As an aside about professional and engineering ethics:
If you’ve ever worked in the DPI space and actively participated in the development or installation of state surveillance and censorship products…
Shame.
Shame.
Shame.
Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
491–500 of 775 posts
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#492Earlier 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?
I've been a SA Generalist for a decade, primarily in biopharma. This is the terminology the people I worked alongside used which included both Network and Computer Engineers.
It was explained to me that its just another version of MITM, the only difference is the number of resilient paths that need to be compromised. Eclipse type of attacks focus on compromising multiple nodes and most deal with breaking consensus algorithmic based software, which is quite common of blockchain, but that isn't the only place.
TL;DR In a single path graph you have MITM, in a N-path graph of connectivity you have Eclipse. Two heads of the same coin.
Loosely I guess it would be considered an adversarial network partition at the ASN/BGP level. For active attacks you'd have to broadcast improperly, but for regional attacks at the ASN level you just have to be positioned correctly passively. That's why the whole AT&T room for the NSA back in the day was such a big deal. A lot of these attacks have been known about for a long time.
For instance, the same kind of attack could easily be done by compromising firmware within 1-step away from edge devices (Modems/Routers/ISP TFTP servers).
Quite a lot of what was in the nationstate war-chest 10 years ago has been leaked, and is actively being used by non-state actors at this point.
Its mad how sophisticated things are now. On some campuses, its not unheard of to see drones flying by to hack the radio logitech keyboards of campus computers; where they try to drop malware OTA through a powershell or tty keyboard spawned terminal prompt. Crazy stuff.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
btw, veracrypt is the name if the follow up project. truecrypt shut down over a decade ago rather abruptly, so anything labeled truecrypt today is suspect as either out of date or potential malware.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#494I 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…
I understand where you are coming from but there’s a flip side to this. Cloudflare obfuscating such a huge segment of origin servers gives a privacy advantage to anyone using a private DNS, since most of the IPs you can be seen connecting to are just…Cloudflare.
Or, at least, that’s how it would work if it wasn’t for SNI…
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#495I 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?
It's a 270 million people country with over 10K+ islands. Last year I visited Borobudur and was surprised that the Yogjakarta region is autonomous and they have their own king.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting Typo? Wireguard-capable VPSes are available for $20-$30 per year. ( https://vpspricetracker.com/ is a good site for finding them.)
I mean multiple VPSs for redundancy. Contabo is maybe the cheapest I've seen and it's like 3$ mtl for the smallest?
Sure, but ten servers is a bit too much redundancy, no? Depending on how many people you want to share it with it might make sense though.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#497you can use anything that has a VM.
let's say Github codespaces. Launch a new codespace, setup vpn or just squid. Use it.
It will not stop working unless your gov. decides to block said service (GitHub) too.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#498Get a Digitalocean droplet, and host your own Outline instance. Their manager app makes this a 1-click process.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#499Earlier 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)
America's Founders saw civil rights as inherent in the Constitution's framework, rooted in natural law. They added the Bill of Rights as an explicit bulwark. That's why we have the 1st Amendment's free speech, and if that falls, the 2nd Amendment ensures we have guns.
How's that working for you at the moment?
Sorry for the snide comment, but considering the last 6 - 8 months in the US, at least from what is being reported in the outside world, the 1st amendment doesn't seem to be providing much in the way of protection, and unless I'm missing something the general public doesn't seem to have the level of interest that would be required for your 2nd amendment to play out in any meaningful way.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#500Earlier 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…
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