After some research shadowsocks plus open vpn works, but not with pfsense.
No package for pfsense since it is freebsd.
So I am square one, but can setup a Linux-server.
Does anyone know a good tutorial on how to make this work securely?
I have a lot of old PCs lying around here waiting for a second life.
I just googled this: will windows remote desktop work from china?
It looks promising. Set up virtualbox, install windows pro and enable remote desktop.
Make a copy of the virtual disk and have your roommate delete and copy a backup everyday fresh into the directory/folder. Use dynamic IP and find a way to acquire it.
Maybe not the best surfing experience, but simple.
ExpressVPN is a few bucks for 1 month, and requires 0 effort. Just sayin’.
For short trips just get a data roaming deal from your Taiwan provider, Facebook, Google etc are all accessible if on a Taiwan sim card.
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Follow up: well, if you want the internet at all when you’re in China, get one of the different Taiwanese plans to access data - and it does mostly let you dodge the Great Firewall. I’ll do that if I ever go over there again - not that I’m particularly interested in doing so.
The main theme with accessing the internet: unpredictability. BBC and Google (including Google Translate, annoyingly!) just won’t work. Sometimes I could access my Taiwanese workplace’s email account, sometimes I couldn’t. New York Times alerts came through on my iOS devices, but then I couldn’t access the story. Some of my podcast feeds (in Overcast app) sometimes worked, others never worked, with not much predictability: BBC podcasts never worked, but also some independent tech podcasts never worked. Couldn’t access Netflix, unsurprisingly. Sometimes I could get to the Apple App Store, sometimes I couldn’t. iCloud sync services (Notes, iCloud Photo Library) sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. I never tried buying anything through my Kindle Amazon account. (Note that much of this unpredictability may be as much from bad wifi as from Chinese censorship.) But all of that was a relatively minor hassle, for a short trip at least.
Those of us from Taiwan used WeChat to stay in touch. That worked well. I still got messages in Apple’s Messages app as well.
The bigger hassle was that the “available” Wifi was very unpredictable. My hotel and the campus I spent most of my time at both had wifi I could use: I knew this ahead of time, and that’s why I didn’t bother getting a data plan. But it was appalling wifi - I only successfully logged in to the campus once (even though they gave us all accounts!), and in the following days just got a spinning wheel. I needed to log in to the hotel wifi repeatedly, but at least it worked after logging in. There are wifi networks across Shanghai, but I think you needed to provide a Chinese phone number to use them, so that was out.
A couple of times I hopped on the hotspots of friends who had connect-to-Taiwan plans, and used those to access things like email.
When I was using the local wifi: Google didn’t work, unsurprisingly; for the duration of my trip, I changed the default search engine to Baidu. And wow does Baidu give crap results, but I guess that’s what happens when massive stretches of the internet are off-limits.
Google Maps still remembered the limited amount that I’d cached, but it was offset and inaccurate and couldn’t download anything new. I installed a different mapping app which I’ve since deleted - Baidu Maps, maybe? It worked well enough. There was also a Shanghai subway map that was quite useful.
I used a couple of offline city maps apps that worked reasonably well: CityMaps2Go, and Pocket Earth.
I don’t think I tried FaceTime or Skype while I was there. I never tried Apple Pay either. I felt very primitive paying for things with cash when everyone else was just waving their phone around.
Finding random restaurants without Google Maps or Google was a pain. Yelp doesn’t seem to exist at all over there. I like to think there’s a great restaurant review and location service that I simply didn’t find, but then again, there isn’t a good service in Taiwan, either.
I think Forumosa worked, although I’m still not entirely sure if that whole thread of Christians policing which other Christians get to call themselves Christian was genuine or a weird attempt to sow division by an atheist division of the 10-cent army.
I hope no damage or hacking was done to my accounts. Since I came back, I’ve had to sign in to a bunch of things again on my devices and computer, and re-enter passwords. I don’t know if that’s a coincidence or not, but I suspect there’s been some kind of flag on my accounts, perhaps because I was accessing from China, or perhaps because I was VPN-hopping between Shanghai and Taipei.
Not related to computers: I was surprised how much trouble I had with simplified Chinese characters. My Chinese is a bit crap, but my comprehension of characters helps a lot when I’m getting around Taiwan - yet the move to simplified caused more trouble for me than I expected. For example, in Taiwan I can usually figure out the restaurants around me in Google Maps, even if there’s only Chinese - but with the simplified characters in the China (Baidu?) app, I was lost.
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Thanks for the detailed report. I’ll be going to Fuzhou next month, but for only five days, so I’m definitely going to get a roaming plan from Taiwan Mobile.
i lived in china for 2 years. here’s my advice on the great firewall:
- don’t use free VPNs, they are not reliable (i like expressvpn the best but i’m not sure how worth it is to get a subscription for just a short trip). try doing like a free trial of a paid VPN if you’re just going for a few days.
- whatever cell phone service you have, if you use it with a VPN you can expect everything to load more slowly and it will take up more data.
- if you’re worried about not being able to contact family/friends i would highly recommended at least one person you know download wechat, even if you’re just staying for few days in china. i’ve been stuck at the airport in shanghai with no VPN and the only app i could use was wechat, and if my parents didn’t also have it i wouldn’t have been able to contact them and let them know i was still alive.
- i never tried applepay in china, i assume it works but most people pay for things with wechat. i’m not sure if you can add non-chinese cards to your wechat wallet
- download baidu or gaode maps and download the offline maps too. google maps even with a VPN isn’t updated regularly and the information isn’t reliable.
- a lot of places with “Free Wifi” in china still require you to enter a chinese phone number to access, so that’s something to keep in mind. get a pocket wifi from klook if you need to
My personal tip: if you use gmail. Create a yahoo account and link it to your gmail account.
Didn’t you use baidu maps lol? It’s so terrible, half the stuff I wanted to find it didn’t even say existed.
One impressive thing about the fire wall is if you check it out at the HK Shenzhen border. 5 steps into Shenzhen no more google, walk back to HK side, google is back.