Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use? • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by necovek » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:07 AM UTC

multjoy wrote: post #283

isaacremuant wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People need to stick it to the government and demand their freedoms. It will only work if they admit that they supported this and all forms of totalitarianism during COVID. You can't fall for that and then be surprised when the world keeps going down that obvious path.

In matters of public health, you cannot trust the public to do the right thing. The problem with covid is that we weren't totalitarian enough. Regulations you could drive a coach & horses through and no way to enforce is a sop. The first lock down needed to be a proper 'papers, please' affair. When we get a properly lethal pandemic, we're fucked. Hopefully Laurence Fox and Piers Corbyn will catch it quickly and expir…

This type of thinking is why we are heading in a direction of authoritarianism everywhere.

And COVID was not "totalitarian enough"? Yet people were forbidden from leaving their homes for a time.

It was really amazing what fear could do to a population, how it rallied mostly together.

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

#522

Post by sudahtigabulan » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:08 AM UTC

Use a less-known DoH or DoT provider.

They just "blocked" Reddit today, I selected another DoH provider from the menu in my browser settings, and continued.

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

#523

Post by necovek » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:11 AM UTC

hdgvhicv wrote: post #58

nomilk wrote: post #43

Australia and UK might soon go down this path. Something quite depressing is if we (HN crowd) find workarounds, most regular folks won't have the budget/expertise to do so, so citizen journalism will have been successfully muted by government / big media.

90% of “citizen journalism” is nothing of the sort. Just like “citizen science” researching vaccines.

Hopefully, as a reader, you can see through the 90% and only really trust the 10% who provide factual reporting.

As with any source, always question what you are being offered: is this video clip full, what preceded it, what followed it? Who else confirms this person said this or experienced that?

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

#524

Post by protocolture » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:13 AM UTC

breve wrote: post #439

protocolture wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>External websites will never fix the internal problem. Except the internal problem is censoring internal information sources. They can only trust external sites to remain neutral. Not to mention that, politically and historically speaking, there are so many examples of revolutionaries needing to go overseas to organize. The Bolshies literally got started in a London pub.

Nope. They can simply talk to each other. I talk to people inside Indonesia routinely. I do it via SMS, via the phone, via iMessage, via Microsoft Teams. It's not difficult. You're not understanding the circumstances on a practical level. All you're doing is running away from the work to solve the fundamental political problem and that avoidance won't solve anything.

>All you're doing is running away from the work

I feel like you have some weird moral hangup with needing/using non local resources that wont be resolved with any application of logic or reference to facts. Its nice that you have formed some weird worldview but its not really reality and it doesnt fit into it, so no need to make it anyone elses problem really.

Edit: Also last time I checked iMessage and Teams are also hosted outside of indonesia.

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

#525

Post by widforss » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:26 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #421

ivanstepanovftw wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is no 'nothing special' with Obfs4proxy. DPI sees it as random byte stream, thus your government can decide to block unknown protocols. Instead, you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS.

Unless your government decides to block HTTPS. In which case you use stenography, but I believe even the Great Firewall of China doesn't block HTTPS completely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle...

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

#526

Post by chmod775 » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

Mullvad has some anti-censorship features (shadowsocks) that it will automatically use if regular connections fail and works reliably in China as well (and has for the last 2+ years). You could give it a shot.

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

#527

Post by ZaoLahma » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:31 AM UTC

estimator7292 wrote: post #515

nine_k wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nah, just drop a few thousand 1GB flash drives from a plane. Load them with a tor browser, a wireguard client, and instructions on finding a remote exit. Only one copy needs to survive and it can spread very quickly and irreversibly by foot.

Yeah, this is a great approach if you're already at war with a country.

If you're not and they're still allowing your planes to fly through their airspace then this is a great way to ensure that they lock your (and your friends') planes out.

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

#528

Post by teiferer » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:34 AM UTC

jchook wrote: post #520

tzs wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wireguard ships with the Linux kernel so you only need to receive ~60 bytes of configuration information.

The user-facing software is not included in the kernel, but you need that to configure wireguard.

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

#529

Post by breve » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:38 AM UTC

protocolture wrote: post #524

breve wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. They can simply talk to each other. I talk to people inside Indonesia routinely. I do it via SMS, via the phone, via iMessage, via Microsoft Teams. It's not difficult. You're not understanding the circumstances on a practical level. All you're doing is running away from the work to solve the fundamental political problem and that avoidance won't solve anything.

>All you're doing is running away from the work I feel like you have some weird moral hangup with needing/using non local resources that wont be resolved with any application of logic or reference to facts. Its nice that you have formed some weird worldview but its not really reality and it doesnt fit into it, so no need to make it anyone elses problem really. Edit: Also last time I checked iMessage and Teams are als…

I'm saying slacktivism won't get you anywhere. There is no technical solution to cultivating a better political culture.

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

#530

Post by verandaguy » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:44 AM UTC

ivanstepanovftw wrote: post #306

_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…

This is no 'nothing special' with Obfs4proxy. DPI sees it as random byte stream, thus your government can decide to block unknown protocols. Instead, you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS.

Hi, posting from my main account (I'm also the poster of the GP comment).

"Nothing special" in this case was meant to describe the fact that it's random data with no identifiable patterns inherent to the data; you're absolutely right that that's what obfs4 does. I understand the confusion though, this phrasing could be better.

    > your government can decide to block unknown protocols

This does happen, though when I worked in the industry it wasn't common. Blocking of specific protocols was much more of an obstacle.

    > you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS

HTTPS blocking (typically based on either the presence of a specific SNI field value, or based on the use of the ESNI/ECH TLS extension) was prolific. I won't comment on whether this was effective or not in impeding efforts to get people in these places connected.

I will say though, Operator's Replicant does something similar to what you're describing in that it can mimic unrelated protocols. It's a clever approach, unfortunately it was a bit immature when I was working in that area so the team didn't adopt it while I was around.