Comment by chickenzzzzu 4 days ago
Think of how many people who have remote jobs with American companies couldn't connect to their meetings while they "work from home" while secretly being in China!
Normally they have to fight VPN issues anyway, but having a sovereign state inject your packets is certainly a fun new one.
How do you propose users in China will magically get around a nation state injecting packets?
That's literally what VPNs are for.
If you aren't aware: a Virtual Private Network creates a fully encrypted link between you and a remote node. So long as your encryption keys are secure, there's no way for anyone (even a global superpower) to listen to or intrude on that connection. There is no possible way to break into this connection, even with the entire planet's computing resources.
From the outside, all you can see is a stream of encrypted data between two nodes. You cannot tell where the traffic goes once it exits the VPN server or what it contains.
The only way to compromise a VPN connection is the most straightforward and pedestrian: compromise the VPN host and directly spy on their clients with their own hardware.
The GFW certainly can and has detected such encrypted streams and blocked them for being un-inspectable. With a VPN you can perfectly hide what you're doing and you can perfectly prevent intrusion. You cannot prevent someone noticing you're using a VPN. China can simply blanket ban connections that look like VPN traffic. But they cannot tell what you're doing with that VPN.
Thanks for the reply. In order to connect to the VPN, your first call must be over https, from China, to the VPN. How does that circumvent the phenomenon in the article, where a nation state was injecting TCP to cause your connection to hang up, thus no VPN connection?
I suspect those connections worked fine.
It’s good to know the boss.
I definitely appreciate that a percentage of so called "employees" are actually just full fledged Chinese nationals, living permanently in China, paid a salary to pretend to be an American who had their identity stolen.
But there absolutely is also a non-negligible number of Chinese and Indian nationals, who have some type of visa status in the US (especially a green card) who spend many months in their original countries making $200,000 or more per year while living like royalty in their home countries :)
How common can this really be? And what kind of companies? I’m finding it really hard to imagine this to be widespread.
I live in a popular Digital Nomad friendly country, and myself included, work with Europe/American companies roughly matching their time zones.
Now, the people I work with know that I'm not really located in the same time zone, but I know people who don't bother to mention it. I rarely get phone calls, but I have a roaming connection active for banking/OTP/etc. Plenty of cheap cafes with great WiFi (500mbps+ almost everywhere), and several times cheaper too.
Sadly much more common than it should be. The durations vary widely, but with the price of airline tickets and the nature of corporate software engineering jobs, it's extremely easy to self-justify a month abroad. The US government allows 6 months officially for green card holders.
If it wasn't literally 10x cheaper to live abroad than it is to live in Seattle/San Jose, it wouldn't be as prevalent. And not to mention, the quality of life is often better at the 10x cheaper price as well.
I can give you as much proof as you would like!
Microsoft was caught doing it for the US federal government, so presumably Chinese software engineers are working on other Microsoft products too.
I'll just say Microsoft is not the only company doing that, and there are also Chinese-owned SAASes which American companies pay for.
Lookup the North Korean version of this with the laptop farms
Example: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
China spans 9.6M km. It has some of the biggest and most modern megacities (Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen to name a few) and features ancient historical wonders like the Great Wall, Forbidden City and Terracotta Warriors.
The nature spans salt lakes and rainbow mountains akin to South America, to the Northern Lights in Mohe down to karst formations of Guilin shared with Vietnam's Halong Bay.
The cuisine is diverse and dishes popular in places like Xi'an reveal lasting influences dating back to the Silk Road.
If you can't find "somewhere really nice" amongst the myriad people and locations you haven't tried.
I don't want to try when they have an authoritarian government.
Visiting somewhere means submitting yourself to their laws. With China's, that's not an option for me. Having restricted communication with home is a dealbreaker too. I would not let that stand so I'd have to break their laws.
It may be a beautiful country but it's not a beautiful place to be. At least not for someone like me.
Though having said that there are many places I refuse to travel to. The US is currently one as well for obvious reasons.
Have you ever been to China?
Because they have some of the most beautiful scenery and buildings I've seen and I've been to dozens of countries.
Personally I wouldn't go there for remote work, because the internet interference is a pain but a holiday definitely.
You say that because you don't hold a Chinese or Indian passport. Now think of those who do, who have family obligations, food preferences, local bank accounts.
> You say that because you don't hold a Chinese or Indian passport.
Not really. People like it in China, regardless of whether they're Chinese.
I took an English teaching certification course in Shanghai. The teachers for that course were used to rotating around the world as the company held courses in various random locations.
One day the teachers asked what was apparently a standard question for them, "are you planning to stay here after you get the certification?"
And they were flabbergasted when everyone answered yes. Apparently in most of the locations that offer CELTA courses, the majority of people come for the course and get out as soon as they can.
Anyone operating in/around China who needs a real VPN has a service they pay for and use that isn't mainstream that isn't blocked (using V2ray or similar). There's a reason why Shadowrocket is the number 1 app on the app store. I'm sure there are a lot of cases of people using e.g., off-the-shelf VPN apps and have trouble, but power users in China are always running a VPN, usually to Japan, that doesn't have this problem.