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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?

#281

Post by SlowTao »

isaacremuant wrote: post #267
int_19h wrote: post #176

Earlier 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…

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…

I think both sides of this are fair. Power is interested in stability of itself, to keeps its back to the wall so that nobody can sneak up on it. But also political power has teamed up with corporate power/determination to create a far more nasty beast.

Seeing companies like Palantir (and many lesser known ones) buddy up to everyone that wants it, its a clear statement on how they want to monitor and control the populace.

Long term I don't think it can be done, but the pain mid term can be vast.

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

#282

Post by primitivesuave »

dijit wrote: post #111
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.

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…

I suppose that for this case, an underground black market of VPN providers might emerge - average individuals setting up VPN software on a cloud service provider, and then selling monthly access to people. Aside from the obvious danger of getting ripped off (someone might put you on a slow shared VPN with many other people, or shut down the server at any time), there is also the possibility of someone monitoring all your Internet activity.

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

#283

Post by multjoy »

isaacremuant wrote: post #269
mikestorrent wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In matters of public health, you cannot trust the public to do the right thing.

The problem with covid is that we weren't totalitarian enough. Regulations you could drive a coach & horses through and no way to enforce is a sop.

The first lock down needed to be a proper 'papers, please' affair. When we get a properly lethal pandemic, we're fucked. Hopefully Laurence Fox and Piers Corbyn will catch it quickly and expire in a painful and televised way, it's the only hope of people complying with actual quarantine measures.

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

#284

Post by asqueella »

cogman10 wrote: post #246

IMO, the safest route for an individual with tech competency is to setup a small instance server in the cloud outside your country and use ssh port forwarding and a proxy to get at information you want. For an example of a proxy service https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-... That will give you a hard to snoop proxy service that should completely circumvent a government blockaid (they likely a…

Advanced enough censors (who have DPI) do block or slow down ssh, e.g.: https://serverfault.com/questions/1122015/ssh-blockedfor-for...

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

#285

Post by SlowTao »

curiousgal wrote: post #140
JustExAWS wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just waiting for red states in the US to try this too since their current laws requiring ID verification for porn sites aren’t effective.

> red states Well you'd be surprised to find out that this stupid policy (and many more) have been brought forward by Labour (Left).

Yep, here in Australia the social media age restriction was pushed through by both sides. Two sides of the same coin.

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

#286

Post by wulfstan »

joshryandavis wrote: post #272

I 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 thei…

When I worked in China (not for long periods but frequently enough that the Great Firewall became an irritant) I hosted an OpenVPN server on port 443 and/or port 22 of a server I owned. That worked sufficiently well most of the time.

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

#287

Post by SlowTao »

nomilk wrote: post #157
curiousgal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> red states Well you'd be surprised to find out that this stupid policy (and many more) have been brought forward by Labour (Left).

Both the major Australian parties (Liberal and Labor) seem as spineless as each other. They're being pushed by media conglomerates News Corp and Nine Entertainment [0] to crush competition (social media apps). With the soon-to-be-introduced 'internet licence' (euphemism: 'age verification'), and it's working. If they ban VPN's, it will make social media apps even more burdensome to access and use. [0] News Corp and N…

How long until they produce an generative AI version of Burt Newton to do new episodes of 20 to 1 based on some social media slop?

Yep, not a great time line here.

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

#289

Post by nomilk »

primitivesuave wrote: post #282
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…

I suppose that for this case, an underground black market of VPN providers might emerge - average individuals setting up VPN software on a cloud service provider, and then selling monthly access to people. Aside from the obvious danger of getting ripped off (someone might put you on a slow shared VPN with many other people, or shut down the server at any time), there is also the possibility of someone monitoring all…

I'd default assume black market VPNs will monitor internet activity since it's both easy and profitable

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

#290

Post by mynameis777 »

Hey there – greetings from one of the most heavily censored regions in the world.

I once considered using an Indonesian VPS to bypass my country's censorship. However, the Indonesian VPS provider actually refused my direct connection request from my country. I was quite frustrated at the time, wondering why they refused me. But now I understand – it turns out these two countries are in cahoots.

Emmm, if you want to break through the censorship, you can start here: https://github.com/free-nodes/v2rayfree

It provides many free proxy nodes that are almost unusable in my country, but might work in Indonesia (although you may need a lot of patience to test which ones actually work).

A good proxy software is Clash.Meta for Linux (you’ll need to install Linux on Windows using VMware, then set up Clash.Meta).

You can start by installing the Windows version of the proxy client software (V2rayN) for a simple way to bypass censorship, but it's not a long-term solution.

A special reminder: these free nodes are not secure (they could very well be "honeypot" lines, but if you're not from my country, the police should have no way of dealing with you). You need to quickly set up your own route by purchasing a U.S. VPS and setting up your own proxy nodes.

Lastly, I recommend a good teacher: ChatGPT. It will solve all the problems you encounter on Linux. Also, use the Chrome browser with translation.

Good luck!

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