381–390 of 775 posts
Here's a list of public instances hosted by volunteers: https://www.vpngate.net/en/
For anyone reading this who still lives in a somewhat free country and has resources to spare, please consider hosting a public instance or mirroring the VPN Gate site.
Grab a VPS and use SOCKS5 tunneling via SSH.
SSH is often targeted by deep packet inspection and protocol binding filters. i.e. One is better off tunneling over https://www.praise-the-glorious-leader.google.com.facebook.c... include SSH traffic protocol auto-swapping on your server (i.e. no way to tell the apparent web page differs between clients), as some corporate networks are infamously invasive. People can do this all day long, and they do... =3
Prior to this, pre-Covid I used to use shadowsocks hosted on a DO droplet. Shadowsocks with obfs, or a newer equivalent (v2ray w/ vmess or vless protocol) and obfs (reality seems to be the current hotness) will probably work within Indonesia given their blocking will be way less sophisticated than China. The difference here is that it’s a proxy, not a VPN, but it makes it a lot easier to obfuscate its true nature than a VPN which stands out because obfuscation isn’t in its design.
Hosting on big public VPSs can be double edged. On one hand, blocking DO or AWS is huge collateral. On the other, it’s an obvious VPN endpoint and can help identify the type of traffic as something to block.
If you have access to reddit, r/dumbclub (believe it or not) has some relatively current info but it’s pretty poor signal to noise. Scratch around there for some leads though.
Note that this stuff is all brittle as hell to set up and I usually have a nightmarish time duct-taping it all together. That’s why I’m overjoyed my WireGuard tunnel has worked whenever I’ve visited for a year now.
One other left-field option, depending on your cost appetite, is a roaming SIM. Roaming by design tunnels all data back to your own ISP before routing out so even in China roaming SIMs aren’t blocked. It’s a very handy backup if you need a clear link to ssh into a box to set up the above, for example.
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.
Grab a VPS and use SOCKS5 tunneling via SSH.
SSH is often targeted by deep packet inspection and protocol binding filters. i.e. One is better off tunneling over https://www.praise-the-glorious-leader.google.com.facebook.c... include SSH traffic protocol auto-swapping on your server (i.e. no way to tell the apparent web page differs between clients), as some corporate networks are infamously invasive. People can do this all day long, and they do... =3
An expensive but functional option is to enable roaming on a foreign eSIM. Getting an eSIM is relatively easy. Roaming mobile traffic is routed from the country in which the SIM is from, not the country that you're in, meaning that an eSIM from e.g. an American carrier will not be subject to the censorship in your country. I've used this on multiple trips to China over the past decade (including a trip last year). Yo…
Chinese forums / blogs have a lot of information about this stuff. I usually ask ChatGPT to translate "Research topic re: some form of circumvention and give me forum posts and blog posts about it" to Chinese, then paste that into DeepSeek with search enabled and just let Chrome translate the responses. Does a really good job. At least better than what I can manage with Baidu.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The problem is the countries, which censor Internet and block VPNs, also jam shortwave radio signals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't work anymore; the GFW no longer detects VPN connections by port but instead by performing deep packet inspection to characterize the type of traffic going over every connection. Using this technique in combination with some advanced ML systems, they're able to detect any encrypted VPN connection and cut it off; it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private server…
> it's basically not possible to run any kind of output VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore. What if you run your own HTTPS server that look semi-legitimate and just encapsulate it in that traffic? Can they still detect it? What about a VPS in HK? Is this even doable?