deleted by creator

Unfortunately, no, not really. They are absolutely able and willing to confiscate your devices at any time once you’re on Chinese soil, and once you’ve lost physical control, that’s the end of trust for that device. Even beyond that, it’s not unheard of for there to be vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc that make your device susceptible to wireless attacks. IMO it’s not worth the risk.

Here is just one example of this type of thing uncovered by The Guardian, New York Times, and others in a joint investigation: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/02/chinese-border-guards-surveillance-app-tourists-phones

Do not bring your normal personal devices to China. They are notorious for injecting spyware on foreign devices at every opportunity. Use a freshly formatted device and create all new accounts to use with it.

Regarding services: do not use self-hosted services unless you you spin up fresh, isolated instances of your services for use while abroad and spin them down afterwards, including formatting any OS they were hosted on.

Regarding VPN: because we are assuming that any device used in China is compromised, do not connect to your VPN unless you have set up a segregated VLAN and are connecting through a VPN server instance created specifically for use while in China.

Basically, assume anything you use in China is compromised. And assume your connections are being monitored. And assume that any device you are connecting to from China is at risk of being compromised. So everything needs to be segregated from the rest of your network and set up specifically to be deleted after you’re back home.

It is important to note that while a FICO score is roughly equivalent to “trustworthiness”, the three credit agency scores (Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian) are NOT meant to reflect your trustworthiness directly. Rather, they are specifically designed to inform lenders of your profitability for them.

It’s an important distinction because having a an outstanding payment history alone won’t improve these scores, if you aren’t utilizing available credit and maintaining some running balance with lenders.

Basically, if you’re just going to borrow money and never pay any interest on the loans, you aren’t actually a source of profit and therefore aren’t a desirable customer for lenders and creditors

My solution for this type of situation is MicroBin running on my home network from a non-standard port, with a port knocker to open and close the port when needed.

My router handle DDNS so I can always contact my home network easily. I port-knock to trigger an iptables command on the router to forward traffic to the MicroBin host.

I also have my phone set up to connect via openvpn to my home network so that I can remotely do things like start and stop services, set port forwarding rules, etc.

I mean to say that the connection attempt is failing because the traffic is never reaching the server.

There is no traffic on Port 8081 in those logs

Yeah your iptables is already set to up ACCEPT by default meaning no blocking.

My next step would be to determine whether the traffic is reaching the target machine. Look into how you can monitor inbound traffic and verify whether the server even sees the inbound connection attempt

First obvious question: do you have a firewall enabled?

From a terminal, type “iptables -L” and if there are any rules there (rather than just category headers) you will probably need to allow inbound traffic through the firewall

It’s weird that we’ve arrived at “Don’t let Google have a monopoly on personally identifying you for advertising purposes!”

Yeah, so, Google already has this data about you. What they’re doing here is trying to reduce the specificity of information given to advertisers about your behaviors, and simultaneously give you the ability to never inform specific third parties about your interest in the specific topics you choose

I see this as a good thing. They were literally already getting and using all of this data. In that case I’d much rather have some control over who knows which things about me, rather than leaving it entirely up to Google

In one breath the author tells us that people who don’t want to read the article are the target demographic.

And then in the next 8000 breaths they proceed to use some of the most dense, obtuse, wandering, inappropriately poetic language for an essay I’ve seen outside of academia

I agree with nearly everything the author has to say and yet I think the essay is a complete and utter failure at even approaching the goals it claims to have.

Nobody who needs to read this will. Not because it’s too long (though some will have that reason) but because anyone with moderate to poor literacy - the people explicitly called out as the target of the piece - won’t be able to grok half the sentences, let alone an entire paragraph, without re-reading it 2, 3, maybe 4 times.

Unfortunate, because the message, and the information contained within the essay, is incredibly important for those people