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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?

#251

Post by qwezxcrty »

Chinese have developed a significant amount of sophisticated tools countering internet censorship. V2ray as far as I recall is the state-of-the-art.

To use them, one need to first rent a (virtual) server somewhere from a foreign cloud provider as long as the payment does not pose a problem. The first step sometimes proves difficult for people in China, but hopefully Indonesia is not at that stage yet. What follows is relatively easy as there are many tutorials for the deployment like: https://guide.v2fly.org/en_US/

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

#252

Post by logicchains »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #58
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.

90% of “citizen journalism” is nothing of the sort. Just like “citizen science” researching vaccines.

Citizen journalism avoids the main weakness of a centralised system: it's incredible suspectible to capture. A prime example of this is the mass opposition around the world to Israel's genocide in Gaza. Israel committed such genocides prior to the event of social media, such as the Nakba, but it was rarely reported on, due to media ownership being concentrated in the hands of a few pro-Zionist individuals.

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

#253

Post by mrbluecoat »

myshoemouth wrote: post #236
_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. How does a state actor do actual DPI without pushing certs to end user devices?

Network fingerprinting, like https://github.com/FoxIO-LLC/ja4

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

#254

Post by mrbluecoat »

qwezxcrty wrote: post #251

Chinese have developed a significant amount of sophisticated tools countering internet censorship. V2ray as far as I recall is the state-of-the-art. To use them, one need to first rent a (virtual) server somewhere from a foreign cloud provider as long as the payment does not pose a problem. The first step sometimes proves difficult for people in China, but hopefully Indonesia is not at that stage yet. What follows is…

Agreed, the best tools for circumventing The Great Firewall of China are from Chinese developers. https://github.com/txthinking/brook comes to mind..

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

#256

Post by s1mplicissimus »

refulgentis wrote: post #155
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.

Mr. Kafka, suspicion is healthy. However, abstraction provides no way forward when faced with practicalities instead of theory. Creates a Kafka-esque situation - anything suitable is by definition unsuitable. Better to focus on practical technical advice.

I don't see parent abstracting. They are simply pointing out a very real risk, which you don't provide any counter points to. Instead you seem to dismiss their point based on a strawman

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

#257

Post by galaxy_gas »

mnw21cam wrote: post #137
kccqzy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tunneling via SSH (ssh -D) is super easy to detect. The government doesn't need any sophisticated analysis to tell SSH connections for tunneling from SSH connections where a human is typing into a terminal. Countries like China have blocked SSH-based tunneling for years. It can also block sessions based on packet sizes: a typical web browsing session involves a short HTTP request and a long HTTP response, during whic…

One alternative would be to set up a VPS, run VNC on it, run your browser on that to access the various web sites, and connect over an SSH tunnel to the VNC instance. Then it actually is an interactive ssh session.

Anything more then small text bandwidth use is also detected . Not about interactivity instead this case

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

#260

Post by unethical_ban »

myshoemouth wrote: post #236
_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. How does a state actor do actual DPI without pushing certs to end user devices?

Patterns of data transmission (network behavioral analysis, I just made that term up), analyzing IP and ports, inspecting SSL handshakes for destination site. In short, metadata.
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