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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?

#681

Post by lyu07282 »

brightball wrote: post #466
reisse wrote: 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…

I understand where you are coming from but there’s a flip side to this. Cloudflare obfuscating such a huge segment of origin servers gives a privacy advantage to anyone using a private DNS, since most of the IPs you can be seen connecting to are just…Cloudflare.

Great gaslighting I must admit, terminating SSL of half the internet.. that centralization is actually enhancing privacy... There is a very high probability Cloudflare is a literal NSA front.

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

#682

Post by multjoy »

isaacremuant wrote: post #575
multjoy wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lol, if you like.

Individually, the people of the UK are generally kind, thoughtful and considerate. As a mob, they're an absolute nightmare especially when wankers like Fox and Corbyn get involved.

Anyone who thinks otherwise has never had to tell people 'no'.

>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

This pandemic was lethal, but it wasn't bubonic plague lethal. When we get something that cuts like a knife through hot butter, you'll soon be holed up inside screaming at strangers through the letterbox.

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

#683

Post by adamfisk »

Hizonner wrote: post #374
adamfisk wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@reisse is 100% right. Most people outside of heavily censored regions have no clue what technology is actually used in those countries. The well-known, well-established providers don't actually work in censored regions because: 1) The problem is very difficult and requires a lot of engineering resources 2) It's very hard to make money in these countries for many reasons, including sanctions or the government restric…

> It's very hard to make money in these countries for many reasons Tor and I2P, for example, don't actually make money anywhere. Which is not to say that they work for any of the users in all of these places, or for all of the users in any of these places. > The answer is simple: the crowdsourcing power of open source combined with billions of people with a huge incentive to get around government blocking. The actual…

You're dramatically underestimating the sophistication of these groups. Think about it: these people are risking their freedom by working on this technology in any capacity. They are not naive to the risks of the work nor are they naive to the technical threats facing the software. In fact, the opposite is true. Western VPN companies are very much naive because the risks their users face are much less severe, and at a technical level they don't require anywhere near the same level of sophistication. They're primarily just WireGuard and OpenVPN, which are trivial for censors to block.

Tor is great, and they do great research on censorship circumvention, but it isn't used at any significant scale in these countries.

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

#684

Post by immibis »

JCharante wrote: post #641
cft wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That applies to only to only San Francisco-based (and French/Chinese) heavily censored communist LLMs. Grok is willing to provide instructions: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk%3D_a78b768c-fcee-4029...

but isn't xAI SF based? https://x.ai/careers/open-roles

It is. People will come up with any excuse to glaze Elon.

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

#685

Post by immibis »

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.

Wireguard is also easily censored and is already censored in the places that censor VPNs.

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

#686

Post by lyu07282 »

SlowTao wrote: post #277
jll29 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When ES leaked his info to the Guardian people, they could still (2013) use the Guardian's US base to publish, protected by the US' stronger freedom of speech laws. Now, in 2025, if the same were to happen again, I'm not sure that would work quite the same way, with Trump aggressively taking American citizens' rights away. Maybe The Guardian should open a branch in Sealand...

It was David Graeber that said we should be wary of places like The Guardian. They are a wolf in sheeps clothing. Used a lot of the more liberal momentum of the early 2010s combined with promoting some of the more left leaning writters to gain a fair bit of clout. But underneath, they will conform to the power structures if it comes down to survival. Alas, they nay not be a Sealand edition although that would be neat…

This was made really obvious since the Gaza genocide began, the guardian was pushing propaganda really hard like everybody else, but now public opinion has shifted enough to the point that continued total denial of reality would cost the guardian more credibility so there was a noticable shift in the way they talk about it now. This way they can preserve some credibility for the next time they need to push propaganda on other fronts.

in the US the NYT is similar, they will sometimes allow stuff get published to manufacture credibility for when they actually need it. Like see the Iraq war for example.

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

#688

Post by weberer »

RansomStark wrote: post #81
hdgvhicv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Preach comrade! Those citizen journalists with their primary sources, disgusting. Thats nothing but propaganda. Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.

>Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.

This should be Wikipedia's official motto. I really hate how they handle "reliable sources".

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

#689

Post by tensor »

tarruda wrote: post #610
bdd8f1df777b wrote: post #584

If you need to bypass censorship, you'll need a tool specifically designed for anti-censorship, rather than any one repurposed for that. Since China has the most advanced network censorship, the Chinese have also invented the most advanced anti-censorship tools. The first generation is shadowsocks. It basically encrypts the traffic from the beginning without any handshakes, so DPI cannot find out its nature. This is…

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…

Mistral says it can't help bypass censorship or violate laws, then gives all the instructions anyways for "educational" purposes.

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

#690

Post by tcfhgj »

tarruda wrote: post #610
bdd8f1df777b wrote: post #584

If you need to bypass censorship, you'll need a tool specifically designed for anti-censorship, rather than any one repurposed for that. Since China has the most advanced network censorship, the Chinese have also invented the most advanced anti-censorship tools. The first generation is shadowsocks. It basically encrypts the traffic from the beginning without any handshakes, so DPI cannot find out its nature. This is…

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…

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