Ayyyy awesome! Glad to hear you’re getting full speeds now!

I’ve personally run into this before, when I got my first gigabit connection. Definitely took me a long time to track it down, and required someone on SmallNetBuilders forum telling me about it haha

With a gigabit connection, you shouldn’t really need QoS, unless your upstream is getting saturated (since I don’t think the coax gigabit providers offer symmetric up/down). But if you do, you’ll want to get another device to do it, or use more simple approaches like just capping throughput per device. If you don’t already have a homelab server, a recent Raspberry Pi should be able to handle it (and then you’d also be able to set up PiHole and other fun self-hosted services)

Issue 1: Don’t use the speed test on your router. Use OpenSpeedTest on your desktop browser. Router hardware isn’t made for this type of function and can often pass traffic (using hardware acceleration) faster than it can decode packets (using the CPU, required for speed tests).

Issue 2: test at off-peak times of day. Last mile for ISPs can get congested and limit actual speeds

Issue 3: Disable QoS, detailed traffic analysis, or other packet-inspection tech on your router. These often require passing the packets through the CPU which can limit max throughput. Check to be sure that “hardware acceleration” is active if possible for your router (sometimes called “cut through forwarding”). This can impact WAN <=> LAN traffic by not LAN-only as it needs to be bridged in a way that LAN-only traffic doesn’t.

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.

I appreciate your capacity to recognize a valid argument even when it conflicts with your initial position ❤️ It’s more than I expect from the average internet commenter

It’s a charicature. I’m not laughing because I think it’s real (which would be kind of mean, anyway, since I’d just be laughing at someone screwing up). I’m laughing because it’s relatable to real experiences many people have had, and because of the added commentary about software development.

Your hyperfocus on reality in media, and failure to see the comedy for what it truly is, is far more cringe than the video 😉

EDIT: it’s like asking why people laugh at the obviously fake stories stand-up comedians tell because they’re made up. Like, yeah, no shit, that’s not the point.

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

Just a heads up, people should be wary of playtron to a degree: the CEO is a guy named Kirt McMaster. Anyone from the Android enthusiast community may know him as the guy who convinced the creator of CyanogenMod to incorporate (becoming Cyngn) and then drove the company into the ground chasing skinning and theming revenue, and wouldn’t even allow the community to keep the cyanogen brand (they had to rebrand it to LineageOS)

Kirt sucks. He’s a terrible leader and a terrible businessperson. I’m sure there are plenty of great people involved in playtron but with him at the helm of the company I am not expecting it to end well

Oh yeah, it’s definitely that. For sure. Your behavior is more similar to the < 0.1% of users who do bad shit than the 99.9% who simply install the app and play games or chat with friends. You are a casualty of war, so to speak. Honestly, I don’t blame discord, they have to secure their platform. I blame the shitheads who make this crap necessary by trying to hide their illegal activity using the same methods as the people like yourself who just want privacy

They think you might be a criminal, literally. Discord has a big problem with people conducting illegal activities on their service (buying, selling, and providing support for cheats, black hat hacker communities, harassment and stalking, etc. The list is pretty long)

Something about your account + connection makes you look very similar to people they know to have done these things. And discord decided that the risk of having these things on their platform is a greater threat to their business than the risk of people like you quitting the platform.

They do this so that if regulators, law enforcement, or one of their business partners comes to them with evidence that you’re using discord to do bad shit, they can help track down the real person behind the account.

There are lots of reasons to pirate stuff, but this argument in particular boils down to “We should steal stuff now because maybe some day in the future I won’t be able to use the paid version after they go out of business.” And that is shitty.

You bought it, so go crack it now that the license check is broken and nobody will care. That’s GOOD piracy. Support the creators, pirate when you can’t or it’s unreasonable to pay (more).

Don’t just pirate to mitigate theoretical future inconvenience. Do it to circumvent actual inconvenience, or to get things you couldn’t otherwise afford, or to say “fuck you” to big, shitty companies.

But pirating from a small-time dev just in case there are maybe license problems far in the future is not The Way