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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?

#144

Post by Ray20 »

dijit wrote: post #111
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 There will always be "that guy down the pub" selling raspberry pi's with some deranged outdated firmware that runs a proxy for everything in the h…

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

You should be worried. Don't underestimate the capabilities of the government bureaucrats. That "guys down the pub" will quickly disappear once they start getting jail time for their activities.

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

#145

Post by platevoltage »

roscas wrote: post #32

Blocking Twitter is a good start, now Facebook, Instagram, Whatsup and TikTok. This is a good start but more should be blocked. Then force ISP to block ads. Not just for Indonesia but all countries. But we still have a lot more to do to fix the web.

I can't stand most of these things you want blocked but this is bonkers.

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

#146

Post by _verandaguy »

azalemeth wrote: post #129
_verandaguy wrote: post #97

Hello! I've got experience working on censorship circumvention for a major VPN provider (in the early 2020s). - First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs. Many providers who are aware of VPN censorship and cater to these locales distribute their VPNs through hard-to-block channels and in obfuscated packages. S3 is a popular option but by no means the only one, and some VPN prov…

Thank you very much for a detailed answer. Might I rudely ask -- as you're knowledgeable in this space, what do you think of Mullvad's DAITA, which specifically aims to defeat traffic analysis by moving to a more pulsed constant bandwidth model?

DAITA was introduced after my time in the industry, but this isn't a new idea (though as far as I know, it's the first time this kind of thing's been commercialized).

It's clever. It tries to defeat attacks against one of the tougher parts of VPN connections to reliably obfuscate, and the effort's commendable, but I'll stop short of saying it's a good solution for one big reason: with VPNs and censorship circumvention, the data often speaks for itself.

A VPN provider working in this space will often have aggregate (and obviously anonymized, if they're working in good faith) stats about success rates and failure classes encountered from clients connecting to their nodes. Where I worked, we didn't publish this information. I'm not sure where Mullvad stands on this right now.

In any case -- some VPN providers deploying new technology like this will partner with the research community (because there's a small, but passionate formal research community in this space!) and publish papers, studies, and other digests of their findings. Keep an eye out for this sort of stuff. UMD's Breakerspace in the US in particular had some extremely clever people working on this stuff when I was involved in the industry.

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

#147

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

_verandaguy wrote: post #97

Hello! I've got experience working on censorship circumvention for a major VPN provider (in the early 2020s). - First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs. Many providers who are aware of VPN censorship and cater to these locales distribute their VPNs through hard-to-block channels and in obfuscated packages. S3 is a popular option but by no means the only one, and some VPN prov…

I’m curious about what makes it difficult to block a vpn provider long term. You said getting the software is difficult, but can a country not block known vpn ingress points?

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

#150

Post by mikestorrent »

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…

The issue these days is that all of the EC2 IP ranges are well known, and are usually not very high-reputation IPs, so a lot of services will block them, or at least aggressively require CAPTCHAs to prevent botting.

Source: used to work for a shady SEO company that searched Google 6,000,000 times a day on a huge farm of IPs from every provider we could find

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