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Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

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

#32
post #153

I have the fortune to reside in Russia-controlled Donbas. Over here they have been blocking all WireGuard connections for a long time. OpenVPN seems to be blocked selectively depending on the host. The government and commerce must need it more than WireGuard. It isn't consistent. Different ISPs block different hosts and protocols at different times. I assume we are a kind of test and staging environment for censorshi…

[stub for offtopicness]

serious question -- your first sentence: is it sarcasm or do you really consider yourself to be fortunate?

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

#33

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…

Outline (https://getoutline.org) is even easier to deploy than Streisand in my experience and uses Shadowsocks.

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

#34

[flagged]

Great example of how Russian propaganda works.

To western readers it reads like sarcasm because we acknowledge the truth contained in it. There are tons of addiction problems we are sorting through with these services. But western readers also see clearly the draconian overtones of tyranny in this sort of approach. Hence it reads like sarcasm.

To russian and other readers living in dictatorships, this sort of thing has been repeated so often that I think the draconian aspects are totally missed.

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

#36
post #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]

It is a fact that Kremlin sponsored psyops campaigns worked to hinder her candidacy. The Mueller report laid this out in detail.

To answer your question, I think they were wondering if this would make it more difficult for Russian groups to do perform these psyops jobs. My thought is no: these groups will likely not have to deal much with these firewalls, considering they're explicitly backed by the Kremlin in their effort.

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

#38

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…

FWIW I stumbled upon the fact that AnyConnect (VPN from Cisco) about 10 years ago could walk over our HTTPS/DPI proxies/firewalls at Ubisoft. Which was mostly interesting because it was Ubi itself using AnyConnect.

In my efforts to use Linux (which is not supported by Cisco) I found "OpenConnect" and it's partner: "OCServe"; which are open source compatible client & server software (respectively) for the protocol

On the wire traffic looks like normal HTTPS traffic, and without the SSL "CONNECT" header which DPI loves to drop as it's known used for proxies and vpn solutions.

YMMV, but it's worked for me with aggressive HTTP proxies in other companies too. :)

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