Has any government ever done that? Seems like it would just break everything (because the world is full of devices that use custom protocols!) at great computational expense.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958621
"Nothing special" in this case was meant to describe the fact that it's random data with no identifiable patterns inherent to the data; you're absolutely right that that's what obfs4 does. I understand the confusion though, this phrasing could be better.
> your government can decide to block unknown protocols
> you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS
I will say though, Operator's Replicant does something similar to what you're describing in that it can mimic unrelated protocols. It's a clever approach, unfortunately it was a bit immature when I was working in that area so the team didn't adopt it while I was around.
It's used for a lot of legitimate traffic as well, so a bit harder to block.
i know a US based tech firm i worked for around 2020 had a simple HTTPS proxy for chinese clients to download content updates. worked really well. it was hosted on some cloud provider and accessible via DNS name. so its not like it wasn't easy to block it. they just didn't bother or it was lost in a sea of other similar activities.
that all being said, regarding oppressive regimes and political turmoil situations: if your health or freedom is at risk, don't rely on internet people's 'guesswork' (hard to tell where ppl get their info from, and what its based on etc.). be careful. if you are not confident, don't go forward with it. Try to get advice from local experts instead, who are familiar in the specific context you are dealing with.
In which case you use stenography, but I believe even the Great Firewall of China doesn't block HTTPS completely.
I encourage you and anyone else here to read into the GFW if you're interested. It's more like the Great Firewalls -- there's regional fragmentation with different vendors, operators, implementations and rules between different parts of the country.
Predictably this means there's no one-size-fits-all solution to circumventing censorship on the Chinese internet, and research into this area's difficult since China has both the technical means to identify violations very efficiently as well as the bureaucratic infrastructure to carry out enforcement actions against a considerable portion of those people who violate the GFW rules (with enforcement action being anything from a "cooldown period" on your internet connection where you can't make any connections for some amount of time between minutes and days, fines, or imprisonment depending on the type of content you were trying to access).
So, the ethics of digging into this get very muddy, very fast.