/anthro/ - Anthropomorphic

>>102442 (OP) 
Welcome to Meatcube
Population:  You

How does the Internet even work in places like Russia & China? Are all the Russians I see online using VPNs?

>>102444
yes afaik

>>102444
Trips of SRS BZNS.  The Chinese are trying to firewall off their entire country, with local alternatives to "subversive" Western social media, Chinese-language search engines that show only Party-approved content, and so on.  A large part of the way the Great Firewall works is by serving up phony DNS information about a third of the time, so that when people there try to use, for example, Google, from their end it looks like Google is constantly dropping the connection, randomly redirecting to random IP addresses, and generally being a ginormous pain in the ass to use.  It's also silently logging IP addresses, and periodically the Ministry for State Security makes examples.  The form this takes can be anything from hits to Social Credit ratings to arrests, fines, laogai sentences, to, for those whose offenses go beyond merely trying to use Google to look for chicken recipes to posting material disrespectful of the CCP, a visit from a black-bag team and a shallow unmarked roadside grave.  It's similar in Russia, as with everything else, just currently less complete, less organized, and less competently administered.

There are regional distinctions in attitude and culture, rooted in Russia's history of legalism, in which there are hard rules, there is a process, in which law and bureaucracy are tools that give predictable results when invoked and manipulated just so by a sufficiently clever and daring fellow (this is why mobiks make videos in which they complain about not having been paid, and put them on the Internet, with an expectation that this will accomplish something; this is also why the NKVD forced "counterrevolutionary wreckers" to sign full confessions before the execution).

In China, by contrast, the entire culture is a result of and reaction to millennia of rule by provincial administrators who might show up any morning and have the entire population of the province put to the sword on the word of an astrologer who told him they were plotting rebellion, or at the request of a concubine who said the direction you plowed the fields disrupted the province's feng shui.  There are no rules, just force and fear, and your rulers wouldn't be in charge if the Gods didn't like the way they do things, the Mongols would probably be slightly worse anyway, so make yourself small, do everything the exact same way your great great grandfather did, and hope to be beneath the governor's notice.

>>102452
> A large part of the way the Great Firewall works is by serving up phony DNS information about a third of the time, so that when people there try to use, for example, Google, from their end it looks like Google is constantly dropping the connection, randomly redirecting to random IP addresses, and generally being a ginormous pain in the ass to use.
It's not just that afaik, (otherwise you'd just specify a western DNS, or use DoH and be done with that), they inspect the packets in real time and drop some (easier than spoofing DNS? Doesn't congest the line as much) that fit certain criteria, e.g. a VPN protocol is detected, SNI is blacklisted etc. But it does go beyond that, the Chinese accidentally leaked some of the docs on it last summer and apparently they can also man-in-the-middle themselves into the traffic which is much worse.
Oh and yes, they can link the traffic to the user (not just based on the fact he's using his home isp or a phone registered to him but by analyzing the traffic and behavior as well) and mess with those with low social credit score aka potential dissidents.

>It's similar in Russia, as with everything else, just currently less complete, less organized, and less competently administered.
It's "badly" managed in the sense they aren't doing anything to the rulebreakers (yet) but from a technological standpoint there are claims that they manage to detect shadowsocks and its derivatives which is something GFW isn't capable of. Again, allegedly, though. Need more anecdotal evidence. The Chinese (especially those eager to discuss such stuff) are particularly hard to come by.
Visited China briefly last year and google worked without a hitch and so did the VPN, but I was using a foreign SIM with data roaming, so it was probably routed around the firewall. Should've tried with the hotel's wifi.

Recently saw an anon claim that GFW has been relaxed lately, it's just that the Chinese have little interest in the outside world by now. Not too hard to imagine, they must have just settled for the Chinese alternatives to all of the Western services. They are well-integrated too, WeChat and AliPay have essentially replaced cash and cards alike, despite the god-awful inhuman UI.
>https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/122
>Only 60% of urban respondents had ever used the Internet; of these, only 52% knew there is something called the Great Firewall and that there are ways to circumvent it. Only 5% of those surveyed had jumped the wall, ever. When those who had not were asked why not, their responses indicated they were negatively motivated not by fear, but rather by inconvenience, from not knowing how, or not having a reason to circumvent. Circumvention was correlated with age and education: those that had jumped the wall were more likely to be young, politically aware, and understand English.
(this data is a decade old though)

>>102472
>it's just that the Chinese have little interest in the outside world by now. 
They never did.  This is normal.  The Middle Kingdom has always looked inward, not outward, as a result of being hemmed in on all sides by Mongols, the sea, and all-but-uncrossable deserts and mountains.  Western nations look outward.  The CCP's utopia is one in which the cities on China's  coastline swell to bursting with genetically engineered bugmen who are content to live in concrete pens and slave their entire lives away for the greater glory of the CCP, then die without making a fuss, none ever so much as looking up at the stars.

Even Russia, which is very much not a Western nation, has had the cultural phenomenon of the frontier, sorta, for some values of "frontier."  Since the last of the Mongol and Turkish princedoms were conquered and their inhabitants expelled about three hundred years back, Russia has had millions of square miles of arable land that are as utterly desolate of human life as they were during the Miocene.  For the last few centuries a handful of hardy souls have tried to go innawoods to homestead, and get out from under the watchful eyes of the Tsar and his agents without the risks of emigration.  There's a sect of Russian Orthodox Christianity whose name for themselves, староверы, translates into English best as "Old Believers" or maybe "Old Ritualists."  Periodically a mania for this idea spreads among them.  They don't congregate, though.  They don't build towns, which would inevitably come to the attention of the Okhrana, or the Chekha, or the KGB, or the FSB.  Single families go out without so much as a radio.  They build tiny cabins, often elaborately camouflaged to make them difficult to see from the air, and grow potatoes and cabbage in between the trees for a few years, until they get eaten by bears, or freeze to death, or starve to death, or one of the kids dies of appendicitis and the parents decide to move back to the city.

This is a tiny, tiny movement.  At any given time probably fewer than a thousand of them are living innawoods in Siberia.  Russia's military has historically built bases deep innawoods, and the secret police's death camps are always put at the terminus of a train line that brings zeks in but never out.  Other than this there are fewer than ten million souls in Russia east of the Urals, the single largest concentration in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, and this is according to official figures, which are known to be unreliable and frequently turn out to be wildly exaggerated.

If you opened a magical portal to such land from the US, you'd instantly get a gorillion volunteers crossing over, building farms, building towns, panning for gold, building mines, building sawmills to export lumber back to this side.  In Russia almost no one is interested.  Part of this is because everyone knows that they wouldn't have paved streets before the secret police and the army showed up and started cattle-prodding all the postpubescent males onto buses with one-way tickets for the zero line in Donbas.  But no one wanted the free land before the current war, either.  It is not a coincidence that the only places on Earth where you can follow a waterway to the sea without ever finding a town, a port, a bridge, or any other sign of human develoopment, are Africa, India, and Russia.

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The current situation depends on the region, whether it's mobile/landline and whether there's a drone alert. Mobile internet is the most restricted. They used to turn it off entirely (switching to 2g worked on some providers) when there are drones, now there're using a whitelist where some essential services remain useable. Old-school VPNs are banned by protocol, only those that pretend to be regular web traffic work, most commonly vless with additional obfuscations. Sites are banned either by SNI or by IP, if whitelist is active only some IP ranges are allowed. SNI blocks can be bypassed without a VPN with anti-DPI utilities like byebyedpi, but finding a working strategy is difficult. There are VPNs now that reside in whitelist IP ranges so they work even if the whitelist is active, they also fake the SNI to be some whitelisted site while the IP is that of the VPN. Russian sites and apps try detecting whether you're connecting from a VPN so they're bypassed, apps like happ have flexible configurations where the config itself can have them bypassed, no user configuration needed, as well as auto-updating server lists. Configs are frequently obtained from telegram. If you're living in EU you should research this.

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>>102523
>They never did.  This is normal. 
Indeed, this does seem to come up often when looking at their history. For the most part the population seems content to just delegate these things to the state, and the state seems content to keep interactions that do not directly benefit it to a minimum.
> there are fewer than ten million souls in Russia east of the Urals
Google says 25-30 million, but this is indeed disproportionately low.
> Jewish Autonomous Oblast
Population 150,000, almost none of them Jews, oddly enough. The whole thing seems to have been created as a containment area for them except they figured it out and either stayed in Moscow or moved to the Middle East or USA. That place blows.

> millions of square miles of arable land 
>If you opened a magical portal to such land from the US, you'd instantly get a gorillion volunteers crossing over, building farms, building towns, panning for gold, building mines, building sawmills to export lumber back to this side.  
I'm not sure, imo it's more fitting to compare that region to Canada, not the US. Similar climate, soil and latitude. Novosibirsk (one of the southernmost Siberian cities) is still further north than Regina and has population higher than that of the entirety of Saskatchewan. 
It is understandable why no one would want to move there when they could just remain in the Volga, Don, Dnieper basins where you'd have fertile soil, mild climate and more sun (too bad they suffer a genocidal war there every century or so).  Siberian soil is passable but barely, there are considerably fewer sunlight hours so you can only harvest once a year. Hell, it snows in June there sometimes. No tornadoes though!
So they ended up with an unwelcoming expanse nearly twice the US coast-to-coast span and instead of prairies they had to go through endless swamps and forests. 
During the Tsarist era the area wasn't developed for this very reason and while they did manage a railroad eventually, it came too late. 
Once industrialization really came into play with the Soviets (as we know the region is rich not just with oil but all sorts of metals and minerals), it did see major development. The government inundated the public with "let's do this shit!"  movies, books and articles, romanticizing the concept, and millions volunteered. They did make strides in turning the area into farmland (accidentally draining a lake the size of Michigan in the process) but again the focus was on the areas with better soil and sunlight, which just happened to be in Central Asia, and ended up on the wrong side of the border in 1991 so they are more or less back to square one except now there is even less incentive for anyone to bother when doordashing in Moscow is more profitable than digging potatoes out of clay while swarms of mosquitoes suck you dry.

But yes, the impetus behind and the approach to colonization and development of Siberia and the American westward expansion were very different. The latter was fueled by highly motivated opportunistic people with the go-getter mentality, the former was mostly done by undesirables (not just the gulags, Siberia had been the go-to banishment place for rebellious peasants and nobles alike for centuries) content with just being left alone. They don't trust the authority to do right by them either. If you look up the recent news from Siberia, these past couple of months farmers have been having their cattle forcefully slain en masse under the pretext of an epidemic (the authorities haven't settled on the pathogen yet) to make room for some oligarch's enterprise. It's not like things like that never happened in the US (pay the railroad tycoon to nudge the line so that it passes through your town, or don't and watch it wither) but Siberian farmers just legit can't catch a break. 

At the end of the day though, people who have an idea of what different places are like don't want to live in Saskatchewan, they want to live in Florida. The incentives to develop middle-of-nowhere areas have to be huge, but seldom are. I don't think a regime and mentality change would affect that area much, not until resource depletion and climate change make it more appealing (or slave labor is reintroduced).

>follow a waterway to the sea without ever finding a town, a port, a bridge
Not too unexpected when the sea in question is frozen solid 6 months a year leaving you completely stranded and there is nothing but lumber to export (to whom?). I'm sure there are rivers in Alaska or Northern Canadian provinces unaffected by the Gold Rush that don't have any noteworthy settlements either. For example, a quick glance along the Rae river in Nunavut does not reveal any, because why would anyone choose to live there anyway.

Cool.

>>102523
text straight out of the glowing corners of the pentagon