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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?

#111

Post by dijit »

nomilk wrote: post #43

Australia and UK might soon go down this path. Something quite depressing is if we (HN crowd) find workarounds, most regular folks won't have the budget/expertise to do so, so citizen journalism will have been successfully muted by government / big media.

Don't worry, you shouldn't underestimate the capability of society.

I grew up in a pretty deprived area of the UK, and we all knew "a guy" who could get you access to free cable, or shim your electric line to bypass the meter, or get you pirated CD's and VHS' and whatever.

There will always be "that guy down the pub" selling raspberry pi's with some deranged outdated firmware that runs a proxy for everything in the house or whatever. To be honest with you, I might end up being that guy for a bunch of people once I'm laid off from tech like the rest. :)

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

#112

Post by Jigsy »

RansomStark wrote: post #75
Jigsy wrote: post #45

I was wondering something like this but in a different capacity. What with certain countries (they know who they are) and their hatred for encryption, it got me wondering how people would communicate securely if - for example - Signal/WhatsApp/etc. pulled out and the country wound up disconnecting the submarine cables to "keep $MORAL_PANIC_OF_THE_DAY safe." How would people communicate securely and privately in a dom…

In person or not at all. At that point you've essentially lost. You either hope another country sees value in spreading you some democracy, or you rise up and hope others join you. Or not and you accept the protection the state is graciously providing to you.

SneakerNet or bust, eh? That sucks.

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

#113

Post by kragen »

barbazoo wrote: post #57
jszymborski wrote: post #10

Mastodon is not easy for regimes to completely block, and most instances won't block you for using Tor. Mastodon saw a huge migration from Brazil when X was blocked there. https://joinmastodon.org/

Wouldn't it be easy to block the individual servers, e.g. https://mastodon.social ?

Sure, but if you have an account on a different server, you can still see things posted on mastodon.social if you have followed someone there.

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

#115

Post by kragen »

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.

VPNs that are advertised are for-profit products, which means:

1. They are in most cases run by national spy agencies.

2. They will at least appear to work, i.e., they will provide you with access to websites that are blocked by the country you are in. Depending on which country's spies run the system, they may actually work in the sense of hiding your traffic from that country's spies, or they may mark you as a specific target and save all your traffic for later analysis.

My inclination is to prefer free (open-source) software that isn't controlled by a company which can use that control against its users.

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

#116

Post by dongcarl »

McNulty2 wrote: post #74
dongcarl wrote: post #50

Give Obscura a try, we get around internet restrictions by using QUIC as transport, which looks like HTTP/3 and doesn't suffer from TCP-over-TCP meltdown: https://obscura.net/ Technical details: https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/ Let us know what you think! Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Obscura.

If they're blocking other protocols then likely they're blocking quic also.

Very possible, though many of our users are saying that in network environments where WireGuard is blocked they were able to use Obscura.

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

#118

Post by esosac »

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.

what's wrong with those solutions?

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

#119

Post by some_random »

kragen wrote: post #115
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.

VPNs that are advertised are for-profit products, which means: 1. They are in most cases run by national spy agencies. 2. They will at least appear to work, i.e. , they will provide you with access to websites that are blocked by the country you are in. Depending on which country's spies run the system, they may actually work in the sense of hiding your traffic from that country's spies, or they may mark you as a spe…

Do you have any evidence for either of these claims?

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

#120

Post by Daishiman »

some_random wrote: post #119
kragen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VPNs that are advertised are for-profit products, which means: 1. They are in most cases run by national spy agencies. 2. They will at least appear to work, i.e. , they will provide you with access to websites that are blocked by the country you are in. Depending on which country's spies run the system, they may actually work in the sense of hiding your traffic from that country's spies, or they may mark you as a spe…

Do you have any evidence for either of these claims?

It is absolutely self-evident that VPNs are considered high-value targets and that all spy agencies invest a chunk of resources to go after high-value targets.
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