Whenever I read about countries banning sites, people post "just use a VPN, lol". But I wonder: If China really wants to, couldn't they just block VPNs? At the worst, just whitelist a bunch of sites and services and literally block everything else?
The GFW is evolving. Many VPN protocols or servers that worked in the past works no longer. It’s definitely not as simple as “just run a VPN”, but more like a cat and mouse game.
They do. They fingerprint for OpenVPN in real time and block it. In 2018 I was cycling through multiple VPNs at a time. The only thing that worked was Shadowsocks.
Can confirm. I setup a Shadowsocks VPN using Streisand on a DO instance at the Singapore data center. That was the only way to get through the firewall.
