NateNate60

Classic Europeans on the Internet trying to make fun of [bad thing that happens in the US] without realising it also happens in Europe

Germany:

If you work between 6 to 9 hours a day, you are entitled to a 30-minute break after no later than 6 hours. If you work more than 9 hours a day, the break is extended to 45 minutes. Labour law prohibits taking the break at the end of the day’s work in order to leave earlier.

France:

As soon as your daily working time reaches 6 hours immediately, you must have a break of at least 20 minutes consecutive

The break is granted:

• Either immediately after 6 hours of work[, or]
• before this 6-hour period is completed

United Kingdom:

Employers can say when employees take rest breaks during work time as long as:

• the break is taken in one go somewhere in the middle of the day (not at the beginning or end)
• workers are allowed to spend it away from their desk or workstation (ie away from where they actually work)

American states set their own labour laws, but the ones of the state where I live (Oregon) are actually far more generous than comparable ones in Europe. I am entitled by law during an eight-hour working day to one 30-minute lunch break (not paid) and two additional 10-minute breaks (counts as time worked and is paid). Meaning I get 50 minutes of breaks in a day and the employer has to pay me during 20 minutes of those breaks. My employment contract actually gives me a 1-hour lunch break in addition to the two 10-minute breaks, which isn't required by law but is not uncommon.

Not sure which ones you're talking about, but in Hong Kong, schoolchildren just walk to school. There's usually a school attached to each housing estate.

Imagine having a choice for how you get to your destination

(this comment made by the American gang)

I understand you are playing the devil's advocate here, but this is a legally misinformed take. There is a legal doctrine in American law called the "anti-commandeering doctrine", which states that even though federal law is supreme to state law, the federal government may not "commandeer" organs of the state government by requiring them to perform actions in furtherance of a federal policy. Hence, it would be illegal for the federal government to require states use their law enforcement resources for immigration purposes.

The State of Colorado in particular has instead chosen to explicitly forbid its law enforcement agents from expending state resources to enforce or aid in the enforcement of federal immigration law.

Wireshark can't but there are other methods, such as checking for the known OpenVPN protocol opcodes in the headers:

Sorry, mate. You're going to have to think for yourself instead of just repeating the catchy things you heard on YouTube or Reddit.

You first tried to argue that these people "weren't the customer, they were the product", because you thought the purpose of Google Drive was to collect data from its users for advertising purposes. Google doesn't do that, and they'd be morons if they did because they'd be quickly caught and everyone would get weirded out and stop using their shit.

No, the purpose of Google Drive and Google's office suite being handed out free of charge is the same reason they sell discounted Chromebooks to schools and provide Gmail for free. You are right, it isn't out of the goodness of their hearts. These are all basically free samples to get people using the product, so when a small portion of those individuals enter into decision-making positions for organisations, they, having tried the product, think "Let's go with Google Workspace". Google then earns 60 USD per user per year. Ka-ching.

This is a rare instance where the big corporation's interests happen to be to make the best possible product.

I don't know how they update their IP list. My university is an American university which I believe has no ties to China, but I can't say for sure. According to friends who use the clandestine OpenVPN services, they pay about 20 CNY a month and every month they are issued a new OVPN configuration file. Only occasionally do their servers get blocked before this, and then they have to issue new config files to everyone.

As for myself, I have been to China two times using the OpenVPN server that I deployed on a US-based VPS I rented from a German hosting provider. Each trip lasted about one month. So far, the IP has not been blocked. The government's philosophy regarding the firewall and VPNs seems to be "make it as annoying as possible for the average uninformed layperson to bypass and go after people selling illegal VPNs, but otherwise, we don't give a shit". I do not sell access to my VPN to anyone else. It is strictly for my own use.

Both times I was there, the firewall didn't apply to cellular data because they do not apply the firewall to holders of foreign SIM cards using their cellular service. I purchased a SIM from a Hong Kong carrier (SoSim) with a few gigabytes of data in both Hong Kong and mainland China for 100 HKD. The firewall doesn't apply within Hong Kong. It worked fine, though I do note that surveillance laws meant that I had to upload my passport to activate the service. I'm not a big fan of that, so I kept the VPN connected at all times, though normally-blocked websites did indeed work on cellular data even without the VPN. I checked on my cell phone's settings, and I know it connects to China Mobile towers when in mainland China. Note that China Mobile is owned by the Chinese state.

I also confirmed that it doesn't apply the firewall when I have my T-Mobile (my US cell carrier) SIM in there. My carrier provides unlimited worldwide roaming at 2G speeds but I can confirm that it also connects to China Mobile towers and I could successfully access Wikipedia, a blocked site, without the VPN.

Your idea of "distressingly often", which you bring up a lot, I believe to be severely flawed. With respect to individuals who control their own wallets, it is in reality exceedingly rare for hackers to be able to breach a wallet's security measures and steal coins. Most wallets implement encryption of some sort, either through the device's keystore or using a password. Most crypto thefts take the form of people being tricked into giving away their key phrase or sending their crypto to a scammer. This is really the same type of scam as someone taking your debit card and then tricking you into giving them your PIN. According to most bank policies, you are liable for unauthorised chip-and-PIN debit transactions. "Zero liability" only applies to credit transactions proceed through the Visa or Mastercard networks. If you give someone your PIN for any reason, you are deemed to have authorised all transactions that they make with that PIN.

But you do raise a good point that the crypto industry is very under-regulated and there needs to be some form of deposit insurance for crypto exchanges. More regulation is definitely not a bad thing (despite what crypto bros will say), especially in the post-FTX era.

Attached below is a Wireshark trace I obtained by sniffing my own network traffic.

I want to draw your attention to this part in particular:

Underneath "User Datagram Protocol", you can see the words "OpenVPN Protocol". So anyone who sniffs my traffic on the wire can see exactly the same thing that I can. While they can't read the contents of the payload, they can tell that it's OpenVPN traffic because the headers are not encrypted. So if a router wanted to block OpenVPN traffic, all they would have to do is drop this packet. It's a similar story for Wireguard packets. An attacker can read the unencrypted headers and learn

• The size of the transmission
• The source and destination IP addresses by reading the IP header
• The source and destination ports numbers by reading the TCP or UDP headers
• The underlying layers, up until the point it hits an encrypted protocol (such as OpenVPN, TLS, or SSH)

Take China for example. There is a common misconception that all VPNs are illegal in China. That's not fully true. In China, VPNs are legal and must obtain a licence from the Ministry of Public Security, like all other online businesses. This also means that they have to agree to monitoring and censorship from the Government, so you can't use legal VPN services to bypass the firewall in China.

The Great Firewall doesn't block by protocol. If you set up your own OpenVPN server, you can still connect to it. I've done this many times in my trips to China, and it's worked fine. That being said, they still do seem to throttle connections to international servers, though this happens to all servers, even those that are not blocked. There are many clandestine VPN operators in China who spin up their own VPN servers and sell the service. They are mostly OpenVPN-based.

My university used Cisco AnyConnect, and I was able to successfully connect to the university VPN servers as well.

The limited experimentation I have conducted seems to indicate that the Great Firewall blocks by IP and not by protocol.

If you are using GitHub, then the cloud copy is obviously not the only copy.