There's a new VPN that you might try, built by Boycat.
Don't know if it will help in this situation as it's designed to be a VPN not controlled by Israel, but it might be worth a try.
Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
91–100 of 775 posts
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#92- Tor. Pros: Reasonably user friendly and easy to get online, strong anonymity, free. Cons: a common target for censorship, not very fast, exit nodes are basically universally distrusted by websites. - Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes. Pros: little setup but not more than installing and configuring a program, faster than Got, very versatile. Cons: deep packet inspection can probably identify your traffic is using Mu…
Minimums for a VPS should be closer to $5-10 a month, no?
No, unless you pay month to month. If you wait till BF you can find some really good deals on sites like lowendspirit
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#93You've come to a wrong place to ask. Most people here (judging by recommendations of own VPN instances, Tor, Tailscale/other Wireguard-based VPNs, and Mullvad) don't have any experience with censorship circumvention. Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.
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Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#94Set up a VM on AWS/azure/gcp/... in the desired cell, install a VPN server and done. Once you have automation in place it takes ~2 minutes to start, you can run it on demand so you can pay per minute.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#95Mastodon is not easy for regimes to completely block, and most instances won't block you for using Tor. Mastodon saw a huge migration from Brazil when X was blocked there. https://joinmastodon.org/
Wouldn't it be easy to block the individual servers, e.g. https://mastodon.social ?
There are many instances of Mastodon, and due to its federated nature, you can use any of them to access it, and even host your own.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#96You've come to a wrong place to ask. Most people here (judging by recommendations of own VPN instances, Tor, Tailscale/other Wireguard-based VPNs, and Mullvad) don't have any experience with censorship circumvention. Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.
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Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#97Hello! 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 providers partner with local orgs who can figure out the safest and most efficient ways to distribute a VPN package in countries at risk of censorship or undergoing censorship.
- Once you've got the software, you should try to use it with an obfuscation layer.
Obfs4proxy is a popular tool here, and relies on a pre-shared key to make traffic look like nothing special. IIRC it also hides the VPN handshake. This isn't a perfectly secure model, but it's good enough to defeat most DPI setups.
Another option is Shapeshifter, from Operator (https://github.com/OperatorFoundation). Or, in general, anything that uses pluggable transports. While it's a niche technology, it's quite useful in your case.
In both cases, the VPN provider must provide support for these protocols.
- The toughest step long term is not getting caught using a VPN. By its nature, long-term statistical analysis will often reveal a VPN connection regardless of obfuscation and masking (and this approach can be cheaper to support than DPI by a state actor). I don't know the situation on the ground in Indonesia, so I won't speculate about what the best way to avoid this would be, long-term.
I will endorse Mullvad as a trustworthy and technically competent VPN provider in this niche (n.b., I do not work for them, nor have I worked for them; they were a competitor to my employer and we always respected their approach to the space).
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#98[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#99You've come to a wrong place to ask. Most people here (judging by recommendations of own VPN instances, Tor, Tailscale/other Wireguard-based VPNs, and Mullvad) don't have any experience with censorship circumvention. Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.
OP: look into VLESS (and similar). And read up on ntc.party (through Google translate). There are certain VPN providers that offer the protocol.
I think REALITY is the newer protocol. I remember VLESS being somewhat more detectable
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#100Australia and UK might soon go down this path. Something quite depressing is if we (HN crowd) find workarounds, most regular folks won't have the budget/expertise to do so, so citizen journalism will have been successfully muted by government / big media.
90% of “citizen journalism” is nothing of the sort. Just like “citizen science” researching vaccines.
> 90% of “citizen journalism” is (trash)
You're right. But compared to what?
I guess 99% of mainstream "journalism" is irrelevant and/or inaccurate, hence citizen journalism is a 10x improvement in accuracy and relevancy! Not 10% better, 900% better! This makes a huge difference to our society as a whole and in our daily lives!
But this misses the most important point which is that the user should have the right to choose for themselves what they say and read. Making citizen journalism unduly burdensome deprives everyone of that choice.