Readit Newstsenkov commented on Ask HN: How to safely collaborate with team member (temp) in China? · Posted by u/tsenkov
You could set up your own VPN and if it works great, if it doesn't that's life.
I think the question that's more important is how big of a target are you? If you/your company/your co-worker are all ultimately nobodies, then it probably doesn't matter.
If you have highly desirable state secrets or advanced tech, then from a technical perspective you're probably out of luck.
Your problem might not even be the connection, but the device connecting.
Chinese (PRC) people will almost all have WeChat on their phone. It's not hard to imagine keeping a list of all Chinese citizens in the US who come back to china, catch messages that say "I have to work for several hours" and launch a targeted attack with Pegasus like software.
A border agent could say "your data or else."
If you buy an iPhone in China, that data, like complete backups, is probably open to the Chinese government probably unencrypted. I am not sure what happens when a person who bought an iPhone outside of china and brings it to china, or who sets their locality to PRC.
A password vault could be compelled to be opened.
So to answer your question, first we have to understand what you have of value and what your threat model is.
From an ultra paranoid perspective, no physical device with privileges should enter China and even the employees personal devices shouldn't have anything company related like 2fac codes.
From a completely practical perspective, connecting to a vpn on a laptop while tethering through a "state approved" vpn is probably fine.
I think most valley companies would give completely new devices for e-mail and meetings and maybe local development, but completely restrict prod access, then destroy those devices when the employee comes back, but maybe I misremember.
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate you taking the time to write it - there is a lot of useful info in-here and def food for thought.
tsenkov commented on Ask HN: How to safely collaborate with team member (temp) in China? · Posted by u/tsenkov
From my understanding companies in China can apply for non-blocking Internet so people can visit Google/Youtube/etc. freely. However, if your concern is that the general Internet in China is not safe enough (monitored), I'm not sure what solutions can solve that. Maybe there is some end-to-end encryption software that you can use?
Thanks for the reply. We are not keeping continuous presence in the country, just have a teammate who lives in Canada, but is from China and would like to visit family for a month or so.
tsenkov commented on Ask HN: How to safely collaborate with team member (temp) in China? · Posted by u/tsenkov
Does anyone know if Amazon Workspace hosted in Tokyo, could be accessed from China? Latency to AWS Japan would likely be one-of/or the lowest from China to an AWS datacenter?
tsenkov commented on Ask HN: How come the Fugaku supercomputer's room has no beams floor/ceiling? · Posted by u/tsenkov
Perhaps someone has info on the building?
> The major risk is the virus we think is safe is not 100% safe.
IANAD, but IMHO you cannot just sequence the virus in asymptomatic people - you have to sequence a randomized, sizable % of the whole positive population, including mild or severe cases, and the dead too. Only then you'll be able to "paint a picture" of the different strains' effects on humans and slap some confidence data to each identified strain. Your idea definitely looks promising though.
That was my thought as well - basically, how do you know if the strain doesn't kill if you don't check for severe and lethal cases linked to the same strain? I understand the part about looking for specific mutations, and assuming they would indicate the "usual" complications with the deadlier strains would not be present, but mutations are not exactly predictable, right? If they don't cause the sympthoms of the current deadly strain - they may be causing something else completely, which could be as deadly a little bit later down the line - isn't this a reasonble concern, @danieltillett?
As an example, just look at the Play Market (the Android marketplace for apps and games). There you can find dozens of nearly identical clones of the same game, uploaded by different authors.
-> How will Vibed avoid drowning in similar low-value ideas and ensure the best ones actually surface?
There are at least a couple points in your message that I wanna address.
> genuine insight is very rare and extremely hard to identify.
Insights capable of spawning billion-dollar companies are hard to come-by, indeed! But the smaller the scope of the idea - the bigger number of insights in existence that you can work on. When you can have a PMF on an idea with TAM of $100M in a matter of days, and you don't need VC money to make it happen, AND you can test it out with a rep of the target audience - isn't that something worth pursuing?
> How do you prevent Vibed from becoming a graveyard of half-baked ideas, I mean projects that are trivial, already solved, or fundamentally flawed?
I think people would genuinely not be incentivised to be posting projects for already solved problems, UNLESS the solutions are not exactly accessible to them, which in turn makes those project potentially a good idea still. We are just starting out so I'm not going to pretend I know rn how we would solve every problem we hit along the way (yet I hope we hit many and for a long time, haha), but one of the best ways for us to get the CONTENT we want - would be to work on getting the PEOPLE we need on the platform. We are also pretty well-versed with AI too, so we will be able to do a great moderation too (including a check for past projects that are similar -> thus to discourage repetition and plagiarism).
Hope that answers your question(s).