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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?

#541
If VPNs don't work for you, I recommend using an anti-censorship tool with an obfuscation protocol like v2ray which is commonly used in China.

https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core https://github.com/net4people/bbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall

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

#542

An expensive but functional option is to enable roaming on a foreign eSIM. Getting an eSIM is relatively easy. Roaming mobile traffic is routed from the country in which the SIM is from, not the country that you're in, meaning that an eSIM from e.g. an American carrier will not be subject to the censorship in your country. I've used this on multiple trips to China over the past decade (including a trip last year). Yo…

I don't know if these work or not for the specific case mentioned here, but the cheapest eSIMs by a huge margin are from https://silent.link/ if anyone is interested. They definitely do work under normal internet circumstances.

You can go way cheaper than that – https://esimdb.com/ has a good comparison of options. I’m usually paying sub-$1/GB in Southeast Asia currently.

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

#545
Hello! I use Octohide VPN - it has VLESS protocol that can bypass geo-blocks (in countries like Russia, China). Its fast, the connection to a server takes merely a second and I do not even have an account as there is no registration required. Try it and see whether it helps you.

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

#546

The thing about fighting against vpn blocks is that if you win, the govt can just turn off the internet. Something like starlink would be ideal in these circumstances, but you'd have to have the receivers in the country before lockdown.

Assuming something like Starlink doesn't cooperate with shutting down in the country just like the land-based ISPs would.

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

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious. How does a state actor do actual DPI without pushing certs to end user devices?

The "inspection" part of DPI isn't limited to encrypted payloads. It's straightforward enough to look at application-level protocol headers and identify e.g. a Wireguard or OpenVPN or SSH connection, even if you can't decrypt the payload. That could be used as sufficient grounds to either block the traffic or punish the user.

I thought OpenVPN simply opens a TLS encrypted connection. How does it look different than HTTPS?

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

#548

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.

How can you do that exactly ?

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

#549

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.

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.

Not the only, AFAIK Shadowsocks with xray-core can pretend to be a 443/tcp HTTPS server.
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