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Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
131–140 of 775 posts
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#132You'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.
> Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. If I was working for a secret service for these countries, I would set up many "VPNs that are advertised specifically for x" as honeypots to gather data about any dissidents.
It doesn't matter, he should look into the open source protocols that these services use. He doesn't have to use them.
VLESS / v2ray works in Russia, as far as I know.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#133This might not be the case for Indonesia currently, but for countries like Russia, China, Iran most of the mentioned solutions will not work. I've had to evade Russian censorship for years now - the censors (Roskomnadzor) use DPI and other means of classifying network traffic, and currently the following things are outright blocked:
- Tor
- Wireguard and derivatives (incl. Mullvad, Tailscale, ProtonVPN)
- OpenVPN
- Shadowsocks (incl. Outline)
What still works is Xray-core [1] with vless and Reality protocols, whatever those mean. Xray-core is an innovation over v2ray [2]. v2ray might also still work, but I've never tried it. If you have the capacity to run your own VPS, the simplest solution would be to install the 3x-ui [3], which is something like "Xray-core with a simple to use UI in a single package ready-to-use", but you'd also need to setup some basic security measures and a firewall.
For those technically inclined, here [4] is a rough ansible playbook to install 3x-ui on a blank Debian machine. Additional configuration will be needed in the UI itself, there is a lot of online tutorials, and I link to one of them in [5] (in Russian, unfortunately). Don't just trust me blindly, please review before running!
There are also commercial xray-aware VPN providers, but I wouldn't publicly vouch for any of them.
I found it very strange that there is not much info on HN about xray and v2ray, and I also hope it stays this way for most of the people here and not here. However, we live in a weird reality and have to actively engage in such an arms race now.
As a side note, if anyone here has quality info about security of the xray-core implementation, I'd be happy to get familiar. I didn't look at the code myself and still am slightly suspicious, but oh well it works :shrug:
[1]: https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core
[2]: https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core
[3]: https://github.com/MHSanaei/3x-ui/
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#134I'm currently traveling in Uzbekistan and am surprised that wireguard as a protocol is just blocked. I use wireguard with my own server, because usually governments just block well known VPN providers and a small individual server is fine. It's the first time I've encountered where the entire protocol is just blocked. Worth checking what is blocked and how before deciding which VPN provider to use.
Same in Russia
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#135In this scenario, Chinese have very rich experience. you need to use the advance proxy tool like clash ,v2ray, shadowsocks etc.
shadowsocks was the winner of the state of the art I had to do at work. It address the "long-term statistical analysis will often reveal a VPN connection regardless of obfuscation and masking (and this approach can be cheaper to support than DPI by a stat)" comment.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#136I'm currently traveling in Uzbekistan and am surprised that wireguard as a protocol is just blocked. I use wireguard with my own server, because usually governments just block well known VPN providers and a small individual server is fine. It's the first time I've encountered where the entire protocol is just blocked. Worth checking what is blocked and how before deciding which VPN provider to use.
how can they detect it is wireguard, I thought the traffic is encrypted?
how does it differ from regular TLS 1.3 traffic?
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#137If 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 whic…
One alternative would be to set up a VPS, run VNC on it, run your browser on that to access the various web sites, and connect over an SSH tunnel to the VNC instance. Then it actually is an interactive ssh session.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#138I'm currently traveling in Uzbekistan and am surprised that wireguard as a protocol is just blocked. I use wireguard with my own server, because usually governments just block well known VPN providers and a small individual server is fine. It's the first time I've encountered where the entire protocol is just blocked. Worth checking what is blocked and how before deciding which VPN provider to use.
XRay protocol based VPN worked for me in Uzbekistan when I were travelling there.
Wireguard is indeed blocked.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#139Usually when countries block websites they don't block major cloud providers, like AWS and Google Cloud. Because most websites are hosted on them. So you can get a cheap VPS from AWS or GCP (always free VM is available) and host OpenVPN on it.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#140Australia 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.
I am just waiting for red states in the US to try this too since their current laws requiring ID verification for porn sites aren’t effective.
> red states
Well you'd be surprised to find out that this stupid policy (and many more) have been brought forward by Labour (Left).