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Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

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Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

#101

Post by yogorenapan »

reisse wrote: post #67

You've come to a wrong place to ask. Most people here (judging by recommendations of own VPN instances, Tor, Tailscale/other Wireguard-based VPNs, and Mullvad) don't have any experience with censorship circumvention. Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.

You can always do v2ray -> Mullvad in a docker container routed with gluetun for censorship avoidance and privacy

Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

#102

Post by hinkley »

reisse wrote: post #67

You've come to a wrong place to ask. Most people here (judging by recommendations of own VPN instances, Tor, Tailscale/other Wireguard-based VPNs, and Mullvad) don't have any experience with censorship circumvention. Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.

I have a little, maybe enough to be dangerous. SSH won’t be sufficient to avoid all traffic analysis. Everyone can see how much traffic and the pattern of that traffic, which can leak info about the sort of things you’re doing.

If you’re worried about ending up on a list, using things that look like VPNs while the VPNs are locked down is likely to do so.

Also… your neighbors in Myanmar didn’t do a lockdown during the genocide and things got pretty fucking dire as a result. People have taken different lessons from this. I’m not sure what the right answer is, and which is the greater evil. Deplatforming and arresting people for inciting riots and hate speech is probably the best you can do to maintain life and liberty for the most people.

Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

#103

Post by princevegeta89 »

OP, you can rent a VPS from a reputable and cheap provider within the NA region - OVH, Vultr, Linode etc. are decent. Also check out lowendtalk.com

Then, setup Tailscale on the server. You can VPN into it and essentially browse the internet as someone from NA.

Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

#104

Post by kccqzy »

Arubis wrote: post #77

If you can still get SSH access and can establish an account with a VPS provider with endpoints outside your country of origin, https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand is a little long in the tooth but may still be viable.

Tunneling via SSH (ssh -D) is super easy to detect. The government doesn't need any sophisticated analysis to tell SSH connections for tunneling from SSH connections where a human is typing into a terminal.

Countries like China have blocked SSH-based tunneling for years.

It can also block sessions based on packet sizes: a typical web browsing session involves a short HTTP request and a long HTTP response, during which the receiving end sends TCP ACKs; but if the traffic traffic mimics the above except these "ACKs" are a few dozen bytes larger than a real ACK, it knows you are tunneling over a different protocol. This is how it detects the vast majority of VPNs.

Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

#106

Post by Barrin92 »

RansomStark wrote: post #81
hdgvhicv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of “citizen journalism” is nothing of the sort. Just like “citizen science” researching vaccines.

Preach comrade! Those citizen journalists with their primary sources, disgusting. Thats nothing but propaganda. Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.

>Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you

In an age of mass media (where there's a video for anything) or now one step further synthetic media knowing who makes something is much more important than the content, given that what's being shown can be created on demand. Propaganda in the modern world is taking something that actually happened, and then framing it as an authentic piece of information found "on the street", twisting its context.

"what's in the video" is now largely pointless, and anyone who isn't gullible will obviously always focus on where the promoter of any material wants to direct the audiences attention to, or what they want to deflect from.

Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

#107

Post by ddtaylor »

Your first option until you get settled is to use an SSH reverse proxy:

    ssh -D 9999 user@my.server
Then configure your browser to use local port 9999 for your SOCKS5 proxy.

This gets you a temporarily usable system and if you can tunnel this way successfully installing some WireGuard or OpenVPN stuff will likely work.

EDIT: Thanks it's -D not -R

Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

#108

Post by Liftyee »

wat10000 wrote: post #87
reisse wrote: post #67

You've come to a wrong place to ask. Most people here (judging by recommendations of own VPN instances, Tor, Tailscale/other Wireguard-based VPNs, and Mullvad) don't have any experience with censorship circumvention. Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.

Mullvad worked OK in China for me recently. Sometimes I'd have to try a few different endpoints before it worked. Something built specifically to work in those places would probably be better, but it wasn't too much trouble. Not necessarily a recommendation, just sharing one data point.

I remember always needing obfuscation enabled in Mullvad, but it would work in the end (as you said, after trying a few endpoints).

Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

#110

Post by hinkley »

bsimpson wrote: post #83
Arubis wrote: post #77

If you can still get SSH access and can establish an account with a VPS provider with endpoints outside your country of origin, https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand is a little long in the tooth but may still be viable.

15 years ago, I was using EC2 at work, and realized it was surprisingly easy to SSH into it in a way where all my traffic went through EC2. I could watch local Netflix when traveling. It was a de facto VPN. Details are not at the top of my mind these years later, but you can probably rig something up yourself that looks like regular web dev shit and not a known commercial VPN. I think there was a preference in Firefo…

I watched a season of Doctor Who that way back when the BBC were being precious about it. But Digital Ocean, so $5.
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