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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?

#261

Post by isaacremuant »

GlacierFox wrote: post #61
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.

I would have laughed in your face if you wrote this comment merely 6 months ago. Now I'm just depressed. (UK)

Don't worry. You'll call us conspiracy theories once you get used to the new goalposts and we warn you about the next thing.

How about instead of being depressed you start being vocal and defiant?

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

#264

Post by mayneack »

Ray20 wrote: post #156
evulhotdog wrote: post #95

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?

The long tail is very long

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

#265

Post by ailun »

reisse wrote: 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.

Mullvad worked okay in China in June for me. I imagine it will be better in Indonesia with their less sophisticated blocking.

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

#266

Post by downrightmike »

teeray wrote: post #242
_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…

> First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs. It would be nice if one of the big shortwave operators could datacast these packages to the world as a public service.

https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand

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

#267

Post by isaacremuant »

int_19h wrote: post #176
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…

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…

The eye doesn't care as long as you're not politically efficient in opposing their narratives or power.

Authoritarianism in the UK doesn't correlate with crime. The economy does.

The point of these things is not really to help citizens. "there's no money for that" like there's no money for healthcare or education (although there is for bombings in foreign countries). The point is protecting power from any threat that could mount against it.

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

#268

Post by int_19h »

jszymborski wrote: post #239
int_19h wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The traffic looks like any other web page.

I doubt that is the case once you do statistical analysis of it.

Advanced VPN tunneling protocols, for example, have to take a lot of special measures to conceal their nature from China's and Russia's deep packet inspecting firewalls.

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

#269

Post by isaacremuant »

mikestorrent wrote: post #166
Ray20 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> People need to stick it to the government and demand their freedoms.

It will only work if they admit that they supported this and all forms of totalitarianism during COVID. You can't fall for that and then be surprised when the world keeps going down that obvious path.

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