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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?

#171

Post by doix »

Ray20 wrote: post #144
dijit wrote: 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 There will always be "that guy down the pub" selling raspberry pi's with some deranged outdated firmware that runs a proxy for everything in the h…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.

I think you really overestimate the capability of the UK to enforce laws. Yes, they can write them and yes they can fine large corporations, that's basically it.

They cannot enforce laws against such "petty" crimes, the reason society mostly functions in the UK is because most people don't try to break the law.

Pretty sure the local punters would kick the cops out if they came for one of their own, especially if he got them their porn back.

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

#172

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#174

Post by spinagon »

dmantis wrote: post #132
tomaskafka wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, I'm using v2less on rented VPS, it's been workin for almost 2 years already (Russia)

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

#175

Post by _verandaguy »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #147
_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?

A country can and absolutely will block known VPN ingress points. There are two tricks that we can use to circumvent this:

- Host on a piece of infrastructure that's so big that you can't effectively block it without causing a major internet outage (think: S3, Cloudflare R2, etc). Bonus points if you can leverage something like ECH (ex-ESNI) to make it harder to identify a single bucket or subdomain.

- Keep spawning new domains and subdomains to distribute your binaries.

There are complications with both approaches. Some countries block ECH outright. Some have no problem shutting the internet down wholesale for a little bit. The domain-hopping approach presents challenges w/r/t establishing trust (though not insurmountable ones, much of the time).

These are thing that have to be judged and balanced on a case-by-case basis, and having partners on the ground in these places really helps reduce risk to users trying to connect from these places, but then you have to be very careful talking to then since they could themselves get in trouble for trying to organize a VPN distribution network with you. It's layers on layers, and at some point it helps to just have someone on the team with a background in working with people in vulnerable sectors and someone else from a global affairs and policy background to try and keep things as safe as they can be for people living under these regimes.

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

#176

Post by int_19h »

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…

Normally I would agree with you, but the ability to pull this kind of thing off hinges on there being enough shadows that the Eye doesn't look at for prolonged periods of time. And the overall trajectory of technological advance lately is such that those shadows are rapidly shrinking. First it was the street cameras (and UK is already one of the most enthusiastic adopters in the world). And now comes AI which can automatically sift through all the mined data, performing sentiment analysis etc. I feel that the time will come pretty soon when "a guy" will need to be so adept at concealing the tracks in order to avoid detection that most people wouldn't have access to one.

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

#178

Post by swe_dima »

Personally, I like Amnezia VPN, it has some ways to work around blocks: https://amnezia.org/en You can very easily self-host it, their installer automatically works on major cloud platforms.

Though if Indonesia has blocked VPNs only now, possibly they only block major providers and don't try to detect the VPN protocol itself, which would make self-hosting any VPN possible.

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

#179

Post by int_19h »

curiousgal wrote: post #140
JustExAWS wrote: post #76

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).

It has been my impression that in UK, both parties are strongly authoritarian, with the sole difference being what kinds of speech and expression, precisely, they want to police.

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

#180

Post by jacobgkau »

tiahura wrote: post #122
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…

For 99% of use cases - piracy and porn, does that matter?

This thread's not about that 99% use case.
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