The level of self-righteousness on that forum is hilarious, so it’s nice when the achievement is appreciated for what it is.

Companies can have multiple business lines.

I’m mocking you for insisting that the general public should use complex technical solutions because you think they’re easy to deploy at scale.

I have a few qualms with this app:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn’t actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. It does not seem very “viral” or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

Iykyk. This technical elitism is just generally really off-putting.

Oh awesome! So pleased to see Mistral AI integration for paperless-ai.

It can technically be used to extend your stay in Palau long enough to establish tax residency since it would allow you to stay in Palau for longer than 183 days a year. Not unusual for people sitting on big crypto stashes to move abroad or buy citizenships in order to cash out their crypto without capital gains tax (or at least that’s how it goes - I imagine the IRS doesn’t go down that easily).

The whole point of this card is basically to bypass KYC requirements for crypto exchanges that don’t allow US customers. They are very explicit about this in their marketing.

China scary tho

I really liked Miniflux and its clean design too too, but I found without an adequate categorization functionality, it quickly became overwhelming. Since I don’t check my RSS reader as often as I should, it eventually got overwhelming and I had to switch to FreshRSS.

A lot of these comments are downright unreasonable.

It’s important to evaluate your threat model critically. The average tourist (that isn’t going to Western China) or student is not a target for surveillance or data extrication attempts, especially firmware level attacks that are very specific to devices and are expensive to research and implement.

Companies tend to require employees to carry burner devices for international travel because that’s just good practice. You’re far more likely to lose your device when traveling, border officials have broad discretion to search for and access your devices, and companies tend to have high value information available to their devices past the corporate gateway, like trade secrets, technical designs, accounting records or employee data. That applies to any country, even Western countries.

Take your privacy seriously, but the notion that anything that touches Chinese soil means your devices are instantly compromised is a bit of a fallacious claim. Critically evaluate your role, the information you carry and why you might be the target of anything.

Anyways, as far as VPNs go - technically not illegal. Companies, universities, etc. all have sanctioned MLP gateways in Hong Kong to bypass the firewall. Every expat in China uses a VPN. There’s only one public case of anyone ever being arrested for using a VPN (and it was under a catch-all law), the others were all operators of ShadowSocks/V2Ray airports.

Tailscale and WireGuard is dicey in Mainland China. If you’re just a short term visitor, just buy a 3HK roaming sim for China and call it a day. As a best practice, you don’t really want to expose your self hosted services to the web anyways, so I would probably not even bother trying to VPN from a mainland connection directly.

I never got Plex or Jellyfin to work well on actual Mainland internet connections, simply because the Chinanet backbone that most people in China use is excruciatingly bottlenecked to the point that torrenting from other Chinese peers is just a much more pleasant experience.

The great firewall situation was always interesting, because if you would use a roaming Sim, then you will be able to access anything

Roaming SIMs work because the APN sets a network routing path outside of China.

Cool writeup. I remember implementing BBR many years ago when I was trying to bypass the Great Firewall for an extended stay. Helped deal greatly with the huge congestion on Chinanet backbone at the time, but it’s less of an issue these days now that foreigners can use CN2.