## Stay Safe!

As you may know, Shadowsocks is an ecosystem of software that is adversarial in nature. You might even say it's political in nature. It was built to fight against one opponent and one opponent only (a very powerful one, mind you) - People's Republic of China's great censoring machine. This opponent would go to great lengths to make sure that the values advocated by Shadowsocks, namely freedom of information and freedom of speech, are completely snuffed and buried, using methods including but not limited to:

- [forced censorship of any mention of Shadowsocks anywhere it can](https://web.archive.org/web/20210307021605/https://www.baidu.com/s?ie=UTF-8&wd=shadowsocks);
- [develop sophisticated, specifically-targeted systems (active & passive) to detect and ban Shadowsocks traffic](https://web.archive.org/web/20201204181712/https://blog.torproject.org/learning-more-about-gfws-active-probing-system);
- [physically intimidate Shadowsocks users and coerce them to stop using it](https://web.archive.org/web/20211010001125/https://difang.gmw.cn/roll2/2020-07/29/content_123387620.htm);
- [twist its own laws and constitution to unscrupulously convict and imprison Shadowsocks distributors](https://web.archive.org/web/20211006150300/https://zj.qq.com/a/20180620/020541.htm);

Therefore it is not far-fetched at all to consider the possibility that our adversary could distribute maliciously modified versions of our software, in an attempt to spy on or even entrap our users. Unfortunately we do not have the ability or resources to combat such attempts directly, so our best defense is open-source.

GPL, the license used by this project, is a strong "copyleft" license, meaning that it aggressively promotes open sourcing by compelling all derivative works to also be open source. In simple English, if you compiled your version of this program and share it with others, you must also share your source code, whether or not you have made any changes. This ensures that all legitimate distributions of this software are subject to public scrutiny. ***If you see a distribution of this piece of software without its source code, consider the distributor HOSTILE and delete their files IMMEDIATELY. They may pose an EXISTENTIAL THREAT to your liberty and livelihood. This is NOT a joke.***

That being said, I would like to believe that us developers and users of Shadowsocks are not so easily intimidated. To quote Benjamin Franklin:
> ***Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither.***

**Edit 2022-06-21**: Funnily, six months after writing this, you all saw what happened to Shanghai in April and May of 2022. At no point in history since The Cultural Revolution has the PRC government ever fallen so deeply into a state of despotism. I literally cannot ask for a better example to demonstrate the validity and importance of this quote.

Despite the uphill battle we are faced with, I am personally determined to stay in and carry on this fight against government overreach and oppression. Will you too?

---

 Spyophobia, written 2021-10-12, edited 2022-06-21