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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?

#711

Post by mikestorrent »

nemomarx wrote: post #209
mikestorrent wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's also dystopian to pin one's future on such hopes. People need to stick it to the government and demand their freedoms. Far too many things are being forced on us in the West that go against fundamental values that have been established for centuries. Somehow, things that could be unifying protests where the working class of every political stripe are able to overlook their differences and push back against…

Reflex. People's opinion on a subject changes if you tell them which political group supports it, sometimes even if they get asked twice in a row. Tribal identity determines ideology more than the other way around for a lot of people. So as soon as Labour comes out for something, Cons are inclined to be against it and so on. The only way to have neutral protests is if no one visibly backs them and they don't become a…

I've seen a technique where you tell someone $politician_they_hate is doing X, and they'll get mad - then you reveal the news story where it's actually $politician_they_love and the cognitive dissonance usually results in the anger getting redirected towards you for tricking them.

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

#712

Post by mikestorrent »

necovek wrote: post #521
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…

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.

Seems to vary greatly by region, of course. Where I live, we barely had anything you could call a lockdown, but they got really insistent about vax passports for restaurants etc.

Sometimes I think about that: vax aside, they actually managed to provision trusted certificates for a huge percentage of the population in a short period of time. Could have actually been useful for online ID, though we know of the dangers there; but look, here I am signing into my government's website using my bank as a 3rd party IDP. Shouldn't I sign into the bank using the gov't instead??

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

#713

Post by mikestorrent »

multjoy wrote: post #682
isaacremuant wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

> 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.

This is true everywhere, mobs devolve us to primate behaviour; if you've been in a crowd that ever got angry, you know this - it drives the hindbrain in amazing and terrifying ways. Happy crowds can give you elation you'll never feel anywhere else; angry crowds can make a man kill, even though normally he'd never dream of it.

Of course, most countries don't need to have Anti-Social Behavioural Orders or ban people from buying butter knives, so there's something else going on in the UK that is a bit harder to put a finger on.

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

#714

Post by tzs »

jdkdbrnrnrb wrote: post #459
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…

You never used dialup did you?

9600 bps dialup using the protocols commonly used back then such as ZMODEM could do file transfers at 3 MB/hour. That would be fine for grabbing VPN software.

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

#715

Post by polyphilz »

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…

Experimented a bit with ChatGPT and it seems to freaks out at the "bypass censorship" language in particular. I re-framed the request more around helping me understand networking better, and it complied immediately

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

#716

Post by ivanstepanovftw »

rafram wrote: post #348
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.

> your government can decide to block unknown protocols Has any government ever done that? Seems like it would just break everything (because the world is full of devices that use custom protocols!) at great computational expense.

Russia tested this in production by blocking Shadowsocks https://habr.com/ru/news/770840/

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

#717

Post by BrandoElFollito »

dwood_dev wrote: post #675
tarruda wrote: post #610

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…

ChatGPT happily helped me run through all kinds of tools and configs. But I started off with explicitly saying it was to evade Chinese/Iranian censorship.

Out of curiosity, I just tried a similar question but for the "French censorship on Internet". The answer was a bit chaotic, I guess the ChatGPT could not make too much sense of the question.

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

#719

Post by commandersaki »

drdaeman wrote: post #549
commandersaki wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for this, really couldn't find any English explanation of xray-core though.

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

#720

Post by sebastiennight »

refulgentis wrote: post #363
sebastiennight wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might want to read about the Anom phone [0], supposedly encrypting messages for drug dealers to avoid law enforcement, which was actually sold by... the FBI. [0]: https://www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/the-fbi-created-its-own-...

Sir Night: may I ask, what should it mean to me that some businesses are fronts? I hope I do not present the presence of a dullard unfamiliar with this.

If you have a threat model, then having both 1. no reassurance of safety in using a tool, and 2. valid reason to believe that such tools can be suspect, is equivalent to certainty that the tool should be avoided.

To give an analogy, this is similar to why "security by obscurity" isn't a valid option if you're serious about security.

Let's say that admin access is open on my server on a certain port and: 1. I have done nothing specific to secure it, and 2. it has been shown that there are adversary actors scanning for vulnerable ports on the network.

I can either take your apparent stance that "this means nothing to me", or I can consider the situation equivalent to "this server is already compromised, I just don't know it yet".

In the current conversation, the combination of: 1. no reasonable reason to believe ExampleVPN keeps your data private and 2. high incentives for adversaries to create fronts plus proof they've done so in the past, means that for people such as myself and GP, the situation is equivalent to "ExampleVPN is a front" until we have a reason to believe otherwise.

Edit: Telegram's not-really-end-to-end-E2EE would be another such example.

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