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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?

#571

Post by prmoustache »

Humorist2290 wrote: post #33
zargon wrote: post #27

Earlier 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?

You don't need multiple vps at all time and can start them dynamically using the vps provider api.

I regularly spawn temporary vps for a few hours to use as socks proxy and view sporting event from my country of origin. There is no reason one couldn't write a script that can spin a VPS choosing a provider and country randomly from a list of supported providers.

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

#572

Post by kilroy123 »

pipes wrote: post #568
_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…

Thanks for this, UK citizen/subject here I believe the UK government is likely to go down the path of banning vpns.

ISPs here are already blocking popular ones.

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

#573

Post by Cypher »

pipes wrote: post #568
_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…

Thanks for this, UK citizen/subject here I believe the UK government is likely to go down the path of banning vpns.

gotta go underground, freedom is now an enemy of the crown.

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

#574

Post by BoxOfRain »

Marsymars wrote: post #406
SahAssar wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could I ask for a source on that and how common it is? Seems like it was used way back in the cold war (and even then not blocked/jammed) and I'd guess that current authoritarian regimes would perhaps not bother considering how few could use it.

The USSR had an extensive shortwave radio jamming program!

The UK used to get around this with very powerful medium-wave signals, the site at Orfordness could put out the BBC World Service at 2 MW towards the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. This site was built on the remains of a 1960s UK/US over-the-horizon radar installation that never worked properly.

These broadcasts were shut down in the early '10s but ironically one of the masts is still in use by Radio Caroline, the former pirate who broke the BBC's radio monopoly by putting their station just outside of UK territorial waters. Their 4 kW goes pretty far given the site's previous role, heard them as far away as the Lake District.

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

#575

Post by isaacremuant »

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…

People assess real risk all the time. The fact that you had to punish people and make them do performative acts was hygiene theater.

You're the kind of person that said that "measures didn't work because we didn't close hard enough, if we do 2 weeks of REAL lockdown...". It's ridiculous. You have absolutely no perspective of how the world work and how things break, people need health, food, working pipes.

You have an absolutely authoritarian mindset and an inability to asses risk. You also have deep contempt for your fellow human being who are "not deserving of democracy".

Lastly, it's funny to hear you admit this pandemic wasn't lethal because people don't actually comply the way you want, which means that the actions were theater and unneeded.

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

#576

Post by wildylion »

As a long-standing supporter of Internet freedoms in Russia, I could advise you to use multiple tools at the same time, to avoid them being blocked.

What would probably work UNLESS they roll out pretty sophisticated DPI that could block by signatures and do active probing:

1. AmneziaVPN (https://amneziavpn.org) - they have the hosted option, or you could run your own on a cheap VPS (preferable). They use Xray/REALITY or a variant of Wireguard with extra padding that confuses DPIs. Should be good enough.

2. Psiphon

3. Lantern

4. Sometimes Tailscale works surprisingly well (even in Russia where they have advanced DPI systems!)

Here's a link to several Tor browser mirrors for you so you could download the VPN software itself:

https://mirror.freedif.org/TorProject/

https://mirrors.mit.edu/torproject/download/

A couple of Tor bridges in case Tor is blocked:

  webtunnel [2001:db8:9947:43ae:8228:97b7:7bd:2c2e]:443 6E6A3FCB09506A05CC8E0D05C7FEA1F5DA803412 url=https://nx2.nexusocean.link ver=0.0.1
  webtunnel [2001:db8:a436:6460:fa7b:318:4e8e:9de3]:443 F76C85011FD8C113AA00960BD9FC7F5B66F726A2 url=https://disobey.net/vM8i19mU4gvHOzRm33DaBNuM ver=0.0.2

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

#577

Post by nosianu »

pembrook wrote: post #508
dragonsky67 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It’s working fantastic.

The ignorance of what's been happening the last few months is ridiculous. Trump and his people have successfully pressured, or denied access, or removed security clearances, or demonetized (public broadcasting), or directly fired, or just called out to cause a hate-storm from his supporters, companies, organizations, individuals.

Oh sure, it is different from the UK: Instead of technical blocks and surveillance this administration targets people and organizations directly.

https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/paramount...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/11/us-journalist-dropp...

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/07/media/trump-cnn-press-con...

https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/11/the-media-fe...

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/g-s1-51489/voice-of-america-b...

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corporate-media-caves-t...

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

#578

Post by varenc »

doix wrote: post #559
varenc wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it the protocol that's blocked as a result of DPI, or just the default 51820 UDP port that's blocked? If the latter, just changing your Wireguard server's port might work.

It's DPI, I run on a non standard port.

Damnnn, wonder what hardware you need to run DPI on a nation's internet.

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

#579

Post by joshryandavis »

thenthenthen wrote: post #482
joshryandavis wrote: post #272

I lived in China for a while and there were several waves of VPN blocks. Also very few VPN services even try to actively support VPN-blocking nations anymore. Any commercial offering will be blocked eventually. What I settled on for decent reliability and speeds was a free-tier EC2 hosted in an international region. I then setup a SOCKS5 server and connected my devices to it. You mentioned Cloudflare so whatever thei…

Github is blocked 90% of the time here in China. It is weird.

Oh really? That's surprising.

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

#580

Post by andy_ppp »

kilroy123 wrote: post #572
pipes wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this, UK citizen/subject here I believe the UK government is likely to go down the path of banning vpns.

ISPs here are already blocking popular ones.

In the UK? That’s insane
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