User profile: kurtosis

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Internet speed and reliability using VPN

For the technologically more affine readers around here, here's how I got around the firewall:

They are using machine learning to recognize VPNs by analyzing the size patterns of the TCP packages transmitted through the firewall. If the patterns resemble a handshake for a protocol like SSL inside an already SSL/TLS-encrypted connection, they can guess that the user is using a VPN.

My workaround: I simply configured my proxy to pad small packages with random data to make them seemingly random data packages, easily passing the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for randomness. Now the Chinese firewall is out of luck and I'm surfing the western internet with full speed (plus latency due to the physical distance, of course). If you don't wanna program it yourself, there are several free opensource obfuscation proxies available online. (Google: china obfuscation proxy). In addition, I'm going through standard SSL ports and tunnel through a nginx webserver on my server so that anyone connecting to my server will think that I'm running a standard webservice.

In case they get curious about why most of my traffic goes to a single foreign IP and start throttling, I'll go through a CDN but currently I'm too lazy to do that.

What also works is setting up a tunneling proxy through SSH as mentioned above, but it's much slower because they drop packages if they think something's fishy and my SSH tunnel doesn't support padding.

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Civilized Kunming

I'm also curious how the party came up with that definition of civilized. Of course, messy traffic, spitting and offensive behavior are annoying. But there are much more obvious harmful uncivilized behaviors, especially regarding hygiene.

And does anyone know how this "wenming" rules are communicated? I mean, I had to search on the internet to know what the government means by Wenming. How is the street propaganda supposed to work when people don't know what the government means? You can't change traffic by just putting up a banner saying 文明开车你我他

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Civilized Kunming

There does seem to be quite a difference compared to the Tier definition (which I posted above).

Here's some information on the national civilized city program:
baike.baidu.com/[...]

They state that in order to be awarded the national civilized city status - the "highest civilized city status" - the following criteria are to be met:
- Reasonable, beautiful and practical public infrastructure such as trash cans, public buildings, sculptures, billboards etc. Clean streets, no messy posting. Parks, green spaces, atmosphere is peaceful.
- No littering, spitting, damaging flowers or trees, quarrels or fighting in public spaces. No smoking in indoor public places. Theaters, libraries, museums are quiet and civilized.
- Civilized traffic. Motor vehicles allow zebra crossing. Vehicles and pedestrians do not randomly cross roads, stick to traffic rules to avoid traffic jams, obey traffic police commands, cars don’t randomly stop to let people get out. No drunk driving.
- Let old or weak people sit on public transport. Treat outsiders friendly, patiently answer stranger’s questions. People try to help the old and weak.
- Public satisfaction on the administrative efficiency of the party and government organs > 90%. Satisfaction with anticorruption work >90% (and then a list with like 10 more such items, too lazy to translate). Oh, an interesting one: More than 50% volunteer to donate organs if they die.
- Public utilities (police, gas, electricity and so on) are civilized and there’s an effective complaint mechanism in places.

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@Alien: Futures provide liquidity. This helps people who want to sell to find a matching buyer on the market - thus, it's helping society and the economy.
However, some people use them for gambling and hope for making money quickly, rather than invest conservatively and apply proper risk management techniques. Like this, they can lose a lot if not all of their money, which causes really sad situations.
If bankers do that because they know that they get a high bonus if they win and lose nothing if they lose, it causes a moral hazard harms society. This might be, as you call it, sociopathological behavior. To prevent this, most banks changed their bonus schemes after 2008 and deferred paying bonuses so that losses caused by sociopaths can be recollected from their accrued bonuses.

All in all, futures are not the problem - insufficient risk management and wrong incentive structures are. In the end, this boils down to a lack of education of many bank managers who don't understand important statistical concepts - like kurtosis ;)

Reviews

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Style wise, it's just another Sofitel.
The food is very average, same like what you get everywhere else around Kunming.
However, the prices are enormous - even compared to Europe. Sofitel Kunming charges more for a coffee than what Sofitel in Luxembourg, Istanbul or other large cities charge.
In addition, they have the audacity to charge a service charge on top of the advertised price.

It took me a while to cool my mood as the air conditioning is too weak as well.
Needless to say, you won't ever see me there again. If you want a nice western hotel in Kunming, go to the Intercontinental down at Dianchi.