try Bright Data / luminati and the traffic is http to the proxy as well.
Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
271–280 of 775 posts
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#272I lived in China for a while and there were several waves of VPN blocks. Also very few VPN services even try to actively support VPN-blocking nations anymore. Any commercial offering will be blocked eventually.
What I settled on for decent reliability and speeds was a free-tier EC2 hosted in an international region. I then setup a SOCKS5 server and connected my devices to it. You mentioned Cloudflare so whatever their VM service is might also work.
It's very low profile as it's just your traffic and the state can't easily differentiate your host from the millions of others in that cloud region.
LPT for surviving the unfree internet: GitHub won't be blocked and you'll find all the resources and downloads you need for this method and others posted by Chinese engineers.
Edit: If you're worried about being too identifiable because of your static IP, well it's just a computer, you can use a VPN on there too if you want to!
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you very much for a detailed answer. Might I rudely ask -- as you're knowledgeable in this space, what do you think of Mullvad's DAITA, which specifically aims to defeat traffic analysis by moving to a more pulsed constant bandwidth model?
DAITA was introduced after my time in the industry, but this isn't a new idea (though as far as I know, it's the first time this kind of thing's been commercialized). It's clever. It tries to defeat attacks against one of the tougher parts of VPN connections to reliably obfuscate, and the effort's commendable, but I'll stop short of saying it's a good solution for one big reason: with VPNs and censorship circumventio…
Have you heard about Safing's "SPN"? Could you comment on that?
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#274Australia 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.
In oz personally and yes, I warned folks of this a few years back, especially in the 12 months or so. Every time I was met with a fair bit of push back.
They would argue back on technical merits, I was talking political, a politics doesn't give a damn about the tech. We have slowly been going down this path for a while now.
“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” - PM Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've had success using wireguard over wstunnel in places where wireguard is blocked. https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel
This looks great, thanks.
I should have mentioned that our use case isn't avoiding government firewalls, it's transiting through broken network environments.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#276Censorship circumvention tools specialize in this, and are extensively used in China, Iran, and Russia. I work on Lantern, and we're not seeing any significant interruptions to connections in Indonesia at the moment.
https://lantern.io/download
Hope it helps!
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
It was David Graeber that said we should be wary of places like The Guardian. They are a wolf in sheeps clothing. Used a lot of the more liberal momentum of the early 2010s combined with promoting some of the more left leaning writters to gain a fair bit of clout. But underneath, they will conform to the power structures if it comes down to survival. Alas, they nay not be a Sealand edition although that would be neat.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
From some of the comments here I get why you are downvoted. But tbh I would also have gone that route. So are we just inexperienced? I read here indeed that wireguard is very easily blocked. It was at the company I worked for but then I just set port 23 (who uses ftp anyways??). And it worked. But why is this still bad then? Obviously I have 0 real experience with this.
Well, I mean, Tailscale is pretty easy overall. When client apps get blocked, you can literally hook up your router into Tailscale if needed, or you can run a headless version of Tailscale on your home server or the very machine you are on. It should also be possible to use a tunnel to get around the blocking of WireGuard, for example. You can then use it as an exit node if needed. It should work in theory, I have ne…
Sure, I know and use it too. But I saw you being downvoted so I responded to that. I think, reading the rest of the thread, your response (as mine would be) does not work as signals 0 experience with actually oppressing regimes. Not?
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#279Can you SSH outside the country?
If so, then you have a VPN.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#280URnetwork works where many don't http://ur.io . It used a grab bag of techniques, open source