People who are looking for direct integration between podcast players and SponsorBlock seem to be missing that a lot of podcasts these days that do have advertising in them oftentimes have dynamic ads where the ad audio will change depending on the day, the geographical location of the download, etc. So SponsorBlock can’t actually account for what are essentially dynamic timestamps Whereas with YouTube you typically have fairly static timestamps that can be shared across a user base, only smaller podcasts are really going to be able to be captured by SponsorBlock unless someone discovers a way to mod an Android APK to essentially prevent the client-side compilation of ads and the original podcast audio assuming that there is a podcast app that does this on the client side.

I mean, some bird species have mothers that essentially drop their fledglings to predators to distract from themselves (and their insecurities), or just simply don’t feel bothered to actually help raise them to maturity.

That’s definitely an interesting suggestion! but I probably wouldn’t risk my life over keeping a separate profile with a VPN on it.

From what I gathered, the deep-packet inspection appliances they’re deploying in Myanmar aren’t working off terribly advanced rulesets. They only seem to be blocking obvious VPN connections since VPN protocols like WireGuard, IKEv2, OpenVPN, etc. make no effort to obfuscate themselves as being a VPN connection.

There aren’t as many data points in Myanmar as one would like, but this Psiphon test from OONI seems to validate that even basic obfuscation is working in Myanmar.

Random phone checks for VPNs are definitely another level though, yikes.

The great firewall situation was always interesting, because if you would use a roaming Sim, then you will be able to access anything

Roaming SIMs work because the APN sets a network routing path outside of China.

Cool writeup. I remember implementing BBR many years ago when I was trying to bypass the Great Firewall for an extended stay. Helped deal greatly with the huge congestion on Chinanet backbone at the time, but it’s less of an issue these days now that foreigners can use CN2.

I remember visiting a youth summit here in Canada, and the Indonesian ambassador to Canada was present. I remember he got pretty exasperated that the only thing people in attendance knew about Indonesia was Bali (and thought it was Indonesia’s capital), despite being the world’s fourth largest country in population. He gave us all Indomie and ginger chews though - nice guy, but he got me hooked on Indomie for much of university.

Appreciate the thoughts. I’m not disagreeing with you I’ve heard Bhutan is debatable from a handful that have been there, simply because there’s a sizable amount of tourism from India and Bangladesh. The infrastructure for getting around and staying overnight is definitely there, but the diversity of attractions is very limited as well (heavily focused around temples), so I feel like it’s a bit of an edge case.

Since I heard this though, as I understand it, it appears that the freedom of movement for Indian citizens in Bhutan has been limited and the Sustainable Development Fee tax got reduced from 200 USD to 100 USD, because of how dramatically it impacted the amount of “high value tourism” they were getting.

I liked Solana Cain’s new photo essay in the Globe and Mail today about Bhutan. I probably ought to put it on my radar.

Basically. Keep in mind that these enterprise drives are often much better built and have much better QC than consumer level drives, so they can last forever. It’s kind of like debating between a used 4-year-old Toyota Corolla and a brand new Range Rover.