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Comment: Available on Taobao (Score 1) 54

by sc0rpi0n (#45894485) Attached to: China Lifts 13-Year-Old Foreign Console Ban

A quick search on Taobao (the number one Chinese online market place) yields more than 60000 results for 'xbox':

People that want one can easily get one. Same for satellite dishes, which are illegal in China, but nevertheless easily seen on most apartment buildings in Beijing.

Comment: Re:Umm, landmark? (Score 1) 55

by sc0rpi0n (#44939561) Attached to: China Lifts Bans On Social Media, Foreign ISPs In Free Trade Zone

And if foreigners use a VPN to access information, you lose all snooping ability. If their connection is not blocked, they will most likely not bother to use a VPN, allowing you to get information on how often they chat with friends, watch cats on Youtube and visit sensitive websites.

Comment: Re:This rule applies to EVERYBODY (Score 1) 622

by sc0rpi0n (#44694083) Attached to: Measles Outbreak Tied To Texas Megachurch

Still, the number of stars within say 50 light years is quite limited (1875 according to one post), so the poster is right about the chances of finding them within his life time being near zero. The number of stars in our own galaxy is 300 billion, and it might take up to 100,000 years for the signal to reach them, and the same amount of time to send a reply. Even within 500 light years, there are only 1,875,000 stars.

Comment: Re:Time to invest in popcorn (Score 1) 520

by sc0rpi0n (#44506365) Attached to: China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem

A shitload of people is probably hoarding exploits to use when MS stops patching the product. Once that happens,it's gonna be fun to watch.

What makes you think that these users are updating their systems right now? Most installations in China are pirated and have updates disabled to prevent them from being disabled after an update.

According to http://www.ie6countdown.com/ 24% of users in China use IE6. Microsoft has issued an update that forces an upgrade to IE8, which means that these users either have updates disabled or explicitly opted out of upgrading the browser through a special process; most likely the first.

Having no new patches won't change anything.

Comment: Re:Priority Failure. (Score 1) 338

by sc0rpi0n (#43662083) Attached to: BT Begins Customer Tests of Carrier Grade NAT

I suppose that most customers will get a /24 in the to use for all the devices in their home network. This way there will still only be one layer of NAT, and the maximum number of customers on one IP would be 64, not 16000. IPs are not so scarce that they need to squeeze more than 64 customers onto one IP (yet): one /8 of real addresses can theoretically accomodate up to 1 billion customers at 64 customers per IP. With only one layer of NAT (and uPNP support), almost nobody will notice a difference.

The few geeks that want remote access will be willing to pay a few extra dollars to get a real IP, or just connect IPv6 instead. By having people pay a little bit for a scarce resource, you can distribute them more effectively amongst those that really need them.

Comment: Recently attempts are made to block UDP VPNs (Score 5, Informative) 58

by sc0rpi0n (#42153681) Attached to: How Some Chinese Users Bypass The Great Firewall

I live in China and noticed that since a few weeks (starting before the congress) the quality of OpenVPN UDP connections deteriorated severely. Formerly traffic worked fine, but now a ping over OpenVPN has significantly higher packet loss and latency than a direct ping to the same host, while these used to be similar. The connection often drops for 5-10 minutes, after which it is reestablished. A tunnel over ssh now performs a lot better than an OpenVPN connection.

Note that I am using my own servers and non-default ports, not established VPN providers that are easier to block. This behavior occurs on different networks from different ISPs. Additionally, L2TP connections now fail most of the time, while they worked a few months ago.

Help fight continental drift.