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.

WhatsApp Back Online in China (for the moment)

Last night it was around 5 pm local time that I and my girlfriend found out that WhatsApp was not working. At the time I was not sure, checking on Twitter and various sites, thinking there might be troubles at WhatsApp's side. But no. It was a total block by government firewall, GFW.

Although there was little coverage until today, but after about 10 hours around 10 am the day after, WhatsApp was back online again. And it has been working since then.

But again, news about WhatsApp blockage finally hits news sites all over. In fact it is working OK now.

I don't know what's going on here. Only few thoeries are all I've got. Maybe later I will write about them.

WhatsApp finally down in mainland China

As far as I know, WhatsApp has been down in mainland China, for both cable and mobile data.

Nothing works so far.

WhatsApp main server works fine, tested via circumvention methods.

It looks like the GFW finally takes down WhatsApp, just before "main event" October.

Reports from other outlets would come very soon. And, lol, nothing will change for users inside China.

WhatsApp has been a great app. So long.

The Gone Emoji

In fact it never occurred to me the big change ahead with the emoji in android O. There are a lot changes under the hood but visually not much with the latest version of the most popular OS on earth. I can't say much is because, hey, there is little chance for me to have android O now that I am on LG V20 instead of a nexus of a pixel.

But, after reading the verge coverage (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/25/15688528/google-blob-emoji-android-o-rip), with all the comparison of emoji from different versions, I find myself missing the days of android 4.4.

It's just my personal opinion but emoji back to version 4.4 is really the best of all. With everyone else doing a round face, what android had back then is a "blob". Not any blobs but blobs with a neck (sort of). Blobs can look up and down and sideways because of the neck they have. To me that's way more expressive than what we will have.

I guess it has something to do with time as well. Back then, most apps with built in emojis were doing apple line of them. Sending a blob most always meant I am the only person who can see what it really was. It is strange. But people are strange anyways. And, I guess people just don't like changes.

Weird LG Phones

In smartphone business LG is surely weird. Or innovative, depends on your liking.

I don't know about other markets in the world but here in China, LG almost always equals to air conditioners, TVs, and other home appliances in general. Few know they are also selling top of the line smartphones. Maybe LG is really tired of this image in people's mind they are ABANDONING Chinese market right now. I mean, seriously. The only place you can buy a LG phone was online, and the phone you are left with is a LG G5, a 2015 model and they are still selling at a full price, with a heavily modified system that does not have Google services. And btw can not be rooted. People are saying that the first week LG put G5 on the Chinese market they were selling so few of them it was a joke.

Well there are too many competitions here in mainland China, even a ex-english teacher can make and sell phones these days. LG must be having a hard time these days here. But their phones are weird in the first place.

The only decent smartphones you can buy right now that can swap batteries are from LG. ALL of them are from LG in fact. Rumoured G6 may ditch this design trend but hey, who knows now for sure?

LG has some layer of skin over the top of Android. Most die hard funs hate these kind of skins. I was one of them and went for a Nexus 6p but guess what, pure Android experience means Google can do whatever they want including some experimental stuff on the phone, and in the end ruined the battery, which is, unfortunately sealed in. I want to talk about batteries later. But the skin that LG puts on is not that intrusive at all. It's WAY better than Samsung's or Huawei's or even HTC's. It's so superficial that sometimes you would think LG is just being lazy. LG doesn't have any strange services of its own working in the background. Hardly any apps that would seem competing with what Google has already offers. I should say it's a gentle and lay back way of doing skins.

Over the days after switching from a Nexus to this LG V20 I am currently holding I can say I am super pleased. Yeah I know rooting is hard but to me I just have enough to worry about and the general Android experience is good enough for me to live without a root.

Oh one more thing. From Nexus the newest doze mode, can't be applied to Google's core services and that sometimes ruins battery life. But on a third party phone guess what nothing can't be dozed. And I have never seen any Google apps on my battery usage anymore.

In the end I should say, LG you are making some really untrendy decisions on phones. You are being different and at times weird. But hey I like that! It's exactly what makes me happy with your phone from the days of my old Nexus 4! Keep doing it. You have the cash to burn. Just keep doing it. (Like Sony).

posted from Bloggeroid

Cashless Living In China

Recently I have tried to go cashless for some time, for no particular reasons at all. Well maybe it was because I was on a business trip and carrying a bulging wallet from place to place wasn't exactly a safe practice. I can only keep my eye on certain amount of things, like my plane ticket, my phone, and my bag and that's about all. I can't just go around still thinking about that wallet in some pocket of mine. So I buried my wallet somewhere in my bag. From that day on for about a month I never actually had more than 50 Yuan in my pocket. And I can say I have had no problem at all living, both on the road and at home.

This shouldn't be a surprise to most of the people around me through. Most people living in the city like I do, have at least an IM app called Wechat installed on their phone. Some shops or supermarkets or KFC also support an app called Alipay.

In Wechat, people can bind one or several bank cards to their account. When paying someone or some shop all people have to do is to open Wechat and scan a QR code the receipt is showing, you just have to type several digits and the transaction is complete. The money would go from the bank card to the recipient's Wechat account. And the transaction goes instantly.  Because almost everyone nowadays has a Wechat account, and has Wechat app installed on their phone, paying with Wechat is really the most common way to live cashlessly. I have used Wechat to pay taxi, food, supermarkets and so on. I think I can do just about anything with Wechat.

Alipay is similar but not all the same. Alipay is not a IM app, it is solely used as a payment app for Taobao, which is the largest online shopping platform in China, maybe in the world. Users of this shopping platform don't need to go anywhere. Anything that a human would need I dare say he or she can buy from Taobao. At first Alipay was just a payment service for Taobao, after a while, Alipay started to grow in functions, like buying plane tickets, paying mobile phone bills, utility bills and so on. Most major supermarkets and shops support paying with Alipay. Personally I have used Alipay for my phone bills utility bills and even steam games.

Now I have about 10 Yuan in my wallet and it has been like this for over 10 days. I don't really feel the need to withdraw any cash from my bank.

There are concerns as well. I know these private companies would very much love to know where and when I pay for what. These kinds of information are priceless and they would love to pay a little bit just to gather that info. And the state is looking into using these info for other purposes that I am not so comfortable with. Cash as a payment method is anonymous. And there is no other way more anonymous than using cash. I understand them all. But, living like this is really fantastic and futuristic as well. I can't just live under a stone. Can I?