Try the Tor Browser, and use bridged mode to to make it look like you aren't using Tor.
Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
501–510 of 775 posts
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
> your government can decide to block unknown protocols Has any government ever done that? Seems like it would just break everything (because the world is full of devices that use custom protocols!) at great computational expense.
China blocked https last week: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/ch... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958621
They blanket blocked connections to port 443 for an hour. There was no protocol sniffing.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Cloudflare WARP (1.1.1.1 tunnel or Zero Trust) run by default on MASQUE
Ah that's true, they originally started off with a rust implementation of Wireguard but have since moved to MASQUE.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#504Earlier 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…
Yeah, you could use forward error correction too, so any n bits would be enough to reconstruct the input.
Of course then you get into needing software to decode the more advanced encodings; maybe start with a voice transmission explaining in plain language how to decode the first layer, which gives you a program that can decode the second layer, or something.
Starting to sound like an interesting project.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#505Wireguard or OpenVPN might work, if someone has a server set up, set up your client to connect.
If those don't work you can try something like wssocks (https://github.com/genshen/wssocks) or wstunnel (https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel). It tunnels connections through WebSockets, so you can make the connection look like a regular HTTPS connection. Another option would just be a regular-old HTTPS proxy (Nginx, Apache2, etc). Set up an HTTPS proxy somewhere on the internet, connect through it, but configure it to return a regular web page if someone tries to make a non-proxy connection through it. Another tool that may help setting up is chisel (https://github.com/jpillora/chisel). Those HTTPS ones may work if, when authorities connect to the host, it returns pages that look like some kind of private video server. (Maybe run an actual video server, in addition to the proxy...) Also, try to enforce TLS 1.3 for the HTTPS server.
And another option, if all else fails, is to run a straight-up SOCKS proxy over the internet, on a weird port. It might be so obvious they aren't looking for it.
To mask your DNS requests with the SOCKS proxy, use something like Tor-DNS (https://github.com/bfix/Tor-DNS), or set up a VPN through the SOCKS proxy and use DNS through that route. Another option is DNS-over-HTTPS.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand
Streisand is extremely out of date and wouldn’t last long in China, but I don’t know how sophisticated Indonesia’s firewall is
i have a few chinese friends and they say it's always easy to get a working vpn. that might not be true in a Tien An Minh type crisis, i dunno, but month in month out year upon year they surf western sites, exchange winnie the pooh pictures, etc. i suppose the people i know could be relatively upper class, i have no idea what type difference that could make. i had a chinese gf in LA who would send... my >cough< pictures... to her mother in china because she enjoyed them
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Scuttlebut, Briar and NNCP come to mind.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mea…
It’s working fantastic. US media is great at generating hysteria (competitive market pressures in the war for attention), but the US is at essentially very little risk for speech suppression at the level of the UK right now.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#509I'm in Indonesia right now as well and my Proton VPN still works. But I would see it as a short-term solution.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
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")
Regarding your usage:
Organic Maps app can download all maps for offile and works OK in China.
It uses openstreetmap data.
1024 bit RSA keys is laughable. I'm inclined to think this was not by accident.
Idea 1 and 2 are basically the same.