371–380 of 775 posts
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Part of that is knowing whats happening inside the country, of which they were previously using tools like discord, which have now been blocked. So the first step to using people power to make Indonesia a more open, democratic society would be to find a way to tunnel out to get and share that information. To that end the OP has created this Ask HN thread.
Nope. The outside doesn't matter. The problem is on the inside. External websites will never fix the internal problem. There are no technical solutions to what is fundamentally a problem of political culture.
Step 1 is establishing a secure means of communication.
AWS ap-southeast-3 should still be up, and isn't in a different partition like CN, govcloud, iso etc. So a VM there and a vpc peer in the US should get you around a lot of stuff.
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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.
@reisse is 100% right. Most people outside of heavily censored regions have no clue what technology is actually used in those countries. The well-known, well-established providers don't actually work in censored regions because: 1) The problem is very difficult and requires a lot of engineering resources 2) It's very hard to make money in these countries for many reasons, including sanctions or the government restric…
Tor and I2P, for example, don't actually make money anywhere. Which is not to say that they work for any of the users in all of these places, or for all of the users in any of these places.
> The answer is simple: the crowdsourcing power of open source combined with billions of people with a huge incentive to get around government blocking.
The actual answer is that (a) they're using so many different weird approaches that the censors and/or secret police can't easily keep up with the whack-a-mole, and (b) they're relying on folklore and survivorship bias to tell them what "works", without really knowing when or how it might fail, or even whether it's already failing.
Oh, and most of them are playing for the limited stakes of being blocked, rather than for the larger stakes of being arrested. Or at least they think they are.
Maybe that's "solving" it, maybe not.
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The problem is the countries, which censor Internet and block VPNs, also jam shortwave radio signals.
Could I ask for a source on that and how common it is? Seems like it was used way back in the cold war (and even then not blocked/jammed) and I'd guess that current authoritarian regimes would perhaps not bother considering how few could use it.
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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.
I think you really overestimate the capability of the UK to enforce laws. Yes, they can write them and yes they can fine large corporations, that's basically it. They cannot enforce laws against such "petty" crimes, the reason society mostly functions in the UK is because most people don't try to break the law. Pretty sure the local punters would kick the cops out if they came for one of their own, especially if he g…
What makes you think, if the Gov was to implement some sophisticated DPI firewall that blocks a million different things, they won't come after the people who circumvent it? They already enforce petty crimes. I could report you for causing me anxiety and you would have a copper show up at your door.
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Obfs4proxy and Shapeshifter are an absolute PITA to install. Get your own VPS server (VPS in EU/US with 2GB of ram, 40GB of disk space and TBs/month of traffic go for $10 a year, it's that cheap). Never get anything in the UK and even USA is weird. I'd stick with EU. Install your software (wireguard + obsfuscation or even tailscale with your own DERP server) Another simpler alternative is just `ssh -D port` and use i…
In my experience, in China as of 2016, "ssh -D" vasn't reliable at all, I wrote more details at https://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewa... (see "idea 1")
Another method that usually worked was ProtonVPN with protocol set to Wireguard. Not sure why this worked, it’s definitely a lot more detectable than other methods I tried. But as long as I rotated which US server I used every few days, this worked fine.
No luck with shadowsocks, ProtonVPN “stealth” mode, Outline+Digital Ocean, or even Jump / Remote Desktop. Jump worked the longest at several hours before it became unbearably slow, I’m still not sure if I was actually throttled or my home computer started misbehaving.
I didn’t get around to setting up a pure TLS proxy, or proxying traffic through a domain that serves “legitimate” traffic, so no idea if that still works.
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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?
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This is no 'nothing special' with Obfs4proxy. DPI sees it as random byte stream, thus your government can decide to block unknown protocols. Instead, you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS.
The only VPN technology I see that blends as HTTPS is MASQUE IP Proxying, and the only implementation I know that does this is iCloud Private Relay. It is also trivial to block because blocking 443/udp doesn't really affect accessing the Internet.