The great fire wall changes it's mind on site restrictions every day.

As such it will always be that way. With the government bigwigs deciding differently on whats not good for the Chinese public, whose to know what's in favour daily.

The government cares more on whats not good for itself.

In so caring what's not good for itself it sets the rules on what's not good for the public ;o)

Anybody know anything about the degree to which online spies, from wherever, can trace your actual location through use of a VPN in China? Not that I think that, for the most part, they really care much, but it might be a good thing to know. I mean, since Snowden and all.

@Alien: assume you mean just the general spying of companies such as facebook and google or the general unspecific supervision through governments, VPNs help. They hide your IP, which is an indicator of your location and even identity.

However, many apps track your GPS, cookies store information about you and even your browser settings may give you away. So it's by far not sufficient.

If a government is looking for you specifically, they can do a correlation analysis around the VPN server (basically looking what is going in and out of a certain websites and who happens to communicate at that time, they got ISP logs) and will pretty soon figure out your real IP and thus your full identity.

You may consider using the T0r web browser if privacy is a concern - it offers much better protection.

Actually, the way corporate spying, such as google, facebook etc work - is NOT based solely on your IP address - although that helps with location information - they actually reverse IP to suck your device's MAC (Media Access Controller) address, which is the hardware ID of your network card. Every MAC address is unique and both identifies the mfg and a serialized mfg's number of your device.

So no matter WHERE you go - that hardcoded address follows you around...unless you use MAC address spoofing software - which can theoretically brick your device, if/when it fails.

@michael2015: how would a website be able to capture a MAC address? I mean, if I were to write a website in, say, PHP, how could I get a client's MAC address?

The MAC address, by TCP/IP standards, is never communicated outside of the local-area network. It is most likely that the web site that you are reaching is NOT on your local area network and hence will not see your MAC address as it is stripped when it reaches the router.

For a website to capture your MAC address you'd need to install software that you'd use with the website rather than just a script in PHP running from the web server.

Haven't looked at this crud for donkey years - but, as I recall..

IPv4 - no MAC address embedded in the header.

IPv6 - MAC address included in the header, for some obscure reason.

redjon777 is technically correct for ARP and LAN restrictions - but that's a different beast, used for a different thing...and with IPv6 kinda went out the window. And that's the limit of my IPv6 knowledge as I didn't design or test that network for IPv6 "compliance"...outta scope.

There are nastier privacy issues with mobile devices...but that's a deep dive of dubious value to this thread.

i think the next big money frauds will be mobile payment.

a few hubndred here, a few there, over millions of customers. they could make 100mil in a day. the banks will do everything they can to stop it and to stop the news gettign out.