Unfortunately, all characteristics of Shadowsocks (SS) and ShadowsocksR (SSR) have been fully and absolutely identified and controlled by GFW ("thanks to" the forced compromise from their developers). In short, as long as the GFW wants to block your VPS, it can now do this easily and perfectly in less than 30 seconds. If you find that your SS/SSR is still working well, that means GFW has no interest or there is no need to ban you right now. Of course, each blocking cycle of GFW is about 10 weeks. Therefore, we can roughly calculate when our VPS can be unblocked.

The first thing to make clear is that proxies are not like VPN (Virtual Private Network), Shadowsocks, or some other Internet censorship circumvention applications. It mainly applies to two situations: 1) users want to hide their real IP address when surfing websites; 2) users want to choose to use the ISP (Internet Service Provider) that supports websites or online games well in order to get a better connection speed. The biggest drawback of proxies is that they are very easy to be invalid, therefore manually and frequently setting up the proxy for a web browser can be a very troublesome matter.

Proxy Switcher is a powerful, professional-level proxy server searching, testing and managing software. It automatically downloads a proxy list from the Internet (displaying the country each proxy server resides in at the same time), analyzes whether it is available, and displays some status information like connection speed in real time. Especially, it allows you to quickly switch between network environments such as proxy connection and direct connection, which is very convenient.

VPN (Virtual Private Network) is currently the best way to encrypt the Internet connection in order to greatly increase our digital privacy and online security. Speaking of VPN services, there are many such applications. But their stability and speed are often the primary reason for limiting their spread.

As is known to all, the serious network blockade and censorship in Mainland China (namely the GFW founded in 1998) has given rise to numerous excellent proxy software from China, including but not limited to: Freegate, UltraSurf, SoftEther VPN, GoAgent, Shadowsocks, cow, Lantern, and more. Among them, Shadowsocks (AKA: 影梭) is a free, open-source, cross-platform, encrypted, and secure small proxy project from China. It uses the SOCKS5 proxy protocol (similar to SSH tunnel), and runs very, very fast. In China and many other countries, it's widely used to break through the GFW-like Internet blockade and censorship and access the disturbed, blocked, or shielded web sites and web services around the world, such as Google, YouTube, FaceBook/Twitter, and more.