During the quarantine back home during the epidemic, I was invited by a friend in Canada to try Psiphon, the official website of which is https://psiphon.ca/.
I was back to China in March, transit Beijing, isolation is also in Beijing, stayed a long 14 days, well in the isolation point conditions are still good, eat, sleep and surf the Internet, brush a lot of days of tubing, one night and in Canada’s friend on FB chat about the wind of this software, I have not been used, and she also intends to go back to China, and would like to let me first to find out this software in China in the end is not good to use, and the ins and outs of the story is roughly like this. If you ask me how I got on a plane back to China in March, please forgive me for not telling you, it’s all tears.
Let’s start with the conclusion: cyphoon doesn’t work.
It never connected, at least not from my hotel in Beijing, where I actually tested it for no more than 2 hours, changed some configurations, and kept getting stuck at “Sailwind is connecting…”. I had no patience to continue testing. Later, I went back to my home in Xi’an and opened the connection twice, but it didn’t connect. I sent the windows installer to my buddies in Shanghai and Guangzhou, and they didn’t connect either. I test all the time to choose the “fastest server”, my friend test specifically hand-picked the United States and Japan nodes, because the experience of these two places in the line is most likely to be connected, the results are disappointing, the rest of the nodes do not bother to try.
On my windows laptop with Cyfone on I also noticed a serious problem: it has a very high CPU usage when connected, and consumes an extremely high amount of power when the laptop is not connected to a power source. Saiwind is a freeware, and frankly I’m not surprised to have this problem, having used a number of similar freeware programs a few years ago that slowed down the machine when connecting (especially when it failed to connect), my guess is that the software authors wrote the logic of switching to exaggerated encryption with extremely high CPU usage when the connection repeatedly failed, but really that doesn’t help in the face of the GFW.
For a discussion on free wall flipping software, please click on the link and see for yourself. As far as I know, since 2018, there is actually very little software on the internet that still works, let alone is “good”.
Back to Sai Feng. Although it can’t be used in China, its blog shows that it has at least “once” helped Internet users in Brazil and other countries to break through the Internet blockade, but the blog post was last updated in May 2016, so the current status of this software is supposed to be in a state of shutdown. Sailwind client is available for windows, android, ios, android and apple official store, but I didn’t look at it when I tested it because of technical reasons, I only tried windows client.
Sai Feng supports VPN and Global Proxy mode, the closest to it technically would be PandaVPN (which has run out of business and is not recommended), which is a sure-fire wall-flipping software, one of the main tools on this site, and if you’re looking for an alternative to Sai Feng, I’d recommend it, as well as ExpressVPN, which is not free, but is a much better option.
Well, that’s all I’m going to write about the Sailwind review, and there really isn’t much more to it, it’s a piece of software that used to be useful but is currently lagging badly in terms of technology, so let’s study it as a fossil.
