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Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

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21–30 of 268 posts

Re: Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

#21

I wonder how this will affect political discourse in the USA. Legitimate question. I’m not concerned with “sides”, more interested to know if there will be less “division/fiery rhetoric”. There seems to have been a systemic psyops campaign from foreign actors into US political “hot” topics.

It's also possible that Russian troll factories still have their own VPN to outside the Russian firewall.

Re: Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

#23

I wonder how this will affect political discourse in the USA. Legitimate question. I’m not concerned with “sides”, more interested to know if there will be less “division/fiery rhetoric”. There seems to have been a systemic psyops campaign from foreign actors into US political “hot” topics.

[flagged]

Re: Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

#24

Try SquareX's disposable browser - works for me in China and is basically Remote Browser Isolation but for consumers. It seems free right now - https://www.sqrx.com

requiring an email in order to download a privacy tool isnt a great start for anonymity. why should I trust this tool?

Maybe don't trust it?

It seems to accept sharklasers.com (aka anonymous) email addresses though, so you don't have to use your real email address. :)

It also seems to work via Tor Browser, although it's a bit slow.

Re: Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

#25

Ten years ago, I was working for a US post-production company that produced a one-off game show in China. We used OpenVPN to monitor our servers, but it was being blocked. I ended up setting up a new OpenVPN server using obfsproxy, and it worked. It might be worth trying in your situation: https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/TrafficObfuscatio...

It should be an OS-level implemented feature at the TCP/IP layer so all non-local traffic is unrecognizable to anyone but the true recipient.

IDS/IPS's are virtually worthless these days anyway so I can't see much downside if every Window's, Mac's and Linux OS's network traffic appeared to be completely random/obfuscated out-of-box.

Re: Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

#26

Try SquareX's disposable browser - works for me in China and is basically Remote Browser Isolation but for consumers. It seems free right now - https://www.sqrx.com

requiring an email in order to download a privacy tool isnt a great start for anonymity. why should I trust this tool?

Technically you are buying VPN services by giving your credit card :D

use a dummy email -- if you feel so unsafe. At least Squarex is free right now so no credit card needed

Re: Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

#27

I wonder how this will affect political discourse in the USA. Legitimate question. I’m not concerned with “sides”, more interested to know if there will be less “division/fiery rhetoric”. There seems to have been a systemic psyops campaign from foreign actors into US political “hot” topics.

Absolutely not, this cannot be to restrict access of bad actors TO the West. This is to restrict regular old Russian citizens from getting information FROM the West. There is no chance at all that such blockage cuts off the ability to conduct military operations on the internet.

Re: Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

#28

Unfortunately, thanks to the Great Firewall of China, there has been a lot of resources put in to fingerprint VPNs and block them by state actors. Fortunately, however, there is equally years of some of the smartest minds on the planet working to bypass Chinese censorship, so there are some great OpenVPN alternatives. I really encourage you to look into something like Shadowsocks which Chinese people have found great…

Can anyone confirm Shadowsocks works anymore? When I tried to use it a few years ago, it got blocked in a few days.

To be honest, I think they are blocking anything that exchanges a lot of data with oversesas IPs, after hitting a certain threshold.

Re: Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

#29
Working around DPI blocks is possible as long as you can get your hands on foreign VPS. Just invent your own protocol and use it for yourself. Wrap it with HTTPS or even HTTP, nobody's has resources to analyse every single website protocol.

However some huge ingress/egress traffic to unknown website with few random pages looks very suspiciously. So it's possible to select those websites using statistics analysis.

Now the question to hackers: how do I hide tunnelled traffic so its statistics does not look suspicious?

Ideally one would use some CDN webserver (like cloudflare or amazon), however without encrypted SNI, host is extractable with DPI.

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