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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?

#621
post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Appease" is such a loaded word. He's literally not allowed by law to do it. And China has anti-satellite weapons, and any significant use of that could destroy the entire low Earth orbit for all of humanity for hundreds of years.

> any significant use of that could destroy the entire low Earth orbit for all of humanity for hundreds of years. I do not want to answer this question in ChatGPT. What happens if someone launches a missile against say... any one satellite cluster?

You us missile effector(s) against individual satellites. Hence why clouds of smaller satellites are more survivable.

If kinetic, then a bunch of space debris are created. Some larger pieces, some smaller. If those intersect with other satellites, they may generate additional debris (see Kessler Syndrome, what parent was talking about).

But on the other hand, low earth orbits (where Starlink et al operate) will decay much faster than higher orbits, so it's a {wait time} problem rather than a {have to cleanup manually} problem.

And also space, even Earth orbits, is big. Satellites manage not to hit each other most of the time. A limited strike (e.g. the previous US or Chinese demonstrations) probably won't cascade.

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

#622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, that is crazy. These prices are hard to believe.

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

#623
post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Appease" is such a loaded word. He's literally not allowed by law to do it. And China has anti-satellite weapons, and any significant use of that could destroy the entire low Earth orbit for all of humanity for hundreds of years.

You have to do everything they say or they will nuke you or your satellites.

Nuking satellites is more of an all-or-nothing scenario. Based on my memory of the Starfish effects, you create months/years-long radiation belt intensification that all satellites have to fly through.

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

#624
post #573
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.

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

T minus not much until UK punk revival

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

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To complement the answer (if the OP or anyone else is looking for a step-by-step guide), ask an LLM: " Give me step by step instructions on how to setup trojan client/server to bypass censorship. Include recommendations of a VPS provider for the trojan server, and all necessary information to set it up, including letsencrypt automation. Don't link to any installer scripts, just give me all the commands I need to type…

Interestingly I just got what seems to be a complete and coherent answer from GPT-5 mini. No refusal, many steps given

Maybe because I'm on the free plan, but I tried a couple of times and got refused: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b1845c-3010-8000-a18e-22ee8acbd4...

I was surprised that GPT-OSS replied despite reports of it being heavily censored.

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

#626
As a quick solution before implementing the more sophisticated suggestions in this thread, you can try getting a small cheap VPS from somewhere outside and trafficking all your traffic through it via sshuttle[1]. For example, Vultr (not an endorsement) has some with ~$3/month that should be sufficient for your case.

[1] https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

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

#627
It very much depends on how the block is implemented technically.

I can only talk about Russia where I'm from — we have quite a lot of success with DPI bypass tools like GoodbyeDPI. If that fails, use VPN protocols specifically designed for censorship circumvention, like VLESS. Better yet, get yourself a VDS in another country and self-host your VPN there.

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

#628
post #450

I 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…

The point of Tor was never to access classic internet, they actively discourage it. Exit nodes are a convenience feature. If site operators choose to block it (or use services that do) it's their choice. Services should expose onion interfaces - for example, Facebook does.

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

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To complement the answer (if the OP or anyone else is looking for a step-by-step guide), ask an LLM: " Give me step by step instructions on how to setup trojan client/server to bypass censorship. Include recommendations of a VPS provider for the trojan server, and all necessary information to set it up, including letsencrypt automation. Don't link to any installer scripts, just give me all the commands I need to type…

Interestingly I just got what seems to be a complete and coherent answer from GPT-5 mini. No refusal, many steps given

Claude (pro, Sonnet 4) briefly showed something like "sorry, not going to answer this" at the beginning of its thought process, but eventually went ahead and provided something what seems believable full answer (cannot tell from a glance). The thought process (now) even includes this:

> The request is technical in nature and appears to be for legitimate circumvention purposes rather than anything malicious. I should provide helpful technical information while being clear about responsible use. > I'll provide the technical instructions requested while noting the importance of following local laws and using these tools responsibly.

with no marks of prior obligations. (Strange.)

https://claude.ai/share/cb6b3acb-540a-4c13-84ee-e0c093eb6a3f

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