Last week, I released TCP Brutal, a TCP port of one of the congestion control algorithms available in Hysteria, my other project which is a QUIC-based anti-censorship proxy. I’m surprised by its surge in popularity and the controversy it has generated, having been featured on sites like Hacker News, Zhihu, even drawing criticism from David Reed, an early TCP/IP developer. While many points are perfectly valid, I believe many critics are overlooking very important context, which I intend to clarify in this post.
Brutal, both in its TCP and QUIC forms, was purposefully built for anti-censorship proxies to deal with China's unique (I hope) internet situation. China has only a handful of government-controlled nodes for connecting its Internet to the rest of the world, called "Internet cross-border security gateway" (数据跨境安全网关) in official government documents. Beyond the bizarre censorship that blocks virtually every foreign website and service—forcing sof