[kotri]

Not all Western companies comply with Beijing, like Route53, a name I've never heard of; Cloudflare seems to be most popular in China.

But yeah, they can shutdown anything unless proxy server is widely used. as <Nearly 90% of Iranians now use a VPN to bypass internet censorship>.

[darrenf]

AFAIK Route53 is AWS’s managed DNS product, not a company.

[kotri]

OK, AWS again, I know it not only complies with Beijing but also Russia and many other dictatorships. Banned domain fronting and recently enforced S3 bucket-based subdomains for government to better inspect.

[lazide]

Their point is if you’re served within China (aka hosted off a chinese IP, or accessing anything from a Chinese IP) it doesn’t matter if the other company interacts or complies with China’s rules - the other half of the transaction will be blocked.

So using DNS hosted outside won’t matter, because the destination Chinese IP will get blocked. Or if using outside hosting, it won’t matter, because anyone in China trying to access it will get blocked. Or anyone trying to publish anything to it the CCP doesn’t like. Presumably also with some follow up in-person ‘check-ins’.

The GFW is a pretty massive and actually impressively effective piece of technology, even if we don’t agree with it’s purpose.

[gopher_space]

Technology backed by force is not impressively effective as a technology.

[lazide]

So nuclear weapons were and are totally boring and unimpressive?

[AnthonyMouse]

Not only that, it seems to be entirely unimpressive: The premise is that they would be able to allow everything except for what they want to censor, which isn't what they're doing.

If you allow connections to random websites outside of your jurisdiction then you're de facto allowing everything, because people can proxy arbitrary traffic that way. If you don't, you're effectively disconnecting your country from the global internet, which is not an impressive technological feat. Anybody with a backhoe can do a fiber cut.

[lazide]

You’re just ignorant of what it does. The GFW autodetects and blocks a truly impressive number of tunnel encapsulation schemes, VPN’s, etc. and blocks a wide variety of proxy attempts.

It really isn’t dumb at all, and is quite difficult to get past.

It also auto detects ‘problematic’ content in near realtime for a huge swath of things. It does deep packet and content inspection, including of a bunch of encrypted traffic that it really shouldn’t be able to.

At massive (national) level scale.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s evil. But it’s an impressive bit of evil kit.