Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 775 posts

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

#351

Post by SahAssar »

mfiro wrote: post #292
teeray wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The problem is the countries, which censor Internet and block VPNs, also jam shortwave radio signals.

Could I ask for a source on that and how common it is?

Seems like it was used way back in the cold war (and even then not blocked/jammed) and I'd guess that current authoritarian regimes would perhaps not bother considering how few could use it.

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

#352

Post by extraduder_ire »

77pt77 wrote: post #303
_verandaguy wrote: post #97

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…

Obfs4proxy and Shapeshifter are an absolute PITA to install. Get your own VPS server (VPS in EU/US with 2GB of ram, 40GB of disk space and TBs/month of traffic go for $10 a year, it's that cheap). Never get anything in the UK and even USA is weird. I'd stick with EU. Install your software (wireguard + obsfuscation or even tailscale with your own DERP server) Another simpler alternative is just `ssh -D port` and use i…

Where are you finding a VPS in the EU for $10/year? Any I've seen are about 5-6 times that much.

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

#353

Post by trod1234 »

myshoemouth wrote: post #236
_verandaguy wrote: post #97

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…

I'm curious. How does a state actor do actual DPI without pushing certs to end user devices?

There are a couple of ways.

The main one is called an Eclipse Attack in cyber circles, and it can be done at any entity operating at the ASN layer so long as they can position themselves to relay your traffic.

The adversary can invisibly (to victim PoV) modify traffic if they have a cooperating rootPKI cert (anywhere in the ecosystem) that isn't the originating content provider, so long as they recognize the network signature (connection handshake); solely by terminating encryption early.

Without a cert, you can still listen in with traffic analysis, the fetched traffic that's already been encrypted with their key (bit for bit), as known plaintext the math quickly reduces. SNI and a few other artifacts referencing the resources/sites are not part of the encrypted payload.

Its more commonly known in a crypto context, but that kind of attack can happen anywhere. It even works against TOR. One of the first instances (afaik) was disclosed by Princeton researches in 2015, under the Raptor paper.

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

#354

Post by anigbrowl »

RansomStark wrote: post #81
hdgvhicv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of “citizen journalism” is nothing of the sort. Just like “citizen science” researching vaccines.

Preach comrade! Those citizen journalists with their primary sources, disgusting. Thats nothing but propaganda. Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

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

#355

Post by rd07 »

I live in Indonesia, and I don't find any recent news that mention X (formerly Twittwr) and or Discord being blocked by the government. The only relevant news from a quick Google search I can find is about the government threatened to block X due to pornography content in 2024. You can even check for yourself if a domain is blocked by visiting https://trustpositif.komdigi.go.id/.

Also for your unability to access the VPN, as far as my experience goes, in the past some providers do block access to VPN. But, I am not experiencing that for at least the last 5 years.

So, maybe you can try changing your internet provider and see if you can connect to VPN?

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

#356

Post by NamTaf »

downrightmike wrote: post #266
teeray wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand

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

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

#357

Post by nomilk »

alisonatwork wrote: post #334
dijit wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t worry about it. They can barely handle wolf-whistlers let alone pedophile rape gangs consisting of the lowest IQ dregs of our society. I know it’s only painfully stupid people who think the law is stupid, but dodgy Dave down the way tends to fly under the radar. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many of them.

One of the problems with authoritarianism is that even though most dodgy Daves will be fine because the political apparatus doesn't have the time or energy to arrest everyone for everything, they retain the ability to arrest anyone for anything. The moment your dodgy Dave offends your local cadre, even for reasons entirely other than being dodgy, they'll throw the book at him. And because there is now unpredictabilit…

Very well explained

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

#358

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

jacobgkau wrote: post #231
nograpes wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massive protests have occurred due to obvious government corruption. In particular the housing allowance for a month for a parliamentarian is now ten times the minimum wage for a month. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/26/indonesia-prot... Sorry I don't have a better freely accessible source, maybe someone with more knowledge can fill it in.

> the housing allowance for a month for a parliamentarian is now ten times the minimum wage for a month. I'm almost positive that everyone in the US Congress is making at least ten times the minimum wage in this country. The "housing allowance" being referred to is separate from their normal salary in Indonesia, but still, interesting to imagine how much more seriously people there would take that disparity than in m…

The ratio between Indonesian parliamentary income and the median Indonesian income is ~18x, while the ratio in the US is ~4x. As someone who wants US congressional income to be substantially higher, it's hard for me to be upset at that on its own. There are plenty of other variables at play, though, and a direct comparison of these ones might not be getting at the issue.

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

#359

Post by degamad »

johnisgood wrote: post #238
more_corn wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ this comment is right on. The cutting edge of VPN circumvention is the one marketed to people in China. Last I poked at this there were a lot of options.

Can I have a list of these options?

Despite its silly name, the reddit forum r/dumbclub is probably the place to start, they are focused on GFW-related discussions.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dumbclub/

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

#360

Post by rufus_foreman »

Beijinger wrote: post #319

Use Astrill - if you can afford. You could try AirVPN, much cheaper, but if Astrill does not work, probably no VPN will. https://expatcircle.com/cms/privacy/vpn-services/ Why is Indonesia in chaos?

>> Why is Indonesia in chaos?

I was wondering that too, looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Indonesian_protests.

Post reply on HN