Do you have any release data for the project?
I am really keen to see this comes to fruition and just can't wait :-)))
Its already been released and running for two years now. There is a link somewhere to the builds.
The only thing left is hacking together the consensus server and then its "done" as Litecoin or Bitcoin. Or Ripple.
Update:Short update. Longer update to follow.
Server has been down for over a week. Bitmessage has not worked since the 2nd. Getting this fixed.
I am dealing with great firewall issues. Ubuntu wont update. Website load or do not load. Pings to baidu are over 50 seconds sometimes for no reason. stunnel + openvpn give me 22 ms pings and then they go to 30 seconds to 50 seconds. Packet loss rates over 20% to 50% at random.
Ubuntu refuses to update some parts of the day because of DNS poisoning. When connection is established and it works, the download speed is 200 KB/s and drops to 5 KB/s once the gfw starts throttling it.
Whole parts of the internet around Singapore are considered inside the firewall and null routed or unreachable at random. China is blocking not only traffic in China, but traffic that transits through China (which seems to change minute by minute at random). uTox will not connect or was connected and disconnecting once every minute. UDP is being blocked as soon as tox establishes connection, dropping and then reconnecting when block ends. Gmail does not work. Google Play does not work. OpenVPN does not work so connecting to corporate intranet is impossible. Connecting to IPv6 servers is impossible. Nothing works. The whole internet is broken.
The Chinese internet is like driving through Libya.
In China, half the messages being sent out for IPO are not being received. Now I know why.
When I SSH into a server, it is fast and then either drops or slows to hell or if I am lucky gets throttled down to 20 KB/s and transfers that used to take seconds take days.
Google Chrome trying to autoupdate or access gmail, sending out a DNS request can trigger the other UDP connections and SSH session for every person on your router to slow down, disconnect or timeout. There are TCP reset packets being injected into streams for no reason.
Its like driving 60 miles per hour over a dirt road covered in bomb craters.
I have wasted a larger percentage of my life over past week waiting or trying to get basic internet applications working than ever.
I am going to try MPLS or cisco netsec tomorrow because they cannot/do not block those. I have no idea why the Chinese government paid Cisco for the hardware for intentionally making the Chinese internet worse than Africa. The only VPN software that works in China is Cisco IPsec, which was designed by an NSA standards committee to allow the US to spy on foreign corporations. All of the secure VPN protocols are blocked.
They are not blocking political sites. They could have just dns nulled and ip blocked CNN. This is not even "censorship", this is harassment. They are blocking the ubuntu update servers, ssh connections and corporate VPNs (except for Ciscos). The company that sold the government the hardware is terrorizing every corporation in China into buying and installing its shitty NSA backdoor unless they want their ssh connections to drop at random.
The wikileaks cables had instance of the US bribing people to install equipment like this in their countries. In China the government forces you to back door your network for a foreign power, if you want to use the internet or access github.
I literally had scripts that would pull things from github and the scripts went through on two virtual machine and two the of the repos failed on a third virtual machine. It is impossible to automate anything because you dont know if pulling a repo from github will get throttled to 2 KB/s and take a week or if the connection will just drop and it will fail.
"go get" is broken, because the packages are on google servers. The DNS request may fail, or the connection may fail, or it may go through and then fail from an injected reset packet, or it may go through and download quickly then go to 5 KB/s and take a week because throttling kicks in and some packages are blocked.
If you try to "go get" any module that pulls in a module that pulls in a module that pulls in the golang two-fish module, it fails with a cryptic error message and the whole installation script fails. Devops automation inside of the firewall is impossible because packages and software repositories cannot be accessed reliably.
HTTP connection are a crap shot and you just sit there hitting reload until the package shows up. If the page loads slowly, its throttled, so you just keep hitting reload until you get an unthrottled HTTPS connection and the page loads.
When searching for error message I constantly get ERR_CONNECTION_RESET, ERR_SOCKET_NOT_CONNECTED and have to reload page thirty times until it goes through.
The Chinese government forces all its corporations and every major computer installation to install Cisco hardware, just to use the internet without connections to github dropping. They are blocking open source software like OpenVPN and the internet wont even function without Cisco MPLS and ipsec.
This is not "Censorship" which would be blocking political material. The only explanation that I have for this, is that the governments employees running the program are corrupt and being bribed by Cisco or the US government. Cisco has been caught putting backdoor access, secret remote administration accounts in all of their VOIP hardware and other devices. When you lock yourself out of the device you just call support and they have database and can remote access the device. These are called "customer support backdoors". RSA security had similar back doors in all of the keyfobs used to secure servers with two-factor authentication. Cisco was also caught shipping hardware backdoors to foreign countries. The wikileaks cables show countries getting bribed into installing backdoored equipment.
In the US, this type of blocking was never tried, even when commercial interests like the MPAA/RIAA pushed for it. The government was concerned that it would spark a crypto war and force communications underground. It makes it more difficult to perform surveillance and identify protest leaders and dissents, while having no benefit.
That is exactly what we are seeing in China now.
The VPN slow downs still let you visit the New York Times, twitter and text content. They just block github repos and make doing work impossible. No one inside or outside of China has any rational explanation that holds up to scrutiny.
Another reason, could be the way the Chinese internet is structured. In other nations, the internet is decentralized and companies are peered with each other in a decentralized network. In China there are four state owned backbone companies and lower level service providers are forced to buy bandwidth from the state owned providers. They are only allowed to rent bandwidth, not own the lines and not peer in a way that would allow competition for transit.
However, different from most of the non-Chinese Internet, the Chinese government owns and controls the access routes to the
Internet, and only allows private enterprises and individuals the rental of bandwidth from state-owned entities (Herold, 2011).
This allows the state to exercise a far greater level of control over the Internet in China than elsewhere, especially in combination with the few and closely monitored connections between the Chinese and the non-Chinese Internet (see e.g. Fallows, 2008), which mean that "China is not on the Internet, it's basically an intranet" (Sherman So as quoted in Fong, 2009). The vast majority of Chinese Internet users do not access the Internet outside China (Roberts, 2011), as it is plagued – from their perspective – with frequent time-outs, very slow speeds, and content in languages other than Chinese.
China may be dropping ssh connections and vpns, just because the state telcoms are cheap, have no incentive for providing good service and are not paid for carrying traffic out of China. They are only being paid by the people at the lower tiers, who are renting transit from them, but do not get paid anything for overseas data.
They appear to just be dropping traffic and packets at random. They may be dropping packets and terminating TCP connections to avoid having to pay for international bandwidth. Also the backbone providers are in competition and refuse to peer with each other for over-seas transit, driving up cost and duplication.
The traffic blocking appears to be centered on reducing bandwidth usage and stopping people from browsing Youtube, netflix and high bandwidth applications. Chat, twitter, gmail and political content is all accessible. Cloud file syncing, sftp, high bandwidth ssh, bitmessage, peer-to-peer, github, bitmessage is the only thing that has problems.
I think the "great firewall" and packet inspection hardware has more to do with cheap ISPs trying to save money by providing African speeds for overseas traffic when they would otherwise have to pay for peerage because of asymmetrical bandwidth patterns. All of the encrypted communications protocols still work.
The choice to ban openvpn while supporting ipsec, suggests desire to ration limited bandwidth to business users. I am not even sure this is "censorship" as much as it is an attempt at not upgrading or paying for traffic leaving country. The fact that github works one minute and stops working or is blocked or dropped at another, suggests this is aggressive traffic filtering and shaping.
Anyways, this is very frustrating experience. Dealing with the firewall made me aware of new types of software unreliability I had never experienced before. Getting work done is almost impossible until I get this resolved.
