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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?

#751

Post by infamouscow »

dragonsky67 wrote: post #499
infamouscow wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America's Founders saw civil rights as inherent in the Constitution's framework, rooted in natural law. They added the Bill of Rights as an explicit bulwark. That's why we have the 1st Amendment's free speech, and if that falls, the 2nd Amendment ensures we have guns.

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…

The United States, uniquely, guards speech under its 1A, excepting only direct calls to violence. A hypothetical like "we ought to hang , but the police would stop us, so have to draw a new plan first" is protected, a case study in law schools for where liberty draws its line.

If you suppress the avenues for peaceful political change, your courting violent revolution. History bears this out. Each, in its moment, seemed an unthinkable leap—overthrowing monarchs or empires—yet each remade its world.

The saying that history rhymes, not repeats, points to immutable human behavior.

Today, revolutionary pressures simmer. The U.S. saw a peaceful political shift in 2024, enabled by free speech's safety valve. Elsewhere, without such freedoms, violence fills the void. I pray other nations find paths to renewal without bloodshed, but history's lessons are not optimistic.

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

#752

Post by chipsrafferty »

ZaoLahma wrote: post #527
estimator7292 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, just drop a few thousand 1GB flash drives from a plane. Load them with a tor browser, a wireguard client, and instructions on finding a remote exit. Only one copy needs to survive and it can spread very quickly and irreversibly by foot.

Yeah, this is a great approach if you're already at war with a country. If you're not and they're still allowing your planes to fly through their airspace then this is a great way to ensure that they lock your (and your friends') planes out.

Drop them from commercial planes via the toilet?

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

#753

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #729
majorchord wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have a reliable source for this claim?

China's use of SNI-based censorship is well-documented For example, see https://censorbib.nymity.ch/pdf/Niere2025a.pdf

China has blocked ESNI

https://gfw.report/blog/gfw_esni_blocking/en/

But SNI is not CH and ESNI is not ECH

Will China block ECH

ECH blocking has been detected in Russia

https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/417

According to Niere et al. (2025)

"Additionally, with the ECH extension not yet being widely used [17], [71] and focusing on privacy protection rather than censorship circumvention [60], it can be censored easily by blocking it entirely [14], [76]."

The paper describes various GFW bypass methods that currently work, including removing the SNI extension entirely

It does not mention anyone using ECH to bypass GFW

Perhaps it is too early to conclude "China blocks ECH" because ECH is not in widespread use

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

#754

Post by 77pt77 »

majorchord wrote: post #747
77pt77 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting Like I've written here. VPS in EU with 2GB RAM, 40 GB disk and >1TB a month of traffic go for $10 PER YEAR! https://billing.chunkserve.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0 https://my.servitro.com/cart.php?a=view https://manager.ouiheberg.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0

In my experience, not only do a lot of sites block access from datacenter/cloud IPs, but you will routinely encounter captcha loops.

This is true, keeps getting worse, but depends heavily on the datacenter/IP.

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

#755

Post by daflip »

chipsrafferty wrote: post #752
ZaoLahma wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is a great approach if you're already at war with a country. If you're not and they're still allowing your planes to fly through their airspace then this is a great way to ensure that they lock your (and your friends') planes out.

Drop them from commercial planes via the toilet?

When you flush the toilet in an airplane the contents is normally vacuumed in to a holding tank which gets emptied after the plane lands.

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

#756

Post by akk0 »

fsckboy wrote: post #506
NamTaf wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streisand is extremely out of date and wouldn’t last long in China, but I don’t know how sophisticated Indonesia’s firewall is

i have a few chinese friends and they say it's always easy to get a working vpn. that might not be true in a Tien An Minh type crisis, i dunno, but month in month out year upon year they surf western sites, exchange winnie the pooh pictures, etc. i suppose the people i know could be relatively upper class, i have no idea what type difference that could make. i had a chinese gf in LA who would send... my >cough< pictu…

The way you phrased this makes it sound like your ex was sending your dick pics to her mom, which I'm not sure is the intended reading (but more power to them...?)

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

#757

Post by ranger_danger »

77pt77 wrote: post #754
majorchord wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, not only do a lot of sites block access from datacenter/cloud IPs, but you will routinely encounter captcha loops.

This is true, keeps getting worse, but depends heavily on the datacenter/IP.

I've also had online shopping orders flagged or unable to buy at all by doing this. They seem to consider traffic as automatically suspicious when it's not through a residential ISP.

Although with the amount of "compromised" residential hosts these days that are for hire through grey-market proxy dealers, I don't know what to think anymore.

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

#758

Post by 77pt77 »

ranger_danger wrote: post #757
77pt77 wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, keeps getting worse, but depends heavily on the datacenter/IP.

I've also had online shopping orders flagged or unable to buy at all by doing this. They seem to consider traffic as automatically suspicious when it's not through a residential ISP. Although with the amount of "compromised" residential hosts these days that are for hire through grey-market proxy dealers, I don't know what to think anymore.

Also true, but also happens in workplaces.

It will be even worse using a normal VPN so no solution there.

Also, if you're signed in it will be fine.

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

#760

Post by barbazoo »

kragen wrote: post #113
barbazoo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be easy to block the individual servers, e.g. https://mastodon.social ?

Sure, but if you have an account on a different server, you can still see things posted on mastodon.social if you have followed someone there.

That’s the context I was missing I think.
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