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On March 31st new rules take effect in China banning VPNs and cross-border leased lines. Bloomberg writes:
Censors have already eliminated hundreds of VPNs, which route user requests for sites through virtual networks located on the providers' servers, disguising their users' true locations or destinations. A few operators have been jailed, and over the summer Apple Inc. began removing VPN software from the Chinese version of its App Store. VyprVPN, ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and a shrinking number of others are still working to outpace the government, renting extra cloud servers from Amazon Web Services Inc. and the like to buoy their networks. They're also working on software that can make user activity look like permitted internet traffic, sometimes by renting internet protocol addresses that have also been used by government-approved services.
Source : China's Internet Underground Fights for Its Life
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Sunday March 04 2018, @04:20PM
It doesn't. Your question is broken. What does change, for example, is how long it takes for the Sun to reach that point. In winter during the corresponding winter solstice for that location, it takes half your daylight hours to reach that point. 30 degree peak azimuth in winter means the location is at a latitude of roughly 36.5 degrees [arizona.edu]. For example, cities near that latitude [wikipedia.org] in the northern hemisphere would be Tunis and Virginia Beach or Auckland in the southern hemisphere. Glancing at day length [orchidculture.com] tables, I get almost 5 hours to make the trip for the Sun in wintertime.
Summer solstice would have the Sun passing overhead at a peak azimuth of 77 degrees and take a little over 7 hours (7.3) to get there from sunrise. The Sun traces a partial circle as its path, so it'll rise faster in the morning than when it is near 77 degrees. So I can overestimate the time it takes to reach 30 degrees by calculating 30/77*7.3 = 2.8 hours.
So in other words, same Sun, same azimuth, but it crudely takes a bit over half as long to get to the same azimuth in the longest day in summer as it did the shortest day in winter.
And notice the power of the model. I can tell you with a few internet look ups where the Sun will achieve this geometric configuration, how long it'll be in either case, and that the feat will be equivalent in northern or southern hemisphere at the same latitude.
Further, this readily explains the greater heating of Earth in summer versus winter. The higher the azimuth of the Sun, the more directly it shines on the land. Oblique angles (low azimuth) mean that the same sunlight is spread over a greater amount of land. One can see that by taking a sheet of paper, positioning it so that it intercepts the most sunlight (that is, it is perpendicular to the sunlight coming in), and then looking at the area of the shadow it casts. When positioned this way, the amount of sunlight tends to be very close to constant (with the variation being how much sunlight is intercepted by the atmosphere). At very oblique angles, such as around sunrise and sunset, it means that the shadow is very long, indicating that the fixed amount of sunlight which hits that piece of paper is spread out over a lot of ground. Meanwhile, the shadow at noon is far more squat indicating a much higher heating per unit area of the ground.