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Comment by dboreham

1 month ago

Can confirm Claude doesn't even work in Hong Kong. That said I fired up my VPN and...then it did work.

Yeah, I love folks who worry about China having access to models and GPUs. I mean, friend, they have 1.3B people. They could put a crack AI team in every country in the world, tomorrow. But yes, instead, it's far cheaper to let each of those AI teams VPN to any country, all the time.

  • If they actually cared, they would just block VPNs. Valve does this when you try to create an account.

    • If we're talking about state funding, that's not a problem. You just send a national to live in a residential area and then a team can proxy through that connection.

    • Commercial VPNs are relatively easy to block, because they use known IP ranges that companies can blacklist. But it's trivial to set up a private VPN with unique IPs such that VPN blocking becomes much less straightforward and much more resource intensive, for example by using traffic pattern analysis or behavioral fingerprinting.