Try looking into tor bridges.
You could also buy a VPS and use SSH tunneling to access a tor daemon running on a VPS. Host some sort of web service on the VPS so it looks inconspicuous
Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
221–230 of 775 posts
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#222XRay / 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...
The great thing about China's Great Firewall is that really good options to circumvent censorship have been around for a while. Was waiting for someone to bring up XRay! Alternatively, here is a great write up of using V2Ray[1]. May be worth OP looking into, as a blogger I found noted[2] is an alternative to a VPN, and may work.
[1]: https://www.v2ray.com/en/
[2]: https://sequentialread.com/v2ray-caddy-to-access-the-interne...
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
90% of “citizen journalism” is nothing of the sort. Just like “citizen science” researching vaccines.
Preach comrade! Those citizen journalists with their primary sources, disgusting. Thats nothing but propaganda. Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.
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Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#224- Tor. Pros: Reasonably user friendly and easy to get online, strong anonymity, free. Cons: a common target for censorship, not very fast, exit nodes are basically universally distrusted by websites. - Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes. Pros: little setup but not more than installing and configuring a program, faster than Got, very versatile. Cons: deep packet inspection can probably identify your traffic is using Mu…
Wireguard is not censorship-resistant, and most VPN-averse countries block cross-border Wireguard. Why reply a practical question in an area in which you have no experience?
Because Indonesia is new to the game and might still be catching up. They’re probably playing whackamole with the most common public VPN providers and might not be doing deep packet inspection yet. I worked with someone getting traffic out of Hong Kong a year ago and there was a lot trial and error figuring out what was blocked and what was not. Wireguard was one that worked.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#225- Tor. Pros: Reasonably user friendly and easy to get online, strong anonymity, free. Cons: a common target for censorship, not very fast, exit nodes are basically universally distrusted by websites. - Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes. Pros: little setup but not more than installing and configuring a program, faster than Got, very versatile. Cons: deep packet inspection can probably identify your traffic is using Mu…
Wireguard is not censorship-resistant, and most VPN-averse countries block cross-border Wireguard. Why reply a practical question in an area in which you have no experience?
Is it possible to identify wireguard traffic that isn't on a common port?
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#226Earlier 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…
Do you have any evidence for either of these claims?
From gemini.. (edited for brevity)
Kape Technologies Owns: ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate
> is there any suspicion that Kape Technologies is influenced or has ties to the Mossad?
Yes, there is significant suspicion and public discussion about Kape Technologies having ties to former Israeli intelligence personnel. While a direct operational link to Mossad has not been proven, the concerns stem from the company's history, its key figures, and their backgrounds.
...
Kape Technologies is owned by Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi. While Sagi himself does not have a documented intelligence background, his business history, which includes a conviction for insider trading in the 1990s, has been a point of concern for some privacy advocates. The consolidation of several major VPN providers under his ownership has raised questions about the potential for centralized data access.
----
Sure there isn't direct proof but there wasn't any proof the CIA was driving drug trade while it was happening. Proof materializes when the dust settles on such matters.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not that they couldn't handle the rape gangs; it's that they turned a blind eye towards them.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#228Earlier 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…
Sorry I’m referring to WireGuard/ovpn server IPs, not the binaries/configs used to setup a client. Unless you’re talking about fronting for both, but I imagine it is not economical to run a commercial -scale privacy vpn via a cloud provider.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
None of the things I listed are "widely used approaches, and well-known, well-established providers" in the parts of the world where it does matter. Yeah, maybe V* and derivatives are random ad-hoc hackery, but they also are the well-known standard now.
> Yeah, maybe V* and derivatives are random ad-hoc hackery, but they also are the well-known standard now.
A lot of people use Telegram and think it's private, too.
What about the part about choosing your VPN provider in the way most likely to get you an untrustworthy one who's after you personally?
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#230Australia 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 would have laughed in your face if you wrote this comment merely 6 months ago. Now I'm just depressed. (UK)
When ES leaked his info to the Guardian people, they could still (2013) use the Guardian's US base to publish, protected by the US' stronger freedom of speech laws. Now, in 2025, if the same were to happen again, I'm not sure that would work quite the same way, with Trump aggressively taking American citizens' rights away.
Maybe The Guardian should open a branch in Sealand...