chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]

I think it’s pretty reckless to give a company that is almost certainly connected to American military intelligence access to your users communications and connection data.

If you are brothered by bots, step one robots.txt, then you can still block crawlers in the config of your own webserver just like did on cloudflare, and then you can roll out tools like Anubis or iocaine to frustrate bots further.

Great comedic timing on the cloudflare recommendation

I’m cool with paying a few bucks for an ad free version as long as it’s not a subscription. But it’s annoying that it’s often only available as an in-app purchase that doesn’t work without google play services.

It is basically unavoidable for PC game publishers/studios. So a bit of monopoly on that side.

For gamers there are alternatives.

Steam machine has been a flop in the past and VR is pretty niche. But Xe is usually right about everything so who is to say.

I’d argue it’s not a question of intelligence but of network equipment. In many countries ISPs are private companies and there which complicates measures that require specialised equipment. Blocking DNS is basically free, routers can void IPs and IP ranges, broad checks for sequences in package payload are more expensive (scanning for Wireguard) and approaches to distinguish OpenVPN from other SSL even more.

I’d be careful with wireguard if VPN is illegal. OpenVPN has a SSL handshake. Wireguard has a Wireguard handshake.

OpenVPN fingerprinting exists too but it’s an actual effort. For Wireguard you just need tcpdump and a basic filter.

I think the Chinese VPN ban is a bit exaggerated

You can rent a server and run OpenVPN on that server on port 443. Maybe even with port sharing so that the server can act like a regular webserver too.

It’s easier to trace the traffic back to you if the server runs in your name but it’s pretty hard to tell that you are using VPN if you aren’t connecting to a known VPN provider.

Yeah the end of security updates severely exaggerated.

You can take Google out of Android but not Android out of Google.

They sure are trying https://fuchsia.dev/