• 1 Post
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle


  • 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.



  • People who are looking for direct integration between podcast players and SponsorBlock seem to be missing that a lot of podcasts these days that do have advertising in them oftentimes have dynamic ads where the ad audio will change depending on the day, the geographical location of the download, etc. So SponsorBlock can’t actually account for what are essentially dynamic timestamps Whereas with YouTube you typically have fairly static timestamps that can be shared across a user base, only smaller podcasts are really going to be able to be captured by SponsorBlock unless someone discovers a way to mod an Android APK to essentially prevent the client-side compilation of ads and the original podcast audio assuming that there is a podcast app that does this on the client side.





  • My guilty pleasure is watching those YouTube videos of people vacationing at absurdly cheap caravan parks, and the general vibe I get is that these places are pretty run down but are surprisingly adequate if all you’re looking to do is get away from town. Low-cost European carriers have definitely done a number on a lot of domestic UK resorts though - they simply aren’t competitive for the reasons you’ve stated.



  • I liked getting the Sendai Area Pass and just taking the Loopie bus. It was a pretty good value and in many of the smaller attractions, I was the only tourist there that day (like the Sankyozawa 100-Year Electric History Center).

    It made it pretty easy to see Sendai in two days. The only thing that was closed in the winter that I would’ve liked to see were the University of Tohoku’s botanical gardens (not that there aren’t other botanical gardens I couldn’t have gone to).

    I really enjoyed Gyutan too (beef tongue) too. I don’t know if I got to try high-quality beef but I definitely enjoyed the food.









  • Highly recommend it, especially between the edges of off-season and shoulder season. I went to Fukushima and was basically one of two tourists in town (the other being a Rwandan artist-in-residence). When I was in Sendai in January, the most touristed attraction (Sendai Castle ruins) couldn’t have had more than 40 visitors, and I remember taking a $10 airport limo bus to the hotel meant for 55 travelers, and I was the only one on it. I’ve made it a goal to visit Akita and Aomori in the future.