PORTABLE CHINA REACHABILITY COMPARISON
Prepared 2026-09-05. This is a transport/access experiment, not swarm detection.

Requires Python 3.8+ standard library and an existing SSH-accessible Linux worker.
No account creation, purchase, deployment or probe was performed to prepare this kit.
Replace HK_USER, HK_HOST and YOUR_SSH_KEY with your own values. These are placeholders.

Copy code to an already available Hong Kong worker:
scp -i YOUR_SSH_KEY /home/sophia/search/investigation/china/vantage-probe/probe.py HK_USER@HK_HOST:china-vantage-probe.py

Run once on that worker, choosing a NEW output directory each time:
ssh -i YOUR_SSH_KEY HK_USER@HK_HOST 'python3 china-vantage-probe.py --label hk-vps-operator-label --out china-probe-hk-01'

Bring observations back to this investigation box:
scp -i YOUR_SSH_KEY -r HK_USER@HK_HOST:china-probe-hk-01 /home/sophia/search/investigation/china/

For a fresh local comparison (explicitly makes the ten live requests):
python3 /home/sophia/search/investigation/china/vantage-probe/probe.py --label existing-box --out /home/sophia/search/investigation/china/china-probe-local-01

WHAT RUNS
Ten fixed GET targets exactly match the URL inventory in report 002:
Baidu query, Bing-CN query, Sogou query, so.com query, Gitee gists API,
Huiji homepage and Minecraft recentchanges API, BWiki homepage and Genshin
recentchanges API, MoeGirl homepage. Search query is 链接测试.
There is no arbitrary-target CLI, authentication, cookie jar, JavaScript,
CAPTCHA solving, browser automation or target publishing. Environment proxies
are disabled for an interpretable direct-worker comparison. Normal redirects
are followed with public-address/mutating-route checks and per-host pacing.
GET is only used against these read-oriented endpoints; no API edit is requested.

Requests run sequentially. Same-host starts are at least 1.5 seconds apart,
including redirects. Each network operation uses a 20-second socket timeout;
this is not an absolute whole-program deadline, and redirects/read progress/DNS
can extend total duration. Each response body is limited to 2,000,000 bytes.
No retries. Redirects are bounded. The output directory must be new, protecting
previous evidence from overwrite. DNS/public-address checks are a best-effort
redirect safeguard, not a DNS-rebinding-resistant general-purpose fetch proxy.

OUTPUT AND INTERPRETATION
probes.json is updated after every target, alongside one .body file per response.
Records include operator label, HTTP status (including HTTPError responses),
final URL, timestamps, elapsed seconds, body bytes and SHA256. SHA256 covers only
the retained body; body_limit_reached warns when it may be a prefix.
Challenge detection is heuristic (challenge title/markup or antispider redirect).
A valid recentchanges array is identified separately from generic valid JSON.
HTTP 200 HTML is semantic-unknown: inspect it before claiming usable results.
Valid JSON can still be an authentication or application error. Compare query
relevance manually; the original Bing result page was irrelevant despite 200.

The operator's region label is NOT verified egress geolocation. No public-IP
check is made. Save provider region/instance details separately, without secrets.
A Hong Kong/Singapore VPS may change routing or IP reputation; neither guarantees
access. Authentication requirements are not fixed by geography. A single pass
measures only that moment. Repeat manually at separate times using new output
directories before committing a research fleet. Do not publish raw bodies without
review: they may contain cookies embedded in HTML, tokens or unrelated content.

SOURCE NOTES
Baseline inventory and measured limitations: investigation/china/002-infrastructure.txt
Public report: http://178.105.23.35:8090/china/reports/002-infrastructure.txt
Provider documentation referenced there (not fresh price quotes in this kit):
Tencent Lighthouse pricing:
https://intl.cloud.tencent.com/document/product/1103/47794?lang=en
Alibaba Simple Application Server creation:
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/user-guide/create-a-server
Alibaba instance families and networking:
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/product-overview/instance-families/
These links supply infrastructure context. This script does not provision either
provider or promise a region-specific accessibility result.
