Hello! 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 prov…
> First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs. It would be nice if one of the big shortwave operators could datacast these packages to the world as a public service.
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?
#342You should use people power to work to make Indonesia a more open, democratic society. Yes, it's hard work. Yes, it will take a long time. Yes, you personally may not get very far with your efforts. But if Indonesians don't take responsibility for and work to improve Indonesia then the rest of it doesn't matter.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#343SSTP or other HTTPS like VPN
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#344Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#345Full disclosure, I run a commercial VPN service (Windscribe). There are 2 paths you can take here: 1. Roll your own VPN server on a VPS at a less common cloud provider and use it. If you're tech savvy and know what you're doing, you can get this going in 2. Get a paid commercial VPN service that values your privacy, has a diverse network of endpoints and protocols. Do not use any random free VPN apps from the Play/Ap…
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#346Weird. I'm in Indonesia and can access VPNs, X and Discord.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#347You should use people power to work to make Indonesia a more open, democratic society. Yes, it's hard work. Yes, it will take a long time. Yes, you personally may not get very far with your efforts. But if Indonesians don't take responsibility for and work to improve Indonesia then the rest of it doesn't matter.
Part of that is knowing whats happening inside the country, of which they were previously using tools like discord, which have now been blocked. So the first step to using people power to make Indonesia a more open, democratic society would be to find a way to tunnel out to get and share that information. To that end the OP has created this Ask HN thread.
There are no technical solutions to what is fundamentally a problem of political culture.
Re: Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
#348Hello! 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 prov…
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.
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.