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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?

#441

Post by reisse »

Hizonner wrote: post #419
raincole wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very sad that every sane and informed comment (like reisse's) has to meet this kind of snarky comment whose only purpose is being snarky on HN. Perhaps you should stop and think about why people living in countries where governments actually censor a lot hardly use these "well-established providers" to circumvent censorship. Tip: it's not because they're stupid.

Actually, my main original purpose was to call (more) attention to the fact that looking for somebody specifically advertising a VPN to your particular country, for a censorship-resistance purpose , has a vastly greater chance of getting you a honey pot than almost any other possible way of looking for a relay. Honey pots are particularly dangerous in one-hop protocols with cleartext exit. The part about the unreliab…

> Actually, my main original purpose was to call (more) attention to the fact that looking for somebody specifically advertising a VPN to your particular country, for a censorship-resistance purpose

Please re-read my post then. I do not call to look for VPN for your or anyone's particular country, I call to look for VPNs for these specific countries because they have the current bleeding edge blocking tech, and if VPN works there now, it will 100% work in every other country. If you're in China, you don't have to look for Chinese VPNs, some of Russian ones will work there too.

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

#442

Post by reisse »

Hizonner wrote: post #229
reisse wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the things I listed are "widely used approaches, and well-known, well-established providers" in the parts of the world where it does matter. Yeah, maybe V* and derivatives are random ad-hoc hackery, but they also are the well-known standard now.

> Yeah, maybe V* and derivatives are random ad-hoc hackery, but they also are the well-known standard now. A lot of people use Telegram and think it's private, too. What about the part about choosing your VPN provider in the way most likely to get you an untrustworthy one who's after you personally ?

[flagged]

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

#443

Post by lossolo »

_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…

Mullvad is a bad choice for this particular case because they publish all their IPs, which makes them very easy to block. You should look into VPN providers that do not publish their IPs and that have a wide range of IP classes and multiple ASNs, which look like ordinary networks not associated with VPNs. In my experience, NordVPN and ExpressVPN have many of these.

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

#444

Post by cuuupid »

jll29 wrote: post #230
GlacierFox wrote: post #61

Earlier 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...

No American citizens’ rights have been taken away or can be taken away by a President.

We have whistleblowers and leakers from the administration itself on a literal weekly basis, our own Department of State actively funds Signal and Tor, our media has been heavily criticizing Trump and his allies for years. A couple organizations got hit with lawsuits for publishing misinformation or skirting campaign law, but that’s about it.

They tried to make flag burning illegal - which is illegal in Mexico, most of South America, all of Asia, and most of Europe - and it was shot down almost immediately as even that comes under 1st amendment rights.

Please don’t lump us into the same bucket as the UK. We may have a sharply divided electorate but we don’t have a failing state!

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

#445

Post by atsuzaki »

andunie wrote: post #434
rd07 wrote: post #355

I live in Indonesia, and I don't find any recent news that mention X (formerly Twittwr) and or Discord being blocked by the government. The only relevant news from a quick Google search I can find is about the government threatened to block X due to pornography content in 2024. You can even check for yourself if a domain is blocked by visiting https://trustpositif.komdigi.go.id/ . Also for your unability to access th…

How can it be that one person living in Indonesia says everything is blocked and the country is in chaos and another, very calmly, is completely unaware and can't even find any news about it? This is so odd. What is the truth?

The context that was likely left out due to HN rules is, there are mass protests turned violent in the face of police brutality in several cities. The Indonesian government has a history of blocking/throttling internet access in immediate areas of the unrest to limit coverage.

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

#446

Post by reinaldnaufal »

rd07 wrote: post #355

I live in Indonesia, and I don't find any recent news that mention X (formerly Twittwr) and or Discord being blocked by the government. The only relevant news from a quick Google search I can find is about the government threatened to block X due to pornography content in 2024. You can even check for yourself if a domain is blocked by visiting https://trustpositif.komdigi.go.id/ . Also for your unability to access th…

There was a reported outage of cloudflare in Jakarta, while simultaneously people can't access Twitter and Discord. The worst part is that it coincides with the time when people need the information to find a safe route to go home after the protest.

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

#447

Post by codethief »

EE84M3i wrote: post #431
trod1234 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of ways. The main one is called an Eclipse Attack in cyber circles, and it can be done at any entity operating at the ASN layer so long as they can position themselves to relay your traffic. The adversary can invisibly (to victim PoV) modify traffic if they have a cooperating rootPKI cert (anywhere in the ecosystem) that isn't the originating content provider, so long as they recognize the network…

I've studied and worked in computer security for over a decade and have never heard of an "eclipse attack" before. Is this blockchain specific terminology? It seems like an adversarial network partition?

> It seems like an adversarial network partition

plus an MITM attack, if I understand correctly.

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

#448

Post by nine_k »

smallnamespace wrote: post #427
zack6849 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure there is, you can send files over HF, it may not be FAST, but once you get it into the country, you can just copy the file with a faster method (eg: usb drive), WINLINK supports attachments, so you could absolutely send these files over HF

If you're going to be using USB drives anyway, then using them to move files into the country would be faster.

More dangerous though. You'd need something like truecrypt, too.

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

#449

Post by johnecheck »

musttotoes wrote: post #423
Hizonner wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At DefCon 26 (25?) I attended two presentations that scared me: 1. there was a presentation about several admins in a hostile country who had been arrested because someone from Harvard pinged a server they ran as part of IPv4 measurement. The suggestion was to avoid measuring countries with strong censorship laws to prevent accidental imprisonment of innocent IT. 2. similar presentation about ToR project struggling t…

Yeah. If an authoritarian government controls the network infrastructure, there's no way to use that network infra without risk.

To actually bypass this, you need your own network. Does anyone know of any sneakernet protocols that would be useful here?

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

#450

Post by reisse »

I also want to add here because a lot of people either mention Tor as a succesful solution, or mention why Tor is not a solution but state completely wrong reasons. And I have a good soapbox to stand once in a while.

Number one reason why Tor is dead is Cloudflare.

Let me digress here. In my opinion, Cloudflare does a lot more censoring than all state actors combined, because they singlehandedly decide if the IP you use is "trustworthy" or "not", and if they decided it is not, you're cut off from like half of the Internet, and the only thing you can do is to look for another one. I'd really like if their engineers understood what Orwellian mammoth have they created and resign, but for now they're only bragging without the realization. Or at least if any sane antitrust or comms agency shred their business in pieces.

And Cloudflare by default makes browsing with Tor unusable. Either you're stuck with endless captchas, or you're banned outright.

Number two reason why Tor is dead is all other antifraud protections combined. Try paying with Stripe through Tor. There is quite a big chance you'll get an "unknown error" of sorts on Stripe side. Try to watch Netflix in Tor - exit nodes are banned.

Everyone kept shouting "Tor bad, Tor for criminals", and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's really hard to do just browse web normally in Tor, because all "normal" sites consider it bad. The "wrong" sites, however, who expect Tor visitors...

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