I'm wondering how the various approaches for getting Tor and VPNs through are working, and which are not. Tor uses various transports, such as obfsproxy (now with obfs3) and most recently (I think) meek. Using meek, traffic is obfuscated and routed through arbitrary third-party sites. Some VPNs use haggismn's XOR patch for OpenVPN. Others provide access via SSH, Stunnel (SSL) and/or obfsproxy (obfs3). I presume that any approach developed for Tor could be used with VPNs.
One of the major issues will be that "Chinese Gov" will be reading here too, and likely alot. If a solution becomes well established it also becomes a major target. Just wondering if IVPN and AirVpn are still making it through. I am not in China so I can't determine the status.
And yet I have seen absolutely nothing on the forums/support for the major ones we recommend here, or that I am using.
the VPN I normally use in China has continued to work work well - I have it on basically all the time on my laptop and android phone. I also subscribe to a second VPN, which has some kind of stealth VPN settings to get around the Great Firewall of China, but it never worked well for me here, so instead I just use the first VPN and then the second one (in normal mode) via a virtual machine when I download torrents because the second one seems to be more torrent friendly. i don't use Tor very much because it's slow - not sure if it still works here, but I'll try it later.
Some of the great reputation VPNs have dedicated member forums, and I am seeing nothing in there. Watching daily and nothing being discussed.
I noticed that Torguard had beefed up its stealth VPNs and updated its client software for getting through the GFC last time I logging in the administrative console.
Tried Tor this morning, and it's not working for me at the moment. Of course, I could always run it if I use VPN first and then Tor inside a VM, or even VPN1 -> Tor -> VPN2... Anyway, the blocking here tends to be spotty, for example, sometimes my gmail works, a lot of times it does not work, so Tor might also sometimes work and sometimes not, or it might with other ISP's or it might be possible to use an advanced configuration to make it work.
China Censors VPNs To Protect Great Firewall, But Some Manage To Get Through http://www.ibtimes.com/china-censors-vpns-protect-great-firewall-some-manage-get-through-1802938
Learning more about the GFW's active probing system https://blog.torproject.org/blog/learning-more-about-gfws-active-probing-system
I know of three open-source obfuscation apps: SSH, SSL/stunnel and obfsproxy. There's also an obfuscation patch for OpenVPN. And some VPN services use proprietary/closed-source methods. I wonder which one works best.
I have heard Boleh VPN works well for China. They use their own obfuscation method with Open VPN last time I checked.
Google briefly worked out a way of bypassing China’s Great Firewall http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/03/28/google-worked-way-bypassing-chinas-great-firewall/