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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?

#181

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/

It would be easy to block on protocol level. Countries that block VPNs usually progress to that level pretty fast once they discover that simple IP blocks don't work.

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

#182
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.

Hmm. People who recommend widely used approaches, and well-known, well-established providers, "don't have any experience with cenorship circumvention".

So the solution is no-name providers using random ad-hoc hackery, chosen according to a criterion more or less custom designed to lead you into watering hole attacks.

Right.

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

#184

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…

> uses such primitive internet basics that it will almost certainly never fail.

It already fails in China and Russia. Simply tunneling HTTP through SSH is too easy to detect with DPI.

> Windows (which afaik doesn't have an ssh client built-in)

It has had both SSH client and SSH server built-in since Win10.

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

#185
post #151

On a related note, does anyone have insight into *why* the Indonesian government is doing this?

If it helps, here's some recent coverage: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/26/indonesia-prot...

“Some demonstrators on Monday were seen on television footage carrying a flag from the Japanese manga series One Piece, which has become a symbol of protest against government policies in the country.”

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

#186
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…

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 aut…

I wouldn’t worry about it.

They can barely handle wolf-whistlers let alone pedophile rape gangs consisting of the lowest IQ dregs of our society.

I know it’s only painfully stupid people who think the law is stupid, but dodgy Dave down the way tends to fly under the radar. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many of them.

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

#187
XRay / XTLS-Reality / VLESS work rather fine, and is said to be very hard to detect, even in China.

I followed [1] to set up my own proxy, which works pretty fine. More config examples may be helpful, e.g. [2].

[1]: https://cscot.pages.dev/2023/03/02/Xray-REALITY-tutorial/

[2]: https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-examples/blob/main/VLESS-TCP-XT...

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

#188
post #169
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…

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…

Tor is a third option, at least as one layer, and seeding Linux ISOs is not, to my knowledge, a criminal offense in any jurisdiction, not even in China. I don't know where you got that idea.

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

#189

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…

This makes me wonder: are there "cloud drive virtual sneakernet" systems that will communicate e.g. by a client uploading URL request(s) as documents via OneDrive/SharePoint/Google Drive/Baidu etc., a server reacting to this via webhook and uploading (say) a PDF version of the rendered site, then allowing the client to download that PDF? You effectively use the CDN of that service as a (very slow) proxy.

Of course, https://xkcd.com/538/ applies in full force, and I don't have any background in the space to make this a recommendation!

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've heard of domain fronting, where you host something on a subdomain of a large provider like Azure or Amazon. Is this what you're talking about when you say

> - 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).

How can one bounce VPN traffic through S3? Or are you just talking about hosting client software, ingress IP address lists, etc?

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