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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?

#161

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

It’s -D, -R is for forwarding specific ports.

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

#162
post #111
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 There will always be "that guy down the pub" selling raspberry pi's with some deranged outdated firmware that runs a proxy for everything in the h…

That absolutely sounds like a world I should be worried about, where our only choices are dodgy ones

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

#163
The most effective solution is to use X-ray/V2ray with VLESS, or VMESS, or Trojan as a protocol.

Another obfuscated solution is Amnezia

If you are not ready to set up your own VPN server and need any kind of connection right now, try Psiphon, but it's a proprietary centralized service and it's not the best solution.

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

#164

Nations severing peoples connections to the world is awful. I'm so sorry for the chaos in general, and the state doing awful things both. Go on https://lowendbox.com and get a cheap cheap cheap VPS. Use ssh SOCKS proxy in your browser to send web traffic through it. Very unfancy, a 30+ year old solution, but uses such primitive internet basics that it will almost certainly never fail. Builtin to everything but Window…

Windows has had both ssh client/server for years

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

#165
post #24

I'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?

It's UDP, not TCP (like TLS) and has a distinguishable handshake. Wireguard is not designed as a censorship prevention tool, it's purely a networking solution.

The tunnel itself is encrypted, but the tunnel creation and existence is not obfuscated.

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

#166
post #144
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it's also dystopian to pin one's future on such hopes. People need to stick it to the government and demand their freedoms. Far too many things are being forced on us in the West that go against fundamental values that have been established for centuries.

Somehow, things that could be unifying protests where the working class of every political stripe are able to overlook their differences and push back against government never seem to happen. It is always polarized so that it's only ever one side at a time, and the other side is against them. How does that work?

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

#167
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many instances of Mastodon, and due to its federated nature, you can use any of them to access it, and even host your own.

What's stopping them from just blocking them all and continuing to block new ones?

Nothing is stopping them, but like most things in blocking free speech, it’s a game of cat and mouse.

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

#169
post #115
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…

Well, you have to host your free open-source VPN software somewhere. And then, (N. B.: technical and usability stuff aside, I'm talking only about privacy bits here) everything boils down to two equally nightmarish options.

First, you use well-known cloud or dedicated hoster. All your traffic is now tied to the single IP address of that hoster. It may be linked to you by visiting two different sites from the same IP address. Furthermore, this hoster is legally required to do anything with your VPN machine on demand of corresponding state actors (this is not a speculative scenario; i. e. Linode literally silently MitMed one of their customers on German request). Going ever further, residential and company IPs have quite different rules when it comes to law enforcement. Seeding Linux ISOs from your residential IP will be overlooked almost everywhere (sorry, Germany again), but seeding Linux ISOs from AWS can easily be a criminal offense.

Second, you use some shady abuse-proof hosting company, which keeps no logs (or at least says that) and accepts payments in XMR. Now you're logging in to your bank account from an IP address that is used to seedbox pirate content or something even more illegal, and you still don't know if anyone meddles with your VPN instance looking for crypto wallet keys in your traffic.

VPN services have a lot of "good" customers for a small amount of IP addresses, so even if they have some "bad" actors, their IPs as a whole remain "good enough". And, as the number of customers is big, each IP cannot be reliably tied to a specific customer without access logs.

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

At this point, anyone who has been watching politics for a few decades understands that the left/right dichotomy is primarily one designed to keep the majority of people within a certain set of bounds. We see it revealed when politicians and ideologies that should be in opposition to one another still cooperate on the same strategies, like this one.

The goal right now is to make online anonymity impossible. Adult content is the wedge issue being used to make defending it unpalatable for any elected official, but nobody actually has it as a goal to prevent teenagers from looking at porn - if they did, they would be using more direct and efficient strategies. No, it's very clear that anonymous online commentary is hurting politicians and they are striking back against it.

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