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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?

#451

Post by marcus_holmes »

doix wrote: post #171
Ray20 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They cannot enforce laws against such "petty" crimes

No, they aren't interested in enforcing laws against petty crimes. The establishment literally don't give a toss if someone breaks into your house and nicks your telly.

They are very interested in enforcing the kinds of infringements we're talking about here.

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

#454

Post by reisse »

octo888 wrote: post #117
reisse wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mullvad doesn't really have any modern censorship circumvention options.

Genuine question is Shadowsocks outdated? Because it supports it

Yes, it's superseded by V* stuff and derivatives (VLess...), and probably by Trojan, but the latter is less popular.

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

#455

Post by tzs »

ianburrell wrote: post #386
teeray wrote: post #242

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.

There isn't enough bandwidth in HF to transmit data. Digital HF audio is 20 kHz wide so maybe 50kbps. The entire HF band is only 3-30 MHz.

50 kb/s x 1000 bits/kb x 3600 s/hr x 24 hr/day x 1 byte/8 bits x 1 MB / 1000000 bytes = 540 MB/day. That's enough to download VPN software and a Linux distribution to run it on in a day.

If you've already got a Linux system, the Debian openvpn package is under 1 MB and at 50 kb/s would take under 3 minutes to download. I don't know if openvpn in particular is suitable for people who are trying to evade their government, but would whatever features it is missing add substantially more size?

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

#456

Post by konimex »

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?

Indonesia is a big country with over ten thousand islands and uneven coverage. What is blocked on one ISP might not be enforced on another (e.g. the state-owned ISP might block or use DNS poisoning on several "non-compliant" DNS providers but my current ISP doesn't). Also, in addition to what the sibling commenter (and another commenter regarding Cloudflare outage) said there might be a general overload on the mobile network near the affected areas since there are lots of users and limited bandwidth.

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

#457

Post by ali-aljufairi »

nromiun wrote: post #139

Usually when countries block websites they don't block major cloud providers, like AWS and Google Cloud. Because most websites are hosted on them. So you can get a cheap VPS from AWS or GCP (always free VM is available) and host OpenVPN on it.

vps install tailscale on it use it as exit node

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

#458

Post by godelski »

mfiro wrote: post #292
teeray wrote: post #242

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.

It's possible but also difficult to jam radio. That's part of why programs like Radio Free Asia[0,1] exist. Even if you can't broadcast from inside a territory you can broadcast from outside. It can be jammed but it is a tough cat and mouse game and jamming isn't precise. So when you jam there are causalities. Not to mention that jamming can be quite expensive.

I'm not saying that makes the problem easy, but I'll say that jamming isn't a very strong defense.

Though the bigger issue here is probably bandwith. It's hard to be both long range and data dense. There's probably easier ways to distribute this. Hell, both Koreas are known to transport different things via balloons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia

[1] It is also why projects like Tor and Signal get funding from RFA. Maybe the US doesn't want encrypted services here, but if anything, it's for the same reason they do want encrypted services in other countries.

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

#459

Post by jdkdbrnrnrb »

tzs wrote: post #455
ianburrell wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't enough bandwidth in HF to transmit data. Digital HF audio is 20 kHz wide so maybe 50kbps. The entire HF band is only 3-30 MHz.

50 kb/s x 1000 bits/kb x 3600 s/hr x 24 hr/day x 1 byte/8 bits x 1 MB / 1000000 bytes = 540 MB/day. That's enough to download VPN software and a Linux distribution to run it on in a day. If you've already got a Linux system, the Debian openvpn package is under 1 MB and at 50 kb/s would take under 3 minutes to download. I don't know if openvpn in particular is suitable for people who are trying to evade their governme…

You never used dialup did you?

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

#460

Post by keepamovin »

Do you still have access to GitHub?

If so you can run BrowserBox in a GitHub action runner exposed via IP or ngrok tunnel. That will give you a browser in a free region. Easy set up via workflow.

You’ll need a ngrok API key and a BrowserBox key. Hit us up: sales@dosaygo.com for a short term key at a discount if it works for you.

We will offer keys for free to any journalists in censored regions.

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