Memorial Edition • February 17, 2026 • Volume 7, Issue FINAL
DPI, Active Probing, and Config Fatigue Claim Another Victim in Proxy Wars
INTERNET — XRAY Core, once hailed as the backbone of modern anti-censorship proxy infrastructure, was pronounced dead yesterday at 23:59 UTC on February 16, 2026, after a prolonged battle with increasingly sophisticated Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) systems and relentless active probing.
Born in early 2020 as a major fork and evolution of the V2Ray ecosystem, XRAY Core showed early promise with modular transports, XTLS optimizations, and camouflage-heavy routing options. Sources close to the core maintainers confirm it had been struggling with fingerprinting pressure for months.
"We tried everything," said Dr. Elena Proxyman, lead researcher at the Institute for Circumvention Technologies. "uTLS impersonation, REALITY tuning, fallback chains, dynamic routes. But the AI-powered DPI stacks evolved faster than operators could reconfigure."
The project's condition deteriorated rapidly after the rollout of real-time model-driven traffic analysis in major censorship regions. What began as occasional packet drops escalated into synchronized nationwide blocking waves by early 2026.
Post-mortem analysis conducted by the Protocol Forensics Laboratory identified several factors contributing to XRAY Core's demise:
"It's a classic case of an arms race where defense couldn't keep pace with offense," explained Prof. Michael Streamcipher from Carnegie Mellon's Privacy Engineering Institute.
News of XRAY's death sent shockwaves through the technical community. The #RIP_XRAY hashtag began trending within hours of the announcement.
XRAY Core
Born: January 2020 • Died: February 2026
Age: 6 years, 1 month
"A modular anti-censorship engine that dared to route around digital walls. Though buried under configs, logs, and fingerprints, it carried the hopes of millions seeking online freedom."
Survived by: sing-box, Hysteria2, TUIC, and WireGuard (conditions unstable)
Predeceased by: Naive HTTP tunnels, legacy PPTP, and countless fragile configs
In Loving Memory – From GosVPN Labs
Green: Stable • Yellow: Under Pressure • Red: Critical/Dead
Peak Usage: ~3.8 million routed sessions (Q4 2024)
Final Detection Rate: 96.4% within 24 hours
Average Session Duration (final week): 2.7 minutes
Protocol Name: XRAY Core (eXtensible Relay for Advanced Yield)
Version: 25.x series
Architecture: Multi-protocol client-server orchestration
Payload Camouflage: XTLS-Vision / REALITY / uTLS impersonation
Transport: TCP, gRPC, WebSocket, HTTP/2, QUIC
Header Format: UUID + routing + sniffing metadata
Cause of Death: Adaptive AI-driven Deep Packet Inspection + operator burnout
Detection Signatures:
- JA3/JA4 TLS fingerprint clustering
- Inter-flow timing and packet-size correlation
- Probe-response behavior under active replay
- Reused misconfigured fallback chains
Time of Death: 2026-02-16 23:59:00 UTC
Last Known Instance: edge-gateway-07.example.net:443
Final Words: "transport/internet: connection closed"
"I watched XRAY grow from a promising fork into a robust platform used by millions. Its death marks the end of an era in practical circumvention engineering."
"We knew this day would come. The mathematics of information theory were against us from the start. You cannot hide patterns indefinitely from sufficiently advanced analysis systems. XRAY fought valiantly, but entropy and human fatigue always win eventually."
"XRAY gave me years of access to blocked knowledge, uncensored communication, and a normal internet. It died so others might adapt. We will remember and reconfigure."
"The sophistication of modern DPI is a quantum leap in censorship technology. XRAY's death is a warning: this is no longer just a protocol problem, it's an ecosystem problem."
sing-box: Stable for now, but under heavy fingerprint pressure.
Hysteria2: High speed remains, but bursts of targeted blocking reported.
TUIC: Promising resilience, though throttling events are increasing.
WireGuard: Maintaining stable condition but increasingly monitored.
Industry experts are divided on whether next-generation tooling can survive in the current threat environment. Some advocate post-fingerprint designs, while others argue the era of purely technical circumvention is ending.
When: February 24, 2026, 19:00 UTC
Where: #xray-memorial on IRC
Dress Code: All black terminals preferred
In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to digital rights organizations worldwide.
The XRAY Maintainers Collective announces the "Core Memory Archive," preserving project history and technical artifacts of deceased circumvention technologies for future researchers.
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Editor-in-Chief: Tim Berners-Lee Jr. • Publisher: Protocol Publishing House
This memorial edition will be archived on the InterPlanetary File System for posterity.
"Protocols may die, but the internet is forever."
— The Protocol Times Motto