
GFWaaS – Make Your Website Work in China - felixding
https://gfwaas.github.io/
======
felixding
Author here.

Surprised to see this would be in the frontpage of HN. Happy to answer any
questions you may have :-)

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cfarm
How does this work? You don't need to disclose secret sauce per se, just
enough to understand the legality and robustness of using it.

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felixding
Not sure I have understood your question. But I'll try to explain.

In terms of tech stack, GFWaaS is a mix of Rails, Apache Guacamole, and
headless browser. If you just want to solve your own problem, you could simply
setup Guacamole on a server in China, and use VNC in your browser.

The real challenge is dealing with the Chinese Internet. For example, to get
reasonable connection speed for VNC, choosing the right cloud service provider
is really the key. You have to figure out a way to get an account from the
major providers in China (many of them, if not all, require you either live in
China or have a local entity), and test the speed and stability of the
connections. And, in some cases, because of the bad traffic peering across
Chinese ISPs, you website may work relatively well with one ISP but not
others, so you have to test with different ISPs.

GFWaaS streamlines the whole process so you can focus on testing your website,
instead of finding the right cloud service provider and setting up software
etc by your own.

Hope I have explained what you asked, and sorry for my English.

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cfarm
Yes that's helpful. Great explanation!

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gainsurier
My suggestion is that you can build a proxy server in China, and you can test
your website bypass the proxy server to see if your website is work. Chinese
cloud host like Aliyun or QCloud may monitor if you have a proxy server like
shadowsocks server in their default template os, so you must reinstall it or
provide your own template os.

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rqs
Well, actually it's a Remote Desktop as Service.

The real "GFWaaS" is when you intentionally put blocked keywords on a HTTP
page, triggering GFW to reset user connection. That way you can block Chinese
users from accessing your website. And it's free.

My suggestion is, may be add more web browsers to your service, make it a
browser compatibility test platform, and (innocently) put few servers in
China. People will figure out what's going on themselves :P

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dleslie
Is there a list of such keywords maintained anywhere?

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komali2
"Taiwan is a sovereign nation"

"Tiananmen square massacre"

"Free Tibet"

"Falun gong organ harvesting"

"Winnie the Pooh"

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rihegher
Winnie the Pooh !?

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cerebellum42
Google it. It's a meme about Xi Jinping, who, if you squint your eyes a
little, looks like Winnie the Pooh.

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komali2
Xi jinping is angry enough about this that Winnie the Pooh is a banned concept
in a nation of over a billion people.

That's China /shrug

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yixiang
I suggest remove "GFW" from the name. It's not funny if your site was blocked
for the name when you promise to make clients' websites work in China.

I also wonder if there's really a market for such a tool? Who needs to
optimize for China EVERY MONTH? Besides Cloudflare (which sucks)?

I had a similar idea of offering a service to make websites fast in China.
Seems more viable.

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duxup
I find the idea of "Well I'm stuck behind the firewall...how can I sell that
as a thing?" amusing, and kinda interesting.

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hmsync
It is also very interesting to have such a service provided by a Chinese
developer (the author)

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nodesocket
Can't you also just rent a Alibaba cloud instance which is in mainland China
and fire up a browser?

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throw03172019
Launching servers in China still require ICP to be lawful.

[https://www.alibabacloud.com/icp](https://www.alibabacloud.com/icp)

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zhangweifang
if you just rent a windows server used as remote desktop PC, there is no need
ICP. In another words, if there is no ICP bind on the server you have, port 80
will be blocked, 3389 ( windows remote desktop ) is still open, and you could
login in the windows server by windows remote desktop, and open any browser to
browse website like a PC locating in China.

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alfonsodev
I don't have experience launching websites in China yet, what's the benefit or
risk of this versus using a AWS partner like this[1] ?

[1] [https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/new/2017/whats-new-announcing-
pa...](https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/new/2017/whats-new-announcing-partnership-
between-aws-and-nwcd-availability-of-ningxia-region/)

~~~
yorwba
The benefit of this is that it lets you simulate the experience of a Chinese
user to debug issues caused by the Great Firewall.

One way to solve those issues could be hosting your website on a Chinese
server. Note that you'll need to register with the government before you'll be
allowed to do that. [https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-
aws/china/faqs/#new%20step](https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-
aws/china/faqs/#new%20step)

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huxflux
Another way to earn money by looking helpful

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minicoolva
Test my website

[https://gfw.netlify.com/](https://gfw.netlify.com/)

