Google's New VPN, Outline, Uses Chinese Technology That Intended To Circumvent GFW

Here is the news today:
Outline is a new app that developed by Google's sibling company, Jigsaw, to deliver a painless homebrew VPN service to anyone, with or without any tech background. It provides a simple one click deploy, easy to share way of DIY your own VPN service, for those who are privacy sensitive, yet without in depth knowledge of how to build one him or herself. And if you are curious, Jigsaw claims Outline has been audited by some independent security entity.
After reading various reports on the internet, and digging around this Outline by Jigsaw I was somewhat surprised. In fact, Outline In fact is not a conventional one click VPN installer and manager. It uses a so called SOCK5 technology. It may appear as a VPN on your phone or laptop, yet in its core, it uses another open source project, called Shadowsocks. And what is this Shadowsocks, it is the most popular tool for Chinese people to fight Chinese government's Great Firewall of China, GFW.
Here is some background story, in a Chinese point of view, for those lucky enough not living in China right now. GFW was built using a mixture of imported hardware and homebrew software, in order to censor the internet. GFW's system is believed to be built into the core internet infrastructure. At its beginning, GFW is just some IP blocking tool, to block some foreign websites' IP addresses. Soon it can do what people call "DNS poisoning", a more advanced way to block websites essentially. Then this GFW can use AI to detect and block certain connections on its own. It just keeps growing in its capabilities. Now it can block most kinds of VPN using packet inspection.
For any Chinese who wants to use "normal" internet to do stuff, like reading "real" news, watching youtube or just doing some research, GFW is a huge pain in the ass. I tried to use GFWed internet just to understand how it felt. It felt awful. Most of the services I am used to are blocked, and most of the foreign websites are slow as hell. Generally speaking, that's exactly what GFW is for. Censor the internet, and discourage Chinese from using foreign internet services that are not blocked already.
So, some years ago some programmer developed a tool to deal with this whole GFW mess. It ran on his own server outside of China. It worked really well so he decided to share it on github, and named it Shadowsocks. Its service side was originally written in python, with little cross platform compatibility. Soon Shadowsocks got very popular, many talented Chinese programmer got into the project. Now Shadowsocks is the only tool I know of, that is stable, cross platform, free and open source tool to use in China. Shadowsocks has been rewritten in several other programming languages including go, c, and java. It can be run on most of the VPS, routers, phones and computers. It is stealthy enough even state run GFW can't detect it. It is efficient enough to run on some cheapish barebone VPS. It is the first tool that comes to mind for any Chinese, to get connected to the "real internet".
It got so popular, its original author got a visit from Chinese police, then deleted his code on github. But no matter. There are now enough others working on it, and it gets update all the time.
For me personally, I got to know Shadowsocks back in my ingress days. Yeah, because ingress uses google's cloud services it got blocked at its start. But we play it all the same. At that time, with the help of Shadowsocks, me and my friends had loads of fun exploring the city. Now I have several Shadowsocks servers running, I have Shadowsocks clients running on all my devices. In fact without it I can't even use this Chromebook I am typing on. All thanks to this open source project, and its contributors, I can enjoy everything I love without the need of a passport and a flight ticket. And it's all free and open source.
Talking about "free", let's talk about what Shadowsocks, and, google's Outline, is and is not.
Outline (Shadowsocks) is:

1. open source
   
2. a free service, that is all its service and client services are free of charge. (except some on iOS, of course)
   
3. a great tool to deal with internet censorship.
   

is not:

1. completely free. You need to pay for your own VPS server.
   
2. run by any company. You do everything for yourself, and you have the control.
   
3. a tor alternative.
   
4. a VPN in traditional sense.
   

I don't want to and in fact can't go any further into Shadowsocks, Outline's underlining core technology. Just go to its github and read the code.
What is curious to me is that apparently someone outside China notices Shadowsocks and built a semi automated app around it. I haven't used Outline app myself. It probably won't work inside China, and I already have enough such severs myself. What I fear is, with google now using Shadowsocks, Chinese government would take some actions. And btw Outline uses Digital Ocean's VPS, does this mean DO will be soon blocked in China as well? I hope not.
At the same time, I really hope that with more and more people interested in Shadowsocks, it would grow more stronger and hardened enough to deal with GFW with some certainty. And with my brief introduction, more people, especially hackers would be motivated to do some work on this GFW blackbox. Hacking something else is fun, yeah, but hacking Chinese government's censor black box GFW? It should be challenging enough, and rewarding enough:

you can change million's people's lives.

State of Things

It has been weeks, since something big happened inside China. President Xi has finally gotten hold of what he always wants, indisputable, unstoppable power upon China. This move has essentially wiped clean 100 years of struggle of my people. Yet all I can hear is silence. It is as if all Chinese has become blind and deaf. Life, goes on.
This silence in fact happens much earlier.
Right after Xi took power, he effectively destroyed objective media, newspapers, TV stations, internet outlets, even independent writers and intellectuals. Then he built a stronger internet censorship machine, upon human censors, AIs, willingly cooperative domestic internet ISPs and companies. After that, he used corruption as an excuse to punish those within the party who might be trouble to whatever he was planning. People love to see lawless display of state power against those who profit from political connections. It was all planned out and executed like a precise battle plan. And most of us has waken up into a nightmare and realized this has been his plan all along.
Now it is quite hopeless to be honest. There is no one politically strong enough to challenge Xi, both within and outside the party. Critics have been warned, jailed or lost his or her voice or platform. Advances in AI and data mining have silenced the rest of my people, there is nothing the state does not know. Your private chat massages, your location histories, your online presents, even your shopping history. Xi must love reading 1984. It is worse than soviet union. Under both psychological and realistic pressures, my people just shut up. Let's be honest most people just don't care anymore. As long as things go as usual. Do things go as usual?
Mostly yes.
As long as economy goes well, as long as housing market keeps going, as long as people can still live and breath under reasonable conditions, yes, things will go as usual. But will it last?
Not necessarily.
Concentrated power does not always yield reasonable decisions. In fact, it mostly yields bad decisions. Because no one can criticize, no bad news, no bad data. The system can not fix itself without right data. It may be alright at the moment, but what about under stress, what about another recession?
It has never been so easy to inter change information in the history of human race. Yet it has never been so hard and dangerous to criticize in China in like 50 years. Without some healthy amount of negative feedback, the system would inevitably fail. After all from what we can see, Xi has never been as smart as Putin. Putin knows his people, Xi just silence them.
So what does it mean for us, people who still live in China and have a life here. I have little hope. Under current toxic environment, I can see little hope. It is after all against party's agenda to politically educate people. People has no desire to learn how to govern themselves. I can see generations of suffering before people can have a voice, before a healthy political system can rise from ashes.
After all, what other communist countries ends up like? Do we, the Chinese are so different from North Korea, or soviet union? Not likely.
But hey, it's golden times, to get rich on politically connections, on corruptions and other disgusting means. There is no doubt about that. As long as you can bear the look of yourself in the mirror, or think long and hard in history perspective. But I guess they are of no problems, we are always nihilistic anyways.