case you're worried about.

[kurthr]

Well, an entire country that is behind a firewall that dynamically blocks huge swaths of content by randomly slowing it down and dropping packets... is a little different than an ISP that uses MITM. The problem is not that they are spying on you when you use https, it's that you can't even get your email, search using google, checkout your code, or get to your financial information at all.

You can forget Github, Facebook, Instagram, NYT, but I'm not even trying to use those... I want to get my damn work done. If all my contacts were on WeChat, I only wanted to use Weibo, and could search using pinyin, I might be fine.