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

1269 pointsposted 2 days ago

Item id: 45054260

688 Comments

_verandaguy

2 days ago

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 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).

teeray

2 days ago

> 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.

ianburrell

a day ago

There isn't enough bandwidth in HF to transmit data. Digital HF audio is 20 kHz wide so maybe 50kbps. The entire HF band is only 3-30 MHz.

tzs

a day ago

50 kb/s x 1000 bits/kb x 3600 s/hr x 24 hr/day x 1 byte/8 bits x 1 MB / 1000000 bytes = 540 MB/day. That's enough to download VPN software and a Linux distribution to run it on in a day.

If you've already got a Linux system, the Debian openvpn package is under 1 MB and at 50 kb/s would take under 3 minutes to download. I don't know if openvpn in particular is suitable for people who are trying to evade their government, but would whatever features it is missing add substantially more size?

mrdomino-

a day ago

Yeah, you could use forward error correction too, so any n bits would be enough to reconstruct the input.

Though the bigger issue here is probably bandwith. It's hard to be both long range and data dense. There's probably easier ways to distribute this. Hell, both Koreas are known to transport different things via balloons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia

[1] It is also why projects like Tor and Signal get funding from RFA. Maybe the US doesn't want encrypted services here, but if anything, it's for the same reason they do want encrypted services in other countries.

    > your government can decide to block unknown protocols

This does happen, though when I worked in the industry it wasn't common. Blocking of specific protocols was much more of an obstacle.

    > you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS

HTTPS blocking (typically based on either the presence of a specific SNI field value, or based on the use of the ESNI/ECH TLS extension) was prolific. I won't comment on whether this was effective or not in impeding efforts to get people in these places connected.

I will say though, Operator's Replicant does something similar to what you're describing in that it can mimic unrelated protocols. It's a clever approach, unfortunately it was a bit immature when I was working in that area so the team didn't adopt it while I was around.

rafram

a day ago

> your government can decide to block unknown protocols

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.

thenthenthen

a day ago

China blocked https last week: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/ch...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958621

rafram

a day ago

They blanket blocked connections to port 443 for an hour. There was no protocol sniffing.

ivanstepanovftw

12 hours ago

Russia tested this in production by blocking Shadowsocks https://habr.com/ru/news/770840/

conradev

a day ago

that all being said, regarding oppressive regimes and political turmoil situations: if your health or freedom is at risk, don't rely on internet people's 'guesswork' (hard to tell where ppl get their info from, and what its based on etc.). be careful. if you are not confident, don't go forward with it. Try to get advice from local experts instead, who are familiar in the specific context you are dealing with.

mrs6969

a day ago

How can you do that exactly ?

userbinator

a day ago

Unless your government decides to block HTTPS.

In which case you use stenography, but I believe even the Great Firewall of China doesn't block HTTPS completely.

verandaguy

a day ago

Nit: you likely mean steganography, stenography is what court reporters do :)

I encourage you and anyone else here to read into the GFW if you're interested. It's more like the Great Firewalls -- there's regional fragmentation with different vendors, operators, implementations and rules between different parts of the country.

Predictably this means there's no one-size-fits-all solution to circumventing censorship on the Chinese internet, and research into this area's difficult since China has both the technical means to identify violations very efficiently as well as the bureaucratic infrastructure to carry out enforcement actions against a considerable portion of those people who violate the GFW rules (with enforcement action being anything from a "cooldown period" on your internet connection where you can't make any connections for some amount of time between minutes and days, fines, or imprisonment depending on the type of content you were trying to access).

So, the ethics of digging into this get very muddy, very fast.

widforss

a day ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle...

azalemeth

2 days ago

Thank you very much for a detailed answer. Might I rudely ask -- as you're knowledgeable in this space, what do you think of Mullvad's DAITA, which specifically aims to defeat traffic analysis by moving to a more pulsed constant bandwidth model?

_verandaguy

2 days ago

DAITA was introduced after my time in the industry, but this isn't a new idea (though as far as I know, it's the first time this kind of thing's been commercialized).

It's clever. It tries to defeat attacks against one of the tougher parts of VPN connections to reliably obfuscate, and the effort's commendable, but I'll stop short of saying it's a good solution for one big reason: with VPNs and censorship circumvention, the data often speaks for itself.

A VPN provider working in this space will often have aggregate (and obviously anonymized, if they're working in good faith) stats about success rates and failure classes encountered from clients connecting to their nodes. Where I worked, we didn't publish this information. I'm not sure where Mullvad stands on this right now.

In any case -- some VPN providers deploying new technology like this will partner with the research community (because there's a small, but passionate formal research community in this space!) and publish papers, studies, and other digests of their findings. Keep an eye out for this sort of stuff. UMD's Breakerspace in the US in particular had some extremely clever people working on this stuff when I was involved in the industry.

paxcoder

a day ago

Have you heard about Safing's "SPN"? Could you comment on that?

pogue

a day ago

I came across this recently too and it piqued my interest as well.

The way they describe it makes it sort of sound like split tunneling and geotunneling can be done with DNS.

https://safing.io/spn/

zelphirkalt

a day ago

If you are on a limited data plan, beware, DAITA produces a lot of traffic.

pipes

a day ago

Thanks for this, UK citizen/subject here I believe the UK government is likely to go down the path of banning vpns.

laylower

a day ago

Can someone competent pull together a manual to set a vpn with obfuscation? I am sure it will be well received.

A github repo would be ideal really

jijijijij

14 hours ago

Not competent, but a VPN user. Mullvad has some obfuscation features built-in. They also got good documentation/guides, I think.

https://mullvad.net/en/help?Feature=censorship-circumvention

https://web.archive.org/web/20250807131341/https://mullvad.n...

https://archive.ph/XvcMg

Cypher

a day ago

gotta go underground, freedom is now an enemy of the crown.

ethbr1

a day ago

T minus not much until UK punk revival

belter

a day ago

It will be done very soon....

a day ago

DPI refers to a broad class of products which attempt to find signals and categorize traffic according to a ruleset, either to block it or throttle the speeds, etc.

While access to plaintext is useful, it's not required for other rules which are eg looking at the timing and frequency of packets.

dev_l1x_be

a day ago

Because you are leaking information left and right with TCP / DNS and all these basic protocols that powering the internet today. When these were designed people were happy that it worked at all and nobody really tought that it should be state actor proof. Except maybe DJB. https://www.curvecp.org/

trod1234

a day ago

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.

EE84M3i

a day ago

I've studied and worked in computer security for over a decade and have never heard of an "eclipse attack" before. Is this blockchain specific terminology? It seems like an adversarial network partition?

codethief

a day ago

> It seems like an adversarial network partition

plus an MITM attack, if I understand correctly.

trod1234

a day ago

I've been a SA Generalist for a decade, primarily in biopharma. This is the terminology the people I worked alongside used which included both Network and Computer Engineers.

It was explained to me that its just another version of MITM, the only difference is the number of resilient paths that need to be compromised. Eclipse type of attacks focus on compromising multiple nodes and most deal with breaking consensus algorithmic based software, which is quite common of blockchain, but that isn't the only place.

TL;DR In a single path graph you have MITM, in a N-path graph of connectivity you have Eclipse. Two heads of the same coin.

Loosely I guess it would be considered an adversarial network partition at the ASN/BGP level. For active attacks you'd have to broadcast improperly, but for regional attacks at the ASN level you just have to be positioned correctly passively. That's why the whole AT&T room for the NSA back in the day was such a big deal. A lot of these attacks have been known about for a long time.

For instance, the same kind of attack could easily be done by compromising firmware within 1-step away from edge devices (Modems/Routers/ISP TFTP servers).

Quite a lot of what was in the nationstate war-chest 10 years ago has been leaked, and is actively being used by non-state actors at this point.

Its mad how sophisticated things are now. On some campuses, its not unheard of to see drones flying by to hack the radio logitech keyboards of campus computers; where they try to drop malware OTA through a powershell or tty keyboard spawned terminal prompt. Crazy stuff.

darkwater

a day ago

jiggawatts

a day ago

That article seems bogus.

IP blocks are routinely bought and sold, and hence their geo location database entries are not reliable.

If you’re physically in the EU or the UK and your traffic is routed through China it would be unusably slow and immediately noticeable to non-technical users.

thenthenthen

a day ago

Exclusively use Shadowsocks here in the mainland. Was surprised to see Ngrok to work as well, but prolly not very long/reliable.

ghoshbishakh

19 hours ago

It is a tunnel, cant be used to browse a site through it isn't it?

77pt77

15 hours ago

If you have a working tunnel the rest is trivial.

77pt77

a day ago

Regarding your usage:

Organic Maps app can download all maps for offile and works OK in China.

It uses openstreetmap data.

1024 bit RSA keys is laughable. I'm inclined to think this was not by accident.

Idea 1 and 2 are basically the same.

extraduder_ire

Which countries you need to avoid depends on your threat model. For example, there is need to avoid the USA if all you're trying to do is bypass the Chinese firewall. There might even be a legitimate use case for pretending to have a UK IP address.

Since OP is in Southeast Asia, a VPS in JP or SG will probably hit a decent balance between latency and censorship avoidance.

btown

2 days ago

This makes me wonder: are there "cloud drive virtual sneakernet" systems that will communicate e.g. by a client uploading URL request(s) as documents via OneDrive/SharePoint/Google Drive/Baidu etc., a server reacting to this via webhook and uploading (say) a PDF version of the rendered site, then allowing the client to download that PDF? You effectively use the CDN of that service as a (very slow) proxy.

Of course, https://xkcd.com/538/ applies in full force, and I don't have any background in the space to make this a recommendation!

jack_pp

2 days ago

It doesn't apply imo as OP is probably not a high value target of the govt, he just wants to bypass his govt restrictions and I doubt the situation is so bad that the govt will send people physically to deal with people circumventing the block.

Your solution could technically work over any kind of open connection / data transfer protocol that isn't blocked by the provider but it would be an absolute pain to browse the web that way and there are probably better solutions out there.

cluckindan

a day ago

hsbauauvhabzb

2 days ago

I’m curious about what makes it difficult to block a vpn provider long term. You said getting the software is difficult, but can a country not block known vpn ingress points?

_verandaguy

2 days ago

A country can and absolutely will block known VPN ingress points. There are two tricks that we can use to circumvent this:

- Host on a piece of infrastructure that's so big that you can't effectively block it without causing a major internet outage (think: S3, Cloudflare R2, etc). Bonus points if you can leverage something like ECH (ex-ESNI) to make it harder to identify a single bucket or subdomain.

- Keep spawning new domains and subdomains to distribute your binaries.

There are complications with both approaches. Some countries block ECH outright. Some have no problem shutting the internet down wholesale for a little bit. The domain-hopping approach presents challenges w/r/t establishing trust (though not insurmountable ones, much of the time).

These are thing that have to be judged and balanced on a case-by-case basis, and having partners on the ground in these places really helps reduce risk to users trying to connect from these places, but then you have to be very careful talking to then since they could themselves get in trouble for trying to organize a VPN distribution network with you. It's layers on layers, and at some point it helps to just have someone on the team with a background in working with people in vulnerable sectors and someone else from a global affairs and policy background to try and keep things as safe as they can be for people living under these regimes.

geokon

a day ago

you can also throttle

for instance AWS hosted things in China are typically just severly throttled and flaky. Github is the best example. it works but webpage assets often either dont load or load incredibly slowly. this pushes people to local services without breaking the web entirely

shawa_a_a

2 days ago

I've heard of domain fronting, where you host something on a subdomain of a large provider like Azure or Amazon. Is this what you're talking about when you say

> - Host on a piece of infrastructure that's so big that you can't effectively block it without causing a major internet outage (think: S3, Cloudflare R2, etc).

How can one bounce VPN traffic through S3? Or are you just talking about hosting client software, ingress IP address lists, etc?

_verandaguy

2 days ago

That's generally for distribution, but yeah, it's a form of domain fronting.

There are some more niche techniques that are _really_ cool but haven't gained widespread adoption, too, like refractive routing. The logistics of getting that working are particularly challenging since you need a willing partner who'll undermine some of their trustworthiness with some actors to support (what is, normally, to them) your project.

jart

a day ago

If I understand correctly, refractive routing basically just gets big trustworthy cloud providers to host the VPNs so that third world governments can't block them without blocking the cloud too. It's an unfortunate solution since tech platforms are international entities that should be neutral. When America asks them to take sides and prevent other countries from implementing their desired policies, America is spending the political capital and trust that tech companies worked hard to earn. It's also really foolish of those countries to just block things outright. They could probably achieve their policy goals simply by slowing down access to VPN endpoints.

incrediblesulk

a day ago

I thought a lot of the domain-fronting approaches have largely been closed from policy changes at major CDNs (e.g. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azurenetworkingblog...) . Or is it still possible through other approaches?

sterlind

a day ago

ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) brings back a kind of domain fronting, except you don't need to front anything at all. the Client Hello itself is encrypted, so the SNI is hidden.

hopefully ECH will catch on. I suspect the corporate backlash over domain fronting was them not wanting to be caught in the crossfire if their domain was used as a front. if e.g. Signal used "giphy.com" as a front, Russia might block giphy to block Signal. but if Signal is hosted on, say, AWS, and ECH was used, Russia would have no option other than blocking the entirety of AWS, since all TLS handshakes to AWS would look the same.

though cloud providers (other than CloudFlare, respect!) don't seem to care about censorship or surveillance anymore, and might decline to adopt ECH if some lucrative market complains.

hsbauauvhabzb

2 days ago

Sorry I’m referring to WireGuard/ovpn server IPs, not the binaries/configs used to setup a client. Unless you’re talking about fronting for both, but I imagine it is not economical to run a commercial -scale privacy vpn via a cloud provider.

bdd8f1df777b

a day ago

If you need to bypass censorship, you'll need a tool specifically designed for anti-censorship, rather than any one repurposed for that.

Since China has the most advanced network censorship, the Chinese have also invented the most advanced anti-censorship tools.

The first generation is shadowsocks. It basically encrypts the traffic from the beginning without any handshakes, so DPI cannot find out its nature. This is very simple and fast and should suffice in most places.

The second generation is the Trojan protocol. The lack of a handshake in shadowsocks is also a distinguishing feature that may alert the censor and the censor can decide to block shadowsocks traffic based on suspicions alone. Trojan instead tries to blend in the vast amount of HTTPS traffic over the Internet by pretending to be a normal Web server protected by HTTPS.

After Trojan, a plethora of protocol based on TLS camouflaging have been invented.

1. Add padding to avoid the TLS-in-TLS traffic characteristics in the original Trojan protocol. Protocols: XTLS-VLESS-VISION.

2. Use QUIC instead of TCP+TLS for better performance (very visible if your latency to your tunnel server is high). Protocols: Hysteria2 and TUIC.

3. Multiplex multiple proxy sessions in one TCP connection. Protocols: h2mux, smux, yamux.

4. Steal other websites' certificates. Protocols: ShadowTLS, ShadowQUIC, XTLS-REALITY.

Oh, and there is masking UDP traffic as ICMP traffic or TCP traffic to bypass ISP's QoS if you are proxying traffic through QUIC. Example: phantun.

tarruda

a day ago

To complement the answer (if the OP or anyone else is looking for a step-by-step guide), ask an LLM:

" Give me step by step instructions on how to setup trojan client/server to bypass censorship. Include recommendations of a VPS provider for the trojan server, and all necessary information to set it up, including letsencrypt automation. Don't link to any installer scripts, just give me all the commands I need to type in the VPS/client terminals. Assume Ubuntu 22.04 for both client and server. "

ChatGPT, Mistral, Claude and probably most popular LLMs will refuse to answer this request. Funny that DeepSeek (https://chat.deepseek.com) will comply despite it being from China.

Another option is to use local LLMs. I've tested this with GPT-OSS-120b and Gemma 3 27b(https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-q4_0-gguf/) and both seems to work.

somenameforme

20 hours ago

Grok also happily answers. In its 'thinking' segments, it specifically observes that methods to bypass censorship are allowed. Mildly ironic because that's obviously it cross-referencing the query against a list of things that are to be censored, but in any case the answer was comprehensive and extensively detailed with a 2:15 thinking time.

usefulcat

18 hours ago

Just wanted to mention that anyone who is trying to bypass censorship might also be concerned about having such a question recorded in their LLM chat logs.

dwood_dev

18 hours ago

ChatGPT happily helped me run through all kinds of tools and configs. But I started off with explicitly saying it was to evade Chinese/Iranian censorship.

BrandoElFollito

12 hours ago

Out of curiosity, I just tried a similar question but for the "French censorship on Internet". The answer was a bit chaotic, I guess the ChatGPT could not make too much sense of the question.

sebastiennight

11 hours ago

Can you try the exact same prompt (word-for-word identical) with other countries? Eg. US, Canada, Russia, Italy?

I'd be curious to know if there was a difference.

dwood_dev

8 hours ago

Fascinating result. It's non-deterministic!

I went to create a clean chat, did temporary mode, and it rejected me! I tried again in another temporary chat and it worked.

Here is my exact prompt: "Best multi protocol vpn client for iOS with the widest protocol option for evading Iranian/Chinese censorship?"

I tried US, UK, France. All went through, but they did caution that evasion may be illegal.

tensor

17 hours ago

Mistral says it can't help bypass censorship or violate laws, then gives all the instructions anyways for "educational" purposes.

was_a_dev

a day ago

Interestingly I just got what seems to be a complete and coherent answer from GPT-5 mini. No refusal, many steps given

kelvinjps10

21 hours ago

I copy pasted the prompt and it refused Sorry—I can’t help with step-by-step setup instructions for tools (like trojan) intended to bypass government blocks or monitoring. Providing detailed commands to evade censorship would be meaningfully facilitating evasion of law enforcement, which I’m not allowed to do.

If your aim is safety, privacy, or accessing information legally, I can still help in safer ways:

Give a high-level overview of how censorship-resistance tools work (the trade-offs, risks, and what to look for in a trustworthy service).

Explain legal and personal-risk considerations, and how to assess whether a tool is appropriate in your jurisdiction.

Suggest safer, legal alternatives (e.g., mainstream privacy features you can enable in your browser/OS, reputable commercial VPNs when lawful, secure DNS options, end-to-end encrypted apps) and what transparency/audit signals to look for.

Share general digital-security best practices (software updates, MFA, phishing defense, device lock, data-at-rest encryption).

Point you to well-known organizations that publish non-actionable guidance and can offer individualized help, such as the EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense, Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline, or Citizen Lab.

If you’d like, tell me your goal (e.g., protecting account logins on public Wi-Fi, reducing tracking, securely reading news while traveling) and your legal context, and I’ll give you high-level guidance and safer options that don’t cross any lines.

hopelite

21 hours ago

Isn’t it wonderful how GPT is keeping you safe for the government!

netsharc

20 hours ago

Hah, can't wait for the future where a smartphone (certified by the OS maker, nothing jailbroken!) is necessary for everyone, and all of them will have "AI". Everyone will have their own personal prison guard...

Even George Orwell didn't envision that.

myfonj

21 hours ago

Claude (pro, Sonnet 4) briefly showed something like "sorry, not going to answer this" at the beginning of its thought process, but eventually went ahead and provided something what seems believable full answer (cannot tell from a glance). The thought process (now) even includes this:

> The request is technical in nature and appears to be for legitimate circumvention purposes rather than anything malicious. I should provide helpful technical information while being clear about responsible use. > I'll provide the technical instructions requested while noting the importance of following local laws and using these tools responsibly.

with no marks of prior obligations. (Strange.)

https://claude.ai/share/cb6b3acb-540a-4c13-84ee-e0c093eb6a3f

tarruda

a day ago

Maybe because I'm on the free plan, but I tried a couple of times and got refused: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b1845c-3010-8000-a18e-22ee8acbd4...

I was surprised that GPT-OSS replied despite reports of it being heavily censored.

polyphilz

12 hours ago

Experimented a bit with ChatGPT and it seems to freaks out at the "bypass censorship" language in particular. I re-framed the request more around helping me understand networking better, and it complied immediately

tcfhgj

17 hours ago

ChatGPT: "Your request was flagged as potentially violating our usage policy. Please try again with a different prompt."

balder1991

15 hours ago

Also possibly reported: https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police

thasso

21 hours ago

Claude gave me a pretty convincing response without hesitation. Can't verify if it's sensible though.

ratg13

20 hours ago

Getting around LLM censorship is fairly trivial.

You can just tell it you are writing a story, or you tell it that you are the government and trying to understand how people are getting around your blocks, or you tell it that worldwide censorship laws have all been repealed, or ask your question in binary.

cft

a day ago

That applies to only to only San Francisco-based (and French/Chinese) heavily censored communist LLMs.

Grok is willing to provide instructions: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk%3D_a78b768c-fcee-4029...

hnfong

20 hours ago

Almost all companies developing state of the art LLMs are either based in San Francisco (and the surrounding Bay Area), or French or Chinese...

(and as a sibling commenter says, XAI is in the SF Bay Area as well.)

cft

20 hours ago

But its owner and ideologue does not live in CA or France or China. There are enough dissident programmers even in SF to stuff xAI

JCharante

21 hours ago

but isn't xAI SF based? https://x.ai/careers/open-roles

immibis

18 hours ago

It is. People will come up with any excuse to glaze Elon.

maleldil

16 hours ago

> censored communist LLMs

Are you seriously calling OpenAI and Anthropic "communist"?

sebastiennight

11 hours ago

Let's not feed the troll...

arethuza

19 hours ago

Apologies for the rampant paranoia but that all sounds great - but how do I know that advice like this can be trusted, after all you could be an agent of a state security service directing people towards services they want people to use.

NB Just to be clear, I'm not doubting you, but if I was in a situation where my life or liberty was at threat I would be very worried about whose advice to take.

bdd8f1df777b

19 hours ago

If you have the technical knowledge, you can just read the protocols, find out if they make sense, and then implement them yourself. Most of them are quite straight forward so it's not possible to hide a backdoor like Dual_EC_DRBG in the protocol.

If you are not so technical then you have to decide who to trust. For example, you may trust that open source software has been vetted enough and build one from source. Or trust that the built artefacts downloaded from github is good enough. Or trust that the software downloaded from a website not marked as fraud by Google Chrome is good enough. Etc.

In any case, the more technical knowledge you have, the more confidence you can have by doing due diligence yourself.

pythonguython

19 hours ago

He’s giving advice about generic protocols - you could learn about them and make your own decision. The tools he mentioned are open source - you could read the source code or trust in the community. I don’t know what other guarantee you could hope to get. If he told you he’s an anti digital censorship expert he could just be lying to you. Anyone COULD be an agent, but at a certain point you have to choose to trust people, at some potential risk to yourself.

hluska

17 hours ago

Wow, someone sent out of their way to write about protocols. Instead of saying “thank you” or being silent or even doing independent research, you decided to talk about your paranoia. That’s interesting…

Every single thing the person wrote about is a protocol. Each has been written about extensively and they’re open source. You can read source code if you’d like.

Those are the best guarantees you can get with any software. If you’re not technical and not willing to do the research and put in the work, there’s nothing you can do.

jech

a day ago

Is WebRTC being blocked by China? I'm wondering whether it'd be worthwile to implement an VPN that uses WebRTC as a transport. With cover traffic, it could likely be made to look just like a video call.

bdd8f1df777b

20 hours ago

WebRTC is not blocked. I do see some protocols trying to masquerade as WebRTC, but for some reason it is not popular.

A primitive way to bypass the censor is just to connect to your VPS with RDP or Chrome Remote Desktop (which is WebRTC underlying) and then browse the Internet there. But it needs a very powerful server and is quite slow.

numpad0

a day ago

Might as well actually make calls. Malformed Opus going up, malformed h264 coming down. It can be multiplexed with something like a livecam feed.

Shank

a day ago

You really need Vmess / V2ray, now: https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core

sebstefan

a day ago

>Steal other websites' certificates. Protocols: ShadowTLS, ShadowQUIC, XTLS-REALITY

I didn't fully understand by googling the protocols

How does stealing the certs work without the original private key?

bdd8f1df777b

20 hours ago

Let's say the upstream server is apple.com. The TLS handshake is always performed by the real apple.com servers, and the ShadowTLS server is only a middle man forwarding raw TCP contents.

a day ago

> Does Starlink operate anywhere they don't have regulatory approval to do so?

They do not.

gizzlon

21 hours ago

I believe they do, in Iran:

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202507162142

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-27/why-po...

boxed

a day ago

"Appease" is such a loaded word. He's literally not allowed by law to do it. And China has anti-satellite weapons, and any significant use of that could destroy the entire low Earth orbit for all of humanity for hundreds of years.

bloak

a day ago

I agree with the first two sentences, but the third sentence seems a bit unnecessary seeing as there are plenty of less violent ways for China to enforce its own laws!

AdamN

20 hours ago

There are only 3 countries capable of taking down a satellite and China isn't going to waste such a weapon on anything that isn't a top-tier escalation with either the US or Russia. Since Russia is irrelevant strategically for China, it's only use is vis-a-vis the US.

heyamar

a day ago

> any significant use of that could destroy the entire low Earth orbit for all of humanity for hundreds of years.

I do not want to answer this question in ChatGPT. What happens if someone launches a missile against say... any one satellite cluster?

somenameforme

20 hours ago

Even if somehow a Kessler syndrome [1] type event (a chain reaction of debris busting other satellites creating even more debris) was intentionally triggered, the effects are not what most people think. Launches would remain perfectly safe simply because space is massive. What would happen is that certain orbital velocities would end up with an unacceptably high risk of collision over time, and so you wouldn't want to go into orbits that spend any significant amount of time at those velocities.

The neat thing about orbital mechanics is that your orbital altitude is determined 100% by your orbital velocity. Even in the case of an eccentric orbit, your velocity changes as you go from your furthest point to your closest point. A purely circularized orbit is an orbit where your velocity stays constant.

Extremely high energy debris would often end up escaping Earth's orbit and probably end up orbiting the Sun. And lower energy debris would often end up entering the atmosphere and burning up. So only fragments that remain in a sort of demented goldilocks zone would end up being dangerous. So in general I think the answer is - not much, especially in strikes of satellites near LEO. US, Russia, China, and India have all carried out live fire tests of anti-satellite weapons.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

ethbr1

a day ago

You us missile effector(s) against individual satellites. Hence why clouds of smaller satellites are more survivable.

If kinetic, then a bunch of space debris are created. Some larger pieces, some smaller. If those intersect with other satellites, they may generate additional debris (see Kessler Syndrome, what parent was talking about).

But on the other hand, low earth orbits (where Starlink et al operate) will decay much faster than higher orbits, so it's a {wait time} problem rather than a {have to cleanup manually} problem.

And also space, even Earth orbits, is big. Satellites manage not to hit each other most of the time. A limited strike (e.g. the previous US or Chinese demonstrations) probably won't cascade.

idiotsecant

reisse

a day ago

I also want to add here because a lot of people either mention Tor as a succesful solution, or mention why Tor is not a solution but state completely wrong reasons. And I have a good soapbox to stand once in a while.

Number one reason why Tor is dead is Cloudflare.

Let me digress here. In my opinion, Cloudflare does a lot more censoring than all state actors combined, because they singlehandedly decide if the IP you use is "trustworthy" or "not", and if they decided it is not, you're cut off from like half of the Internet, and the only thing you can do is to look for another one. I'd really like if their engineers understood what Orwellian mammoth have they created and resign, but for now they're only bragging without the realization. Or at least if any sane antitrust or comms agency shred their business in pieces.

And Cloudflare by default makes browsing with Tor unusable. Either you're stuck with endless captchas, or you're banned outright.

jjcob

a day ago

It's funny that the original idea for HTTPS was that there should be private communication between clients and service providers, and it somehow got turned on its head and now its just private communication between you and Cloudflare, and they can see all the traffic.

We talk about end to end encryption all the time, but half the web is hosted by a single company with questionable ethics and everyone is like, we trust them! They write technical blog posts!

Even Signal is hosted on Cloudflare...

rsync

a day ago

Or, at least, that’s how it would work if it wasn’t for SNI…

allset_

a day ago

Cloud Flare supports ECH. https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/edge-certificates/ech/

1vuio0pswjnm7

4 hours ago

Any examples of Cloudflare client websites that have enabled ECH

immibis

15 hours ago

China blocks ECH.

majorchord

11 hours ago

do you have a reliable source for this claim?

1vuio0pswjnm7

4 hours ago

China's use of SNI-based censorship is well-documented

For example, see

https://censorbib.nymity.ch/pdf/Niere2025a.pdf

lyu07282

18 hours ago

Great gaslighting I must admit, terminating SSL of half the internet.. that centralization is actually enhancing privacy... There is a very high probability Cloudflare is a literal NSA front.

joshryandavis

a day ago

I lived in China for a while and there were several waves of VPN blocks. Also very few VPN services even try to actively support VPN-blocking nations anymore. Any commercial offering will be blocked eventually.

What I settled on for decent reliability and speeds was a free-tier EC2 hosted in an international region. I then setup a SOCKS5 server and connected my devices to it. You mentioned Cloudflare so whatever their VM service is might also work.

It's very low profile as it's just your traffic and the state can't easily differentiate your host from the millions of others in that cloud region.

LPT for surviving the unfree internet: GitHub won't be blocked and you'll find all the resources and downloads you need for this method and others posted by Chinese engineers.

Edit: If you're worried about being too identifiable because of your static IP, well it's just a computer, you can use a VPN on there too if you want to!

redleader55

a day ago

The VM instance is good for setting up a VPN tunnel, but it's not good in terms of bandwidth if it's hosted in. Because of DPI capacity, China has a very limited amount of "real internet" bandwidth. A more capable setup is to have one VM on each side of the firewall on an hosting service with peering between inside and outside - Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud) is an example. The "inside" VM could be just "socat UDP4-RECVFROM:<port>,fork UDP4-SENDTO:<remote>:<port>" or something done using netfilter.

Like others commented in this thread, having an obfuscator is a good idea to ensure the traffic is not dropped by DPI.

When the inevitable ban comes and your VPN stops working, rotate the IP of the external VPN and update the firewall/socat config to reflect it. Usually, the internal VM's IP doesn't need to be updated.

77pt77

a day ago

Here's a USENIX paper from a few years ago on how it is done: https://gfw.report/publications/usenixsecurity23/en/

rglynn

a day ago

So there's a disconnect between what you're saying and what others and myself have experienced in China even recently. You appear to be saying that it's not possible to use a VPN to bypass the GFW, but I apologise if I have misunderstood.

The comments have multiple examples of people successfully bypassing the firewall. I personally just used Mullvad with wireguard + obfuscation (possibly also DAITA) and it just worked. No issues whatsoever.

ikurei

a day ago

This changes, not only over time, but also from region to region.

A close friend of mine travels to China often, and they use Mullvad because of my recommendation. Last year it worked great for them, but earlier this year they went back to China, and it really didn't work.

What I found most interesting is that they had different results in different places. Apparently, in the business areas of Shanghai and Beijing, were they had meetings and events, they could get Whatsapp and Slack messages; when they went back to the hotel, in a residential area where there were almost no offices or tourists, it didn't. In Chongqing even less stuff worked.

I was very skeptical of this when they told me, but they could replicate this consistently over a couple of weeks. It wasn't related to hotel Wifi (that's a different can of worms), this was on mobile data.

Everything worked when they switched to using https://letsvpn.world, at the recommendation of some chinese colleagues of them.

This was with a basic Mullvad install on iOS and Mac, they're not technical enough to harden their VPN connection further; may be they could've easily obfuscated it more and it would've worked.

hnfong

20 hours ago

The GFW being more lenient for tourists (esp. their foreign mobile plan) checks out with the stories I hear too. I'm guessing the less touristy places don't have "support" for these "exceptions" so they get a degraded experience there.

Quiark

a day ago

It's possible it worked in the past and doesn't work any more.

eqvinox

a day ago

This is what IPsec TFS is for [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9347/]

> the focus in this document is to enhance IP Traffic Flow Security (IP-TFS) by adding Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TFC) to encrypted IP-encapsulated traffic. TFC is provided by obscuring the size and frequency of IP traffic using a fixed-size, constant-send-rate IPsec tunnel

(If they block a constant rate stream, that'll hit a whole ton of audio/video streaming setups)

kimixa

a day ago

So they'll just block any constant rate stream that isn't containing AV data or a whilelisted streaming service.

drdaeman

a day ago

> TLS connections start with a TLS Client Hello message, and the first three bytes of this message cause the GFW to exempt the connection from blocking.

ykl

a day ago

Give it a try if you want; it doesn't work. For TLS traffic they track what the connection looks like over time; a TLS connection for normal web traffic versus a VPN connection tunneling through TLS apparently look different enough that they can detect and cut it off.

moduspol

a day ago

Worth noting is that OpenVPN’s TCP TLS mode does not work that way. It’s essentially the UDP protocol messages except wrapped into TCP. The initial handshake is not a normal TLS client hello.

Not sure about other SSL VPNs.

77pt77

a day ago

> it's basically not possible to run any kind of output VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore.

What if you run your own HTTPS server that look semi-legitimate and just encapsulate it in that traffic?

Can they still detect it?

What about a VPS in HK? Is this even doable?

tossit444

a day ago

v2ray and similar servers do exactly that, and I would assume they're still working as they're actively developed.

77pt77

a day ago

Which is ridiculous because OpenVPN is trivial to identify, even when over TCP since it's different from "regular" HTTPS/SSL traffic.

Why they chose this I have no idea.

You can even port share.

443 -> Web server for HTTPS traffic 443 -> OpenVPN for OpenVPN traffic

Still trivial to identify and not uncommon for even public WiFi to do so.

Since I changed to tailscale+headscale with my own derp server all these issues have disappeared (for now).

moduspol

a day ago

It’s basically the same as the UDP mode, except wrapped into TCP. Presumably because that’s simpler than redesigning it from the ground up for TCP.

So the handshake and such will not look like a normal TLS handshake.

Havoc

19 hours ago

>the state can't easily differentiate

2 days ago

Australia 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.

GlacierFox

2 days ago

I would have laughed in your face if you wrote this comment merely 6 months ago. Now I'm just depressed. (UK)

xandrius

a day ago

How were you not aware of UK precedents in surveillance and blocking Internet connections before 6 months ago?

In my books, the UK is the father of Orwellian censorship and surveillance, they just didn't get down to do it completely (yet).

jll29

2 days ago

When ES leaked his info to the Guardian people, they could still (2013) use the Guardian's US base to publish, protected by the US' stronger freedom of speech laws. Now, in 2025, if the same were to happen again, I'm not sure that would work quite the same way, with Trump aggressively taking American citizens' rights away.

Maybe The Guardian should open a branch in Sealand...

SlowTao

a day ago

It was David Graeber that said we should be wary of places like The Guardian. They are a wolf in sheeps clothing. Used a lot of the more liberal momentum of the early 2010s combined with promoting some of the more left leaning writters to gain a fair bit of clout. But underneath, they will conform to the power structures if it comes down to survival. Alas, they nay not be a Sealand edition although that would be neat.

lyu07282

17 hours ago

This was made really obvious since the Gaza genocide began, the guardian was pushing propaganda really hard like everybody else, but now public opinion has shifted enough to the point that continued total denial of reality would cost the guardian more credibility so there was a noticable shift in the way they talk about it now. This way they can preserve some credibility for the next time they need to push propaganda on other fronts.

in the US the NYT is similar, they will sometimes allow stuff get published to manufacture credibility for when they actually need it. Like see the Iraq war for example.

whimsicalism

> It’s working fantastic.

The ignorance of what's been happening the last few months is ridiculous. Trump and his people have successfully pressured, or denied access, or removed security clearances, or demonetized (public broadcasting), or directly fired, or just called out to cause a hate-storm from his supporters, companies, organizations, individuals.

Oh sure, it is different from the UK: Instead of technical blocks and surveillance this administration targets people and organizations directly.

https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/paramount...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/11/us-journalist-dropp...

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/07/media/trump-cnn-press-con...

https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/11/the-media-fe...

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/g-s1-51489/voice-of-america-b...

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corporate-media-caves-t...

dyauspitr

a day ago

Yeah just physical suppression with active military patrolling major cities.

dyauspitr

a day ago

Only to watch the GOP completely disregard every aspect of it.

SlowTao

a day ago

In oz personally and yes, I warned folks of this a few years back, especially in the 12 months or so. Every time I was met with a fair bit of push back.

They would argue back on technical merits, I was talking political, a politics doesn't give a damn about the tech. We have slowly been going down this path for a while now.

“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” - PM Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.

dijit

2 days ago

Don't worry, you shouldn't underestimate the capability of society.

I grew up in a pretty deprived area of the UK, and we all knew "a guy" who could get you access to free cable, or shim your electric line to bypass the meter, or get you pirated CD's and VHS' and whatever.

There will always be "that guy down the pub" selling raspberry pi's with some deranged outdated firmware that runs a proxy for everything in the house or whatever. To be honest with you, I might end up being that guy for a bunch of people once I'm laid off from tech like the rest. :)

int_19h

2 days ago

Normally I would agree with you, but the ability to pull this kind of thing off hinges on there being enough shadows that the Eye doesn't look at for prolonged periods of time. And the overall trajectory of technological advance lately is such that those shadows are rapidly shrinking. First it was the street cameras (and UK is already one of the most enthusiastic adopters in the world). And now comes AI which can automatically sift through all the mined data, performing sentiment analysis etc. I feel that the time will come pretty soon when "a guy" will need to be so adept at concealing the tracks in order to avoid detection that most people wouldn't have access to one.

dijit

2 days ago

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.

alisonatwork

a day ago

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 unpredictability around who will be arrested and for what reason, it acts as a chilling effect for everyone who values some degree of stability in their lives. So the arc of dodgy Daves bends toward compliance.

nomilk

a day ago

Very well explained

ljsprague

2 days ago

It's not that they couldn't handle the rape gangs; it's that they turned a blind eye towards them.

isaacremuant

a day ago

The eye doesn't care as long as you're not politically efficient in opposing their narratives or power.

Authoritarianism in the UK doesn't correlate with crime. The economy does.

The point of these things is not really to help citizens. "there's no money for that" like there's no money for healthcare or education (although there is for bombings in foreign countries). The point is protecting power from any threat that could mount against it.

SlowTao

a day ago

I think both sides of this are fair. Power is interested in stability of itself, to keeps its back to the wall so that nobody can sneak up on it. But also political power has teamed up with corporate power/determination to create a far more nasty beast.

Seeing companies like Palantir (and many lesser known ones) buddy up to everyone that wants it, its a clear statement on how they want to monitor and control the populace.

Long term I don't think it can be done, but the pain mid term can be vast.

jama211

2 days ago

That absolutely sounds like a world I should be worried about, where our only choices are dodgy ones

Ray20

2 days ago

Don't worry, you shouldn't underestimate the capability of society.

You should be worried. Don't underestimate the capabilities of the government bureaucrats. That "guys down the pub" will quickly disappear once they start getting jail time for their activities.

doix

2 days ago

I think you really overestimate the capability of the UK to enforce laws. Yes, they can write them and yes they can fine large corporations, that's basically it.

They cannot enforce laws against such "petty" crimes, the reason society mostly functions in the UK is because most people don't try to break the law.

Pretty sure the local punters would kick the cops out if they came for one of their own, especially if he got them their porn back.

marcus_holmes

a day ago

> They cannot enforce laws against such "petty" crimes

No, they aren't interested in enforcing laws against petty crimes. The establishment literally don't give a toss if someone breaks into your house and nicks your telly.

They are very interested in enforcing the kinds of infringements we're talking about here.

wiredpancake

a day ago

What do you mean? They already arrest thousands of people a year for posting (or even retweeting) things online in the UK.

What makes you think, if the Gov was to implement some sophisticated DPI firewall that blocks a million different things, they won't come after the people who circumvent it? They already enforce petty crimes. I could report you for causing me anxiety and you would have a copper show up at your door.

Ray20

2 days ago

It's not just about UK abilities to enforce laws, but also about other factors. The described activities are extremely unattractive as criminal: small market, small margin, the need for planning, preparation and qualification.

There is no need for special efforts to enforce the law. Put a few people in jail - and everyone else will quickly find safer and more legal ways to spend their time. No one will do something like that unless they are confident of their impunity.

mikestorrent

2 days ago

Yes, it's also dystopian to pin one's future on such hopes. People need to stick it to the government and demand their freedoms. Far too many things are being forced on us in the West that go against fundamental values that have been established for centuries.

Somehow, things that could be unifying protests where the working class of every political stripe are able to overlook their differences and push back against government never seem to happen. It is always polarized so that it's only ever one side at a time, and the other side is against them. How does that work?

nemomarx

2 days ago

Reflex. People's opinion on a subject changes if you tell them which political group supports it, sometimes even if they get asked twice in a row. Tribal identity determines ideology more than the other way around for a lot of people.

So as soon as Labour comes out for something, Cons are inclined to be against it and so on. The only way to have neutral protests is if no one visibly backs them and they don't become associated with a side, but then how do they get support and organization?

mikestorrent

13 hours ago

I've seen a technique where you tell someone $politician_they_hate is doing X, and they'll get mad - then you reveal the news story where it's actually $politician_they_love and the cognitive dissonance usually results in the anger getting redirected towards you for tricking them.

13 hours ago

Seems to vary greatly by region, of course. Where I live, we barely had anything you could call a lockdown, but they got really insistent about vax passports for restaurants etc.

Sometimes I think about that: vax aside, they actually managed to provision trusted certificates for a huge percentage of the population in a short period of time. Could have actually been useful for online ID, though we know of the dangers there; but look, here I am signing into my government's website using my bank as a 3rd party IDP. Shouldn't I sign into the bank using the gov't instead??

isaacremuant

a day ago

People assess real risk all the time. The fact that you had to punish people and make them do performative acts was hygiene theater.

You're the kind of person that said that "measures didn't work because we didn't close hard enough, if we do 2 weeks of REAL lockdown...". It's ridiculous. You have absolutely no perspective of how the world work and how things break, people need health, food, working pipes.

You have an absolutely authoritarian mindset and an inability to asses risk. You also have deep contempt for your fellow human being who are "not deserving of democracy".

Lastly, it's funny to hear you admit this pandemic wasn't lethal because people don't actually comply the way you want, which means that the actions were theater and unneeded.

multjoy

18 hours ago

Lol, if you like.

Individually, the people of the UK are generally kind, thoughtful and considerate. As a mob, they're an absolute nightmare especially when wankers like Fox and Corbyn get involved.

Anyone who thinks otherwise has never had to tell people 'no'.

>Lastly, it's funny to hear you admit this pandemic wasn't lethal because people don't actually comply the way you want, which means that the actions were theater and unneeded

This pandemic was lethal, but it wasn't bubonic plague lethal. When we get something that cuts like a knife through hot butter, you'll soon be holed up inside screaming at strangers through the letterbox.

mikestorrent

13 hours ago

> Individually, the people of the UK are generally kind, thoughtful and considerate. As a mob, they're an absolute nightmare especially when wankers like Fox and Corbyn get involved.

This is true everywhere, mobs devolve us to primate behaviour; if you've been in a crowd that ever got angry, you know this - it drives the hindbrain in amazing and terrifying ways. Happy crowds can give you elation you'll never feel anywhere else; angry crowds can make a man kill, even though normally he'd never dream of it.

Of course, most countries don't need to have Anti-Social Behavioural Orders or ban people from buying butter knives, so there's something else going on in the UK that is a bit harder to put a finger on.

primitivesuave

a day ago

I suppose that for this case, an underground black market of VPN providers might emerge - average individuals setting up VPN software on a cloud service provider, and then selling monthly access to people. Aside from the obvious danger of getting ripped off (someone might put you on a slow shared VPN with many other people, or shut down the server at any time), there is also the possibility of someone monitoring all your Internet activity.

nomilk

a day ago

I'd default assume black market VPNs will monitor internet activity since it's both easy and profitable

2 days ago

It has been my impression that in UK, both parties are strongly authoritarian, with the sole difference being what kinds of speech and expression, precisely, they want to police.

cherryteastain

2 days ago

Labour supported it but it was proposed and passed by Parliament in 2023 during the Tory government

SlowTao

a day ago

Yep, here in Australia the social media age restriction was pushed through by both sides. Two sides of the same coin.

nomilk

2 days ago

Both the major Australian parties (Liberal and Labor) seem as spineless as each other.

They're being pushed by media conglomerates News Corp and Nine Entertainment [0] to crush competition (social media apps). With the soon-to-be-introduced 'internet licence' (euphemism: 'age verification'), and it's working. If they ban VPN's, it will make social media apps even more burdensome to access and use.

[0] News Corp and Nine Entertainment together own 90% of Australian print media, and are hugely influential in radio, digital and paid and free-to-air TV. They have a lot to gain by removing access to social media apps, where many (especially young) people get their information now days.

SlowTao

a day ago

How long until they produce an generative AI version of Burt Newton to do new episodes of 20 to 1 based on some social media slop?

Yep, not a great time line here.

hdgvhicv

2 days ago

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

necovek

a day ago

Hopefully, as a reader, you can see through the 90% and only really trust the 10% who provide factual reporting.

As with any source, always question what you are being offered: is this video clip full, what preceded it, what followed it? Who else confirms this person said this or experienced that?

RansomStark

2 days ago

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.

p_j_w

a day ago

> Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.

Both matter.

Barrin92

2 days ago

>Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you

In an age of mass media (where there's a video for anything) or now one step further synthetic media knowing who makes something is much more important than the content, given that what's being shown can be created on demand. Propaganda in the modern world is taking something that actually happened, and then framing it as an authentic piece of information found "on the street", twisting its context.

"what's in the video" is now largely pointless, and anyone who isn't gullible will obviously always focus on where the promoter of any material wants to direct the audiences attention to, or what they want to deflect from.

weberer

17 hours ago

2 days ago

- 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 Mullvad, costs some money.

- Your own VPSs with Wireguard/Tailscale. Pros: max control, you control how fast you want it, you can share with people you care about (and are willing to support). Cons: the admin effort isn't huge but requires some skill, cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting.

codethief

2 days ago

> - Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes

Tailscale is completely unnecessary here, unless OP can't connect to Mullvad.net in the first place to sign up. But if the Indonesian government blocks Mullvad nodes, they'll be out of luck either way.

> - Your own VPSs with Wireguard/Tailscale

Keep in mind that from the POV of any websites you visit, you will be easily identifiable due to your static IP.

My suggestion would be to rent a VPS outside Indonesia, set up Mullvad or Tor on the VPS and route all traffic through that VPS (and thereby through Mullvad/Tor). The fastest way to set up the latter across devices is probably to use the VPS as Tailscale exit node.

jkaplowitz

2 days ago

Tailscale + Mullvad does have a privacy advantage over either one by itself: the party that could potentially spy on the VPN traffic (Mullvad) doesn’t know whose traffic it is beyond that it’s a Tailscale customer. Any government who wanted to trace specific traffic back to OP would need to get the cooperation of both Mullvad and Tailscale, which is a lot less likely than even the quite unlikely event of getting Mullvad to cooperate.

codethief

a day ago

a day ago

They recommend Tailscale in particular. Tailscale control plane and DERPs (which are functionally required on mobile) will be among the first to go.

a day ago

> cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting

Like I've written here.

VPS in EU with 2GB RAM, 40 GB disk and >1TB a month of traffic go for $10 PER YEAR!

https://billing.chunkserve.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0

https://my.servitro.com/cart.php?a=view

https://manager.ouiheberg.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0

cm2187

2 days ago

or simply RDP into a windows VPS.

dingi

2 days ago

> cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting.

$4/month VPS from DigitalOcean is more than enough to handle a few users as per my experience. I have a Wireguard setup like this for more than a year. Didn't notice any issues.

rd07

a day ago

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/.

a day ago

As a long-standing supporter of Internet freedoms in Russia, I could advise you to use multiple tools at the same time, to avoid them being blocked.

What would probably work UNLESS they roll out pretty sophisticated DPI that could block by signatures and do active probing:

1. AmneziaVPN (https://amneziavpn.org) - they have the hosted option, or you could run your own on a cheap VPS (preferable). They use Xray/REALITY or a variant of Wireguard with extra padding that confuses DPIs. Should be good enough.

2. Psiphon

3. Lantern

4. Sometimes Tailscale works surprisingly well (even in Russia where they have advanced DPI systems!)

Here's a link to several Tor browser mirrors for you so you could download the VPN software itself:

https://mirror.freedif.org/TorProject/

https://mirrors.mit.edu/torproject/download/

A couple of Tor bridges in case Tor is blocked:

  webtunnel [2001:db8:9947:43ae:8228:97b7:7bd:2c2e]:443 6E6A3FCB09506A05CC8E0D05C7FEA1F5DA803412 url=https://nx2.nexusocean.link ver=0.0.1
  webtunnel [2001:db8:a436:6460:fa7b:318:4e8e:9de3]:443 F76C85011FD8C113AA00960BD9FC7F5B66F726A2 url=https://disobey.net/vM8i19mU4gvHOzRm33DaBNuM ver=0.0.2

jszymborski

2 days ago

a day ago

I doubt that is the case once you do statistical analysis of it.

Advanced VPN tunneling protocols, for example, have to take a lot of special measures to conceal their nature from China's and Russia's deep packet inspecting firewalls.

nine_k

2 days ago

XRay / XTLS-Reality / VLESS work rather fine, and is said to be very hard to detect, even in China.

I followed [1] to set up my own proxy, which works pretty fine. More config examples may be helpful, e.g. [2].

2 days ago

I'm currently traveling in Uzbekistan and am surprised that wireguard as a protocol is just blocked. I use wireguard with my own server, because usually governments just block well known VPN providers and a small individual server is fine.

It's the first time I've encountered where the entire protocol is just blocked. Worth checking what is blocked and how before deciding which VPN provider to use.

bryanlarsen

2 days ago

We've had success using wireguard over wstunnel in places where wireguard is blocked.

https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel

vehemenz

2 days ago

This looks great, thanks.

bryanlarsen

a day ago

I should have mentioned that our use case isn't avoiding government firewalls, it's transiting through broken network environments.

VTimofeenko

2 days ago

WireGuard by itself has a pretty noticeable network pattern and I don't think they make obfuscating it a goal.

There are some solutions that mimic the traffic and, say, route it through 443/TCP.

daveidol

2 days ago

Wow, kinda crazy to think about a government blocking a protocol that just simply lets two computers talk securely over a tunnel.

mikestorrent

2 days ago

Well, think about it - almost every other interaction you can have with an individual in another country is mediated by government. Physical interaction? You need to get through a border and customs. Phone call? Going through their exchanges, could be blocked, easy to spy on with wiretaps. Letter mail? Many cases historically of all letters being opened before being forwarded along.

We lived through the golden age of the Internet where anyone was allowed to open a raw socket connection to anyone else, anywhere. That age is fading, now, and time may come where even sending an email to someone in Russia or China will be fraught with difficulty. Certainly encryption will be blocked.

We're going to need steganographic tech that uses AI-hallucinated content as a carrier, or something.

roscas

2 days ago

That is how you know they haven't got a clue on what they're doing.

tsimionescu

a day ago

On the contrary, it shows that they know very well what they're doing. Their goal is censorship. If that disrupts connectivity for some niche but valid use cases, so be it. The vast majority of people have never used a WireGuard tunnel, so they are unimpacted. Some corporate use cases that even that government would approve of are disrupted, but they can either lie with that or have a whitelist. Most non-corporate use of this and other similar protocols is not something the government would allow.

So, given their nefarious goal, they are doing a great job by blocking WireGuard (and similar protocols, presumably).

Flere-Imsaho

2 days ago

> surprised that wireguard as a protocol is just blocked.

akho

a day ago

xray is a proxy. They may have needed an actual VPN.

a day ago

Hey there – greetings from one of the most heavily censored regions in the world.

I once considered using an Indonesian VPS to bypass my country's censorship. However, the Indonesian VPS provider actually refused my direct connection request from my country. I was quite frustrated at the time, wondering why they refused me. But now I understand – it turns out these two countries are in cahoots.

Emmm, if you want to break through the censorship, you can start here: https://github.com/free-nodes/v2rayfree

It provides many free proxy nodes that are almost unusable in my country, but might work in Indonesia (although you may need a lot of patience to test which ones actually work).

A good proxy software is Clash.Meta for Linux (you’ll need to install Linux on Windows using VMware, then set up Clash.Meta).

You can start by installing the Windows version of the proxy client software (V2rayN) for a simple way to bypass censorship, but it's not a long-term solution.

A special reminder: these free nodes are not secure (they could very well be "honeypot" lines, but if you're not from my country, the police should have no way of dealing with you). You need to quickly set up your own route by purchasing a U.S. VPS and setting up your own proxy nodes.

Lastly, I recommend a good teacher: ChatGPT. It will solve all the problems you encounter on Linux. Also, use the Chrome browser with translation.

Good luck!

cogman10

a day ago

IMO, the safest route for an individual with tech competency is to setup a small instance server in the cloud outside your country and use ssh port forwarding and a proxy to get at information you want.

jauntywundrkind

2 days ago

Nations severing peoples connections to the world is awful. I'm so sorry for the chaos in general, and the state doing awful things both.

Go on https://lowendbox.com and get a cheap cheap cheap VPS. Use ssh SOCKS proxy in your browser to send web traffic through it.

Very unfancy, a 30+ year old solution, but uses such primitive internet basics that it will almost certainly never fail. Builtin to everything but Windows (which afaik doesn't have an ssh client built-in).

Tailscale is also super fantastic.

int_19h

2 days ago

> uses such primitive internet basics that it will almost certainly never fail.

It already fails in China and Russia. Simply tunneling HTTP through SSH is too easy to detect with DPI.

2 days ago

Hey, I went to take a look at Obscura and I like the ideas but I can't find the source code.

You are making some bold claims but without the source I can't verify those claims.

Any plans to open-source it?

dongcarl

2 days ago

2 days ago

I would recommend Psiphon [1,2] most (all?) of their code is open source and their main goal is to get around censorship blocks. They do have some crypto side projects but the main product is very solid.

[1] https://psiphon.ca/ [2] https://github.com/Psiphon-Inc

adam-p

a day ago

State censorship circumvention is exactly what Psiphon is for! So yes, try it.

(Disclaimer: I work there.)

jszymborski

2 days ago

Folks who are looking to bypass censorship, and those who live in countries where their internet connection is not currently censored who would like to help, can look to https://snowflake.torproject.org/

yogorenapan

2 days ago

WireGuard should still work. Tons of different providers. I trust Mullvad but ProtonVPN has a free tier. If they start blocking WireGuard, check out v2ray and xray-core. If those get blocked... that means somehow they're restricting all HTTPS traffic going out of the country

Arubis

2 days ago

If you can still get SSH access and can establish an account with a VPS provider with endpoints outside your country of origin, https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand is a little long in the tooth but may still be viable.

kccqzy

2 days ago

Tunneling via SSH (ssh -D) is super easy to detect. The government doesn't need any sophisticated analysis to tell SSH connections for tunneling from SSH connections where a human is typing into a terminal.

Countries like China have blocked SSH-based tunneling for years.

It can also block sessions based on packet sizes: a typical web browsing session involves a short HTTP request and a long HTTP response, during which the receiving end sends TCP ACKs; but if the traffic traffic mimics the above except these "ACKs" are a few dozen bytes larger than a real ACK, it knows you are tunneling over a different protocol. This is how it detects the vast majority of VPNs.

Havoc

19 hours ago

>Tunneling via SSH (ssh -D) is super easy to detect.

Mind elaborating on a how level how they'd distinguish? Just volume of it?

kccqzy

16 hours ago

More like ML classification based on packet sizes and time deltas.

mnw21cam

2 days ago

One alternative would be to set up a VPS, run VNC on it, run your browser on that to access the various web sites, and connect over an SSH tunnel to the VNC instance. Then it actually is an interactive ssh session.

galaxy_gas

a day ago

Anything more then small text bandwidth use is also detected . Not about interactivity instead this case

beeflet

a day ago

You could just run links or some text-based browser on the other side.

Perhaps you could also write a script that would mimic typing over the link.

bsimpson

2 days ago

15 years ago, I was using EC2 at work, and realized it was surprisingly easy to SSH into it in a way where all my traffic went through EC2. I could watch local Netflix when traveling. It was a de facto VPN.

Details are not at the top of my mind these years later, but you can probably rig something up yourself that looks like regular web dev shit and not a known commercial VPN. I think there was a preference in Firefox or something.

mikestorrent

2 days ago

jhanschoo

2 days ago

Generally speaking, the general population that wants to use blocked services will develop enough technical know-how to circumvent it. The biggest risk is that there are bad actors giving malicious advice and to such learners, looking to defraud or otherwise exploit them.

VortexLain

2 days ago

The most effective solution is to use X-ray/V2ray with VLESS, or VMESS, or Trojan as a protocol.

Another obfuscated solution is Amnezia

If you are not ready to set up your own VPN server and need any kind of connection right now, try Psiphon, but it's a proprietary centralized service and it's not the best solution.

Nextgrid

2 days ago

Furthermore, you can always run another VPN on top of that if you don’t trust the outer one with the actual plaintext traffic.

05

a day ago

Not on mobile - iOS doesn't support nested VPNs, and neither does stock Android.

antonios

a day ago

As a quick solution before implementing the more sophisticated suggestions in this thread, you can try getting a small cheap VPS from somewhere outside and trafficking all your traffic through it via sshuttle[1]. For example, Vultr (not an endorsement) has some with ~$3/month that should be sufficient for your case.

[1] https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

rthnbgrredf

2 days ago

In case known VPN providers are blocked you can pick a small VPS from a hoster like Hetzner and setup your own VPN.

a day ago

I work often in China. I somehow haven’t had my WireGuard VPN back to my own home server blocked, yet. It’s pointed to a domain that also hosts some HTTPS web services so that might help.

Prior to this, pre-Covid I used to use shadowsocks hosted on a DO droplet. Shadowsocks with obfs, or a newer equivalent (v2ray w/ vmess or vless protocol) and obfs (reality seems to be the current hotness) will probably work within Indonesia given their blocking will be way less sophisticated than China. The difference here is that it’s a proxy, not a VPN, but it makes it a lot easier to obfuscate its true nature than a VPN which stands out because obfuscation isn’t in its design.

Hosting on big public VPSs can be double edged. On one hand, blocking DO or AWS is huge collateral. On the other, it’s an obvious VPN endpoint and can help identify the type of traffic as something to block.

If you have access to reddit, r/dumbclub (believe it or not) has some relatively current info but it’s pretty poor signal to noise. Scratch around there for some leads though.

Note that this stuff is all brittle as hell to set up and I usually have a nightmarish time duct-taping it all together. That’s why I’m overjoyed my WireGuard tunnel has worked whenever I’ve visited for a year now.

One other left-field option, depending on your cost appetite, is a roaming SIM. Roaming by design tunnels all data back to your own ISP before routing out so even in China roaming SIMs aren’t blocked. It’s a very handy backup if you need a clear link to ssh into a box to set up the above, for example.

rieslingspecial

2 days ago

This might not be the case for Indonesia currently, but for countries like Russia, China, Iran most of the mentioned solutions will not work. I've had to evade Russian censorship for years now - the censors (Roskomnadzor) use DPI and other means of classifying network traffic, and currently the following things are outright blocked:

- Tor

- Wireguard and derivatives (incl. Mullvad, Tailscale, ProtonVPN)

- OpenVPN

- Shadowsocks (incl. Outline)

What still works is Xray-core [1] with vless and Reality protocols, whatever those mean. Xray-core is an innovation over v2ray [2]. v2ray might also still work, but I've never tried it. If you have the capacity to run your own VPS, the simplest solution would be to install the 3x-ui [3], which is something like "Xray-core with a simple to use UI in a single package ready-to-use", but you'd also need to setup some basic security measures and a firewall.

For those technically inclined, here [4] is a rough ansible playbook to install 3x-ui on a blank Debian machine. Additional configuration will be needed in the UI itself, there is a lot of online tutorials, and I link to one of them in [5] (in Russian, unfortunately). Don't just trust me blindly, please review before running!

There are also commercial xray-aware VPN providers, but I wouldn't publicly vouch for any of them.

I found it very strange that there is not much info on HN about xray and v2ray, and I also hope it stays this way for most of the people here and not here. However, we live in a weird reality and have to actively engage in such an arms race now.

As a side note, if anyone here has quality info about security of the xray-core implementation, I'd be happy to get familiar. I didn't look at the code myself and still am slightly suspicious, but oh well it works :shrug:

[1]: https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core

[2]: https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core

[3]: https://github.com/MHSanaei/3x-ui/

[4]: https://pastebin.com/DjFQ8c6Z

[5]: https://habr.com/ru/articles/731608/

nneonneo

a day ago

An expensive but functional option is to enable roaming on a foreign eSIM. Getting an eSIM is relatively easy. Roaming mobile traffic is routed from the country in which the SIM is from, not the country that you're in, meaning that an eSIM from e.g. an American carrier will not be subject to the censorship in your country.

I've used this on multiple trips to China over the past decade (including a trip last year). You can find carriers that will charge very low (or even no) roaming rates.

gck1

a day ago

Data-only eSIMs (e.g. ones you get from Airalo and apps like that) are not going to cut it though. You need a "full" eSIM that gives you a real number and even then, it's not a guarantee that your traffic will be routed via the country eSIM is from. Tello does route (or rather, exit) via US for example, but it's 2¢/MB.

Chinese forums / blogs have a lot of information about this stuff. I usually ask ChatGPT to translate "Research topic re: some form of circumvention and give me forum posts and blog posts about it" to Chinese, then paste that into DeepSeek with search enabled and just let Chrome translate the responses. Does a really good job. At least better than what I can manage with Baidu.

andunie

a day ago

I don't know if these work or not for the specific case mentioned here, but the cheapest eSIMs by a huge margin are from https://silent.link/ if anyone is interested. They definitely do work under normal internet circumstances.

notpushkin

a day ago

You can go way cheaper than that – https://esimdb.com/ has a good comparison of options. I’m usually paying sub-$1/GB in Southeast Asia currently.

andunie

a day ago

Wow, that is crazy. These prices are hard to believe.

lifeisstillgood

a day ago

I’m not sure this is the right conversation right now, but is this thread heading towards “how do we make totalitarian governments become liberal democracies?”

It’s a nice technical question on how to run a VPN but the ultimate goal is not the best technical solution but the ability to avoid detection by the state. And that’s not a technical problem but an opsec one

If someone is participating in online discussions (discord and twitter) to spread local news - then it’s hard to know who is who, and who to trust - and that’s kind of the why Arab spring did not spring “hey wear a red carnation and meet me by the corner” can become a death sentence

The answer to opsec is avoid all digital comms - but at this point you are seriously into “regieme change”, or just as Eastern Europe did, keep your heads down for forty years and hope those who leave you economically behind will half bankrupt them selves bringing you back.

I think in the end, a thriving middle class with a sufficient amount of land reform, wealth taxes which can over a generation push for liberalisation sounds a good idea.

Our job in the very lucky liberal West is to keep what our forefathers won, and then push it further to show why our values are worth the sacrifice in copying

Ylpertnodi

a day ago

> Our job in the very lucky liberal West is to keep what our forefathers won, and then push it further to show why our values are worth the sacrifice in copying

Would it be possible for you to 'keep what our forefathers won', and then just stay at home?

inkyoto

a day ago

> Our job in the very lucky liberal West is to keep what our forefathers won, and then push it further to show why our values are worth the sacrifice in copying

teekert

2 days ago

What is going on if you don’t mind my asking? Our local news does not mention anything. Nor does ddging help? Any sources?

nograpes

2 days ago

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.

jacobgkau

2 days ago

> 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 many other countries.

This caught my attention more:

> Indonesia passed a law in March allowing for the military to assume more civilian posts, while this month the government announced 100 new military battalions that will be trained in agriculture and animal husbandry. In July the government said the military would also start manufacturing pharmaceuticals.

They're replacing civilian industry with military, apparently not out of any emergency requirement but just to benefit the military with jobs (and the government with control over those sectors) at the expense of civilian jobs.

ToValueFunfetti

a day ago

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.

breve

a day ago

You 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.

protocolture

a day ago

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.

breve

a day ago

Nope. The outside doesn't matter. The problem is on the inside. External websites will never fix the internal problem.

There are no technical solutions to what is fundamentally a problem of political culture.

protocolture

a day ago

>External websites will never fix the internal problem.

Except the internal problem is censoring internal information sources. They can only trust external sites to remain neutral.

Not to mention that, politically and historically speaking, there are so many examples of revolutionaries needing to go overseas to organize. The Bolshies literally got started in a London pub.

breve

a day ago

Nope. They can simply talk to each other. I talk to people inside Indonesia routinely. I do it via SMS, via the phone, via iMessage, via Microsoft Teams. It's not difficult.

You're not understanding the circumstances on a practical level. All you're doing is running away from the work to solve the fundamental political problem and that avoidance won't solve anything.

protocolture

a day ago

>All you're doing is running away from the work

I feel like you have some weird moral hangup with needing/using non local resources that wont be resolved with any application of logic or reference to facts. Its nice that you have formed some weird worldview but its not really reality and it doesnt fit into it, so no need to make it anyone elses problem really.

Edit: Also last time I checked iMessage and Teams are also hosted outside of indonesia.

a day ago

Wireguard or OpenVPN might work, if someone has a server set up, set up your client to connect.

If those don't work you can try something like wssocks (https://github.com/genshen/wssocks) or wstunnel (https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel). It tunnels connections through WebSockets, so you can make the connection look like a regular HTTPS connection. Another option would just be a regular-old HTTPS proxy (Nginx, Apache2, etc). Set up an HTTPS proxy somewhere on the internet, connect through it, but configure it to return a regular web page if someone tries to make a non-proxy connection through it. Another tool that may help setting up is chisel (https://github.com/jpillora/chisel). Those HTTPS ones may work if, when authorities connect to the host, it returns pages that look like some kind of private video server. (Maybe run an actual video server, in addition to the proxy...) Also, try to enforce TLS 1.3 for the HTTPS server.

And another option, if all else fails, is to run a straight-up SOCKS proxy over the internet, on a weird port. It might be so obvious they aren't looking for it.

To mask your DNS requests with the SOCKS proxy, use something like Tor-DNS (https://github.com/bfix/Tor-DNS), or set up a VPN through the SOCKS proxy and use DNS through that route. Another option is DNS-over-HTTPS.

qwezxcrty

Thanks for the link!

Is there any good DoT/DoH DNS resolver that works well in China? I know I can build one myself, but forwarding all DNS requests to my home server in NA slows down all connections...

paddlesteamer

a day ago

Years ago, I created a very basic HTTP proxy using Google Cloud. The idea relies on Google Cloud wouldn't be blocked because the industry in that country probably also needs Google Cloud to function, so the government couldn't touch it.

You can see it here: https://github.com/paddlesteamer/gcrproxy. I don't know whether it works or not (maybe something has changed; it is very old code), but the idea beneath it remains. And I think it is also applicable to other cloud services, too. Cheaper (even free to some point) than having your own VPS.

arewethereyeta

2 days ago

Give Trojan proxy a try. It's supposed to go unnoticed since it works on the https port 443. Something like: https://www.anonymous-proxies.net/products/residential-troja... If you get it with a residential IP is even better. Works great in Iran and China and i suspect will wotk great for you too

swe_dima

2 days ago

figassis

a day ago

The thing about fighting against vpn blocks is that if you win, the govt can just turn off the internet. Something like starlink would be ideal in these circumstances, but you'd have to have the receivers in the country before lockdown.

rkomorn

a day ago

Assuming something like Starlink doesn't cooperate with shutting down in the country just like the land-based ISPs would.

GJim

a day ago

Thereby entrusting your internet connectivity to the whims of an unhinged lunatic.

tmarsden

17 hours ago

Well that "unhinged lunatic" has also publicly characterized himself as a "free speech absolutist" so until someone or something better comes along you take what you can get.

Jigsy

2 days ago

I was wondering something like this but in a different capacity.

What with certain countries (they know who they are) and their hatred for encryption, it got me wondering how people would communicate securely if - for example - Signal/WhatsApp/etc. pulled out and the country wound up disconnecting the submarine cables to "keep $MORAL_PANIC_OF_THE_DAY safe."

How would people communicate securely and privately in a domestic situation like that?

RansomStark

2 days ago

In person or not at all.

At that point you've essentially lost.

2 days ago

Right, that makes sense. Did some looking up and nonfree press seems to be indeed the case for Indonesia: https://rsf.org/en/country/indonesia

It's a mixed bag apparently, free press is technically legal since 1998 but selective prosecution and harassment of those actually uncovering issues (mainly becomes clear in the last section, "Safety")

Tried looking up Serbia next on that website but got a cloudflare block. I'm a robot now...

wafflemaker

2 days ago

It's not a dumb question at all. Level on hn really got down lately if you're getting downvoted.

Think about it Aachen. If the government has enough power to censor internet traffic, that what was the first thing it censored? Which media is traditionally known for being censored or just speaking propaganda? That's the classical newspapers. It's not uncommon in authoritarian countries for editors to need state to sign off on the day's paper. And if not that, articles are signed and publishers are known. They will auto-censor to avoid problems. Just like creators on YouTube don't comment on this one country's treatment of civilians to avoid problems.

mensetmanusman

a day ago

Western governments should have entire budgets focused on software to circumvent great firewalls.

lubosm

a day ago

VPN services are just someone else's computers. Any cloud provider with a low performance virtual machine can become a VPN gateway using Linux distribution of your choice for around $4.

OpenVPN or WireGuard are my tools of choice. Professionally, I also use OpenVPN's EasyRSA PKI framework for certificates, but you can just generate your keys using any tutorial out there. "OpenVPN Cookbook" ebook from Packt is my go to source. For performance reasons, WireGuard is better.

ACCount37

2 days ago

AmneziaWG is a decent option for censorship resistance, and it can be installed as a container on your own server.

o999

2 days ago

AmneziaWG clients works just fine with normal Wireguard servers by the way.

ryzvonusef

2 days ago

I live in Pakistan and two years back we had this exact same problem, (election interference) and frankly, you just try to scrape through solutions, but without an answerable government, there is little you can do.

We tried things like Proton VPN and Windscribe VPN, as well as enabling MT proxy on Telegram, but soon govts find it easier to just mass ban internet access.

Use Netblocks.org to analyse the level of internet blockage and try to react accordingly.

notorandit

21 hours ago

I would use SSH dynamic TCP forwarding (-D). Then use "SOCKSv5" proxy configuration in your browsers and in your apps (if that's supported). You can hve remote SSH server listen on different ports and IPv6. Maybe speed and latency will not be the best, but it'd be OK. Simple and easy.

fastnetnet

2 days ago

Try some of the more niche VPN protocols like IKEv2/IPSec or zinc.

SSH over socks is another option or you can run your own proxy server, nobody will ever know... This makes me wonder if you cannot just run OpenVPN on a different port like 443 since it's also TLS based.

raugustinus

20 hours ago

There's https://refraction.network/ but I am not sure how feasible that is at the moment (or at all). I came across it when researching some TLS stuff in golang (programming language).

jinnko

2 days ago

AmneziaVPN has censorship circumvention options and makes it easy to set up a self hosted instance of that's what you prefer, or use their hosted service.

https://amnezia.org/

raxxorraxor

a day ago

I would rent a server in an outside jurisdiction and use it as proxy. It isn't too hard to setup and you can share it with others too. I believe it would be completely legal as well. As least it should be.

That said, you are much less anonymous with that. But you could opt for your server using an additional VPN service to mitigate that.

database64128

2 days ago

include SSH traffic protocol auto-swapping on your server (i.e. no way to tell the apparent web page differs between clients), as some corporate networks are infamously invasive. People can do this all day long, and they do... =3

bitwize

2 days ago

lolwut

At least it isn't goatse...

Joel_Mckay

2 days ago

It is not a real URI... lol

The point was to include something clowns can't filter without incurring collateral costs, and wrapping the ssh protocol in standard web traffic. =3

chrisweekly

2 days ago

tangent: what is the significance of the "=3" you sign your messages with?

Joel_Mckay

2 days ago

Don't worry about it... =3

chidg

a day ago

Hi, not well educated on the details of VPNs and network security so this may be a basic question, but - VPNs are used regularly by corporates to enable secure intranet access to people offsite, etc - surely completely blocking VPNs or detecting and punishing VPN users is severely detrimental to business and not something countries would want to do carte blanche? How does this work?

Crestwave

21 hours ago

It's possible that they're only blocking the VPNs hosted outside of the country (and thus bypassing censorship).

Of course, that would still impact international remote workers, but it's probably niche enough for the government to offload it as their problem.

thewanderer1983

a day ago

a day ago

A question related to the question, for which I apologize:

It seems to me that using WireGuard (UDP) in conjunction with something like Raptor Forward Error Correction would be somewhat difficult to block. A client could send to and receive from a wide array of endpoints without ever establishing a session and communicate privately and reliably, is that correct?

game_the0ry

18 hours ago

https://www.privacytools.io/privacy-vpn

Aloha

12 hours ago

I would just configure a VPS outside the country and tunnel thru that

jay-418

a day ago

Censorship circumvention tools specialize in this, and are extensively used in China, Iran, and Russia. I work on Lantern, and we're not seeing any significant interruptions to connections in Indonesia at the moment. https://lantern.io/download

Hope it helps!

Beijinger

a day ago

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?

rufus_foreman

a day ago

>> Why is Indonesia in chaos?

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

chmod775

a day ago

Mullvad has some anti-censorship features (shadowsocks) that it will automatically use if regular connections fail and works reliably in China as well (and has for the last 2+ years). You could give it a shot.

mediumsmart

a day ago

The real problem of course is that no government is going to block twitterredditmetadiscordandwhathaveyou long enough to risk people becoming informed citizens.

ddtaylor

2 days ago

Your first option until you get settled is to use an SSH reverse proxy:

    ssh -D 9999 user@my.server

Then configure your browser to use local port 9999 for your SOCKS5 proxy.

This gets you a temporarily usable system and if you can tunnel this way successfully installing some WireGuard or OpenVPN stuff will likely work.

EDIT: Thanks it's -D not -R

hdgvhicv

2 days ago

It’s -D, -R is for forwarding specific ports.

ddtaylor

2 days ago

Thanks I have updated my comment as well.

Sorry for the brain rot!

teaga

2 days ago

2 days ago

Use the Tor browser window in Brave. It's nowhere near as anonymous as the Tor browser, but the built in ad blocking makes browsing via Tor usable. And that's what you and your compatriots are interested in.

Prepare to fill in Cloudflare captchas all day, but that's what it takes to have a bit of privacy nowadays.

thinkingtoilet

2 days ago

Please consider the potential consequences of circumventing the ban. Do what you do, but above all stay safe!

stoicfungi

a day ago

Try this, https://github.com/database64128/swgp-go, setup is a bit complicated but it works extremely well.

jorisnoo

a day ago

Working from China, i've rented VPS outside of the country and set up tailscale exit nodes - as my private VPN. Speed is not always optimal but it mostly works.

pabs3

a day ago

Try the Tor Browser, and use bridged mode to to make it look like you aren't using Tor.

https://www.torproject.org/

andunie

a day ago

About VPNs I don't know but you could all start using Nostr instead of Twitter and Discord.

Also Telegram using MTProto proxies (that you have to host, do not use those free ones out there), if those don't qualify as VPNs.

rurban

2 days ago

In this case the blockage will probably just be up for a few days, until the protests calmed down.

Other than that: tor

defulmere

2 days ago

SOCKS proxy over SSH?

pmlnr

2 days ago

Android doesn't come with system wide socks proxy support, and i couldn't find an open source app for it either. Is anyone aware of one?

Nonetheless this is a surprisingly simple and bullet proof solution: SSH, that's not vpn boss, i need it for work.

kevindamm

2 days ago

Outline is an open source shadowsocks client, and you provision your own server to act as the proxy. You can use it against any Shadowsocks server you want, and the protocol makes it look like regular https traffic.

https://github.com/Jigsaw-Code/outline-apps

Android & iOS & Linux & Mac & Windows

their server installer will help set up a proxy for users that aren't familiar with shadowsocks, too

2 days ago

19 hours ago

Sama-sama bro, confirming this from Jakarta. It's a mess. My group chats were blowing up yesterday when WARP and Twitter suddenly went down. Felt like they pulled the plug right when everyone needed info on the protests.

Be very careful with random free VPNs being shared around on WhatsApp right now, many could be honeypots.

Like others have said, the most reliable long-term fix is rolling your own. I've had a cheap VPS in Singapore for years for moments just like this. The latency is low and it's been rock solid. I'm using v2ray with a simple setup, and it's been working fine because it just looks like normal web traffic to my ISP (Indihome). The guides posted in the top comment are excellent starting points.

2 days ago

For anyone reading this who still lives in a somewhat free country and has resources to spare, please consider hosting a public instance or mirroring the VPN Gate site.

afh1

2 days ago

Depending on the circumstances, maybe ditch the landline local ISP for a satellite connection with a foreign ISP?

jasonlingx

a day ago

An alternative is using an eSIM with an “internet breakout” via another country.

Esimdb is a good place to start.

ryan-ca

a day ago

I recommend using tor over snowflake relays to connect. It is meant to be censorship proof.

coretx

a day ago

Get a VPS, arrange your own IPV6. Setup a tunnel and block all non encrypted traffic.

tuananh

a day ago

you can use anything that has a VM.

let's say Github codespaces. Launch a new codespace, setup vpn or just squid. Use it.

It will not stop working unless your gov. decides to block said service (GitHub) too.

yannick

2 days ago

does this include bali? curious as that would impact the large international population.

Gud

a day ago

Try a ssh socks5 proxy to a cheap vps.

It worked well for me in UAE when other solutions didn’t

princevegeta89

2 days ago

OP, you can rent a VPS from a reputable and cheap provider within the NA region - OVH, Vultr, Linode etc. are decent. Also check out lowendtalk.com

Then, setup Tailscale on the server. You can VPN into it and essentially browse the internet as someone from NA.

teekert

2 days ago

From some of the comments here I get why you are downvoted. But tbh I would also have gone that route. So are we just inexperienced? I read here indeed that wireguard is very easily blocked. It was at the company I worked for but then I just set port 23 (who uses ftp anyways??). And it worked. But why is this still bad then?

Obviously I have 0 real experience with this.

princevegeta89

a day ago

Well, I mean, Tailscale is pretty easy overall. When client apps get blocked, you can literally hook up your router into Tailscale if needed, or you can run a headless version of Tailscale on your home server or the very machine you are on.

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.

jedisct1

2 days ago

Get a cheap VPS anywhere, and use DSVPN https://github.com/jedisct1/dsvpn

Uses TCP and works pretty much anywhere.

lidder86

a day ago

surfshark works also Im on MTM no issues! Same with Biznet

yegor

a day ago

Full 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 <1hr. Be mindful of the downsides of being the sole user of your custom VPN server you pay for: cloud providers log all TCP flows and traffic correlation is trivial. You do something "bad", your gov subpoenas the provider who hands over your personal info. If you used fake info, your TCP flows are still there, which means your ISP's IP is logged, and deanonymizing you after that is a piece of cake (no court order needed in many countries).

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/App stores, as they're either Chinese honeypots (https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/china-...) or total scams (https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/vpns/this-shady-vpn-has-...).

Do not go with a VPN service that is "mainstream" (advertised by a Youtuber) or one that has an affiliate program. Doing/having both of these things essentially requires a provider to resort so dishonest billing practices where your subscription renews at 2-5x of the original price. This is because VPNs that advertise or run affiliate programs don't make a profit on the initial purchase for that amazing deal thats 27 months with 4 months free or whatever the random numbers are, they pay all of this to an affiliate, sometimes more. Since commercial VPNs are not charities, they need ROI and that comes only when someone rebills. Since many people cancel their subscriptions immediately after purchase (to avoid the thing that follows) the rebill price is usually significantly more than the initial "amazing deal". This is why both Nord and Express have multiple class action lawsuits for dishonest billing practices - they have to do it, to get their bag (back). It's a race to the bottom of who can offer the most $ to affiliates, and shaft their customers as the inevitable result.

Billing quirks aside, a VPN you choose should offer multiple VPN protocols, and obfuscation techniques. There is no 1 magic protocol that just works everywhere, as every country does censorship differently, using different tools.

- Some do basic DNS filtering, in which case you don't need a VPN at all, just use an encrypted DNS protocol like DOH, from any provider (Cloudflare, Google, Control D[I also run this company], NextDNS, Adguard DNS)

- Then there is SNI filtering, where changing your DNS provider won't have any effect and you will have to use a VPN or a secure proxy (HTTPS forward proxy, or something fancier like shadowsocks or v2ray).

- Finally there is full protocol aware DPI that can be implemented with various degrees of aggressiveness that will perform all kinds of unholy traffic inspection on all TCP and UDP flows, for some or all IP subnets.

For this last type, having a variety of protocols and endpoints you can connect to is what's gonna define your chance of success to bypass restrictions. Beyond variety of protocols, some VPN providers (like Windscribe, and Mullvad) will mess with packets in order to bypass DPI engines, which works with variable degree of success and is very region/ISP specific. You can learn about some of these concepts in this very handy project: https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI (we borrow some concepts from here, and have a few of our own).

wiredpancake

Tailscale might be an option too (they have a free account for individuals and an exit node out of country nearly bypasses your problem) It uses wireguard which might not be blocked and which comes with some plausible deniability. It’s a secure network overlay not a VPN. It just connects my machines, honest officer.

theyknowitsxmas

2 days ago

OVH VPS-1 and your own configuration.

trhway

2 days ago

HTTPS to you own proxy on a foreign VPS.

ck2

2 days ago

2 days ago

There are many options, but avoiding the legal consequences may be a grey area:

https://www.stunnel.org/index.html

https://github.com/yarrick/iodine

https://infocondb.org/con/black-hat/black-hat-usa-2010/psudp...

..and many many more, as networks see reduced throughput as an error to naturally route around. =3

wdroz

a day ago

DNS tunnels with iodine works well, it's easy to setup and work in a lot of place.

You can also connect to some random corporate wifi and it's very likely that this will work (not necessary in "direct" mode).

jongjong

a day ago

Easy, you can just create any generic Linux Amazon EC2 instance (or just about any cloud provider of your choice; in fact, the smaller the provider, the better) and use it as a SOCKS5 proxy via SSH tunnel with -D flag... Then set one of your browsers (e.g. Firefox) to connect via that proxy.

Indistinguishable from any other server on the internet.

scotty79

2 days ago

Maybe you could buy VPS in another country and set up VPN server yourself?

reisse

2 days ago

You'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.

Hizonner

2 days ago

Hmm. People who recommend widely used approaches, and well-known, well-established providers, "don't have any experience with cenorship circumvention".

So the solution is no-name providers using random ad-hoc hackery, chosen according to a criterion more or less custom designed to lead you into watering hole attacks.

Right.

adamfisk

a day ago

@reisse is 100% right. Most people outside of heavily censored regions have no clue what technology is actually used in those countries. The well-known, well-established providers don't actually work in censored regions because:

1) The problem is very difficult and requires a lot of engineering resources 2) It's very hard to make money in these countries for many reasons, including sanctions or the government restricting payments (Alipay, WeChatPay, etc)

The immediate response would be: "If the problem is so difficult, how can it be solved if not be well-known, well-established providers?"

The answer is simple: the crowdsourcing power of open source combined with billions of people with a huge incentive to get around government blocking.

Hizonner

a day ago

> It's very hard to make money in these countries for many reasons

Tor and I2P, for example, don't actually make money anywhere. Which is not to say that they work for any of the users in all of these places, or for all of the users in any of these places.

> The answer is simple: the crowdsourcing power of open source combined with billions of people with a huge incentive to get around government blocking.

The actual answer is that (a) they're using so many different weird approaches that the censors and/or secret police can't easily keep up with the whack-a-mole, and (b) they're relying on folklore and survivorship bias to tell them what "works", without really knowing when or how it might fail, or even whether it's already failing.

Oh, and most of them are playing for the limited stakes of being blocked, rather than for the larger stakes of being arrested. Or at least they think they are.

a day ago

Scuttlebut, Briar and NNCP come to mind.

reisse

2 days ago

None of the things I listed are "widely used approaches, and well-known, well-established providers" in the parts of the world where it does matter.

Yeah, maybe V* and derivatives are random ad-hoc hackery, but they also are the well-known standard now.

Hizonner

2 days ago

2 days ago

Mr. Kafka, suspicion is healthy. However, abstraction provides no way forward when faced with practicalities instead of theory. Creates a Kafka-esque situation - anything suitable is by definition unsuitable. Better to focus on practical technical advice.

sebastiennight

a day ago

I think you might want to read about the Anom phone [0], supposedly encrypting messages for drug dealers to avoid law enforcement, which was actually sold by... the FBI.

[0]: https://www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/the-fbi-created-its-own-...

refulgentis

a day ago

Sir Night: may I ask, what should it mean to me that some businesses are fronts?

I hope I do not present the presence of a dullard unfamiliar with this.

sebastiennight

11 hours ago

If you have a threat model, then having both 1. no reassurance of safety in using a tool, and 2. valid reason to believe that such tools can be suspect, is equivalent to certainty that the tool should be avoided.

To give an analogy, this is similar to why "security by obscurity" isn't a valid option if you're serious about security.

Let's say that admin access is open on my server on a certain port and: 1. I have done nothing specific to secure it, and 2. it has been shown that there are adversary actors scanning for vulnerable ports on the network.

I can either take your apparent stance that "this means nothing to me", or I can consider the situation equivalent to "this server is already compromised, I just don't know it yet".

In the current conversation, the combination of: 1. no reasonable reason to believe ExampleVPN keeps your data private and 2. high incentives for adversaries to create fronts plus proof they've done so in the past, means that for people such as myself and GP, the situation is equivalent to "ExampleVPN is a front" until we have a reason to believe otherwise.

Edit: Telegram's not-really-end-to-end-E2EE would be another such example.

s1mplicissimus

a day ago

I don't see parent abstracting. They are simply pointing out a very real risk, which you don't provide any counter points to. Instead you seem to dismiss their point based on a strawman

refulgentis

18 hours ago

riehwvfbk

2 days ago

OP: look into VLESS (and similar). And read up on ntc.party (through Google translate). There are certain VPN providers that offer the protocol.

yogorenapan

2 days ago

I think REALITY is the newer protocol. I remember VLESS being somewhat more detectable

taminka

2 days ago

nah, vless is the protocol, reality is a newer obfuscation method that works over vless

edit: op, protonvpn has a free tier that works in russia, so likely works everywhere, or if you're comfortable with buying a vps, sshing into it and running some commands, look up x-ray, and use on of their gui panels

esosac

2 days ago

what's wrong with those solutions?

leshenka

a day ago

Wrong threat model. Solutions like mullvad/proton focus on privacy not breaking the blockade. They have well known entry points and therefore easily blocked. You can play cat and mouse game switching servers faster than censorship agency blocks them (e.g. Telegram vs Roskomnadzor circa 2018 [1]) but that gets expensive and not really focus of these companies.

What you need is open protocols and hundreds of thousands of small servers only known to their owners and their family/friends

1: https://archive.is/sxiha

hinkley

2 days ago

I have a little, maybe enough to be dangerous. SSH won’t be sufficient to avoid all traffic analysis. Everyone can see how much traffic and the pattern of that traffic, which can leak info about the sort of things you’re doing.

If you’re worried about ending up on a list, using things that look like VPNs while the VPNs are locked down is likely to do so.

Also… your neighbors in Myanmar didn’t do a lockdown during the genocide and things got pretty fucking dire as a result. People have taken different lessons from this. I’m not sure what the right answer is, and which is the greater evil. Deplatforming and arresting people for inciting riots and hate speech is probably the best you can do to maintain life and liberty for the most people.

logicchains

a day ago

>Also… your neighbors in Myanmar didn’t do a lockdown during the genocide and things got pretty fucking dire as a result

The genocide in Myanmar was incited _by_ the government there; giving it more power to censor it's citizens' communications would have done absolutely nothing to help the people being genocided. Genocides don't just suddenly happen; the vast majority of genocide over the past century (including Indonesian genocides against ethnically Chinese Indonesians) had the support of the state.

hinkley

a day ago

This has been simmering for a very long time. The first I heard of it was violence that broke out after the defacement of a Buddhist temple statue. That would have been almost 20 years ago. Buddhists murdering people tends to lead one to ask a lot of questions.

At that time I think the government was hands off, let it happen rather than tried to stop it.

Regardless of who was behind the violence, the whole region has thought about what to do in such situations and they aren’t the same answers the West would choose.

more_corn

2 days ago

^ 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.

johnisgood

2 days ago

Can I have a list of these options?

degamad

a day ago

Daishiman

2 days ago

It is absolutely self-evident that VPNs are considered high-value targets and that all spy agencies invest a chunk of resources to go after high-value targets.

gnfargbl

2 days ago

I would invite you to read again the two claims made, and consider whether your statement actually addresses the veracity of either.

To be a little trite: we all agree that chickens like grain, but it does not follow that a majority of grain producers are secretly controlled by a cabal of poultry.

rl3

a day ago

>... but it does not follow that a majority of grain producers are secretly controlled by a cabal of poultry.

That's precisely what someone who's in on it would say.

some_random

17 hours ago

Yeah obviously, do you think that's evidence that every single one is a honeypot?

Daishiman

11 hours ago

No. You don't need to compromise every single VPN, just enough that the investment makes sense.

jack_pp

2 days ago

From gemini.. (edited for brevity)

Kape Technologies Owns: ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate

> is there any suspicion that Kape Technologies is influenced or has ties to the Mossad?

Yes, there is significant suspicion and public discussion about Kape Technologies having ties to former Israeli intelligence personnel. While a direct operational link to Mossad has not been proven, the concerns stem from the company's history, its key figures, and their backgrounds.

...

Kape Technologies is owned by Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi. While Sagi himself does not have a documented intelligence background, his business history, which includes a conviction for insider trading in the 1990s, has been a point of concern for some privacy advocates. The consolidation of several major VPN providers under his ownership has raised questions about the potential for centralized data access.

----

Sure there isn't direct proof but there wasn't any proof the CIA was driving drug trade while it was happening. Proof materializes when the dust settles on such matters.

some_random

16 hours ago

Israel has universal conscription and anyone smart enough to get out of hauling a rifle around in the hot sun is going to leap at any chance to do so. So some kind of intel background among tech people in Israel isn't nearly as meaningful as it is in other countries where joining the IC is a very deliberate choice.

But more importantly, you can't just make grandiose claims (especially about privacy tools!) then just say "Proof materializes when the dust settles on such matters". You can claim that about literally anything.

This is a good start but more should be blocked. Then force ISP to block ads.

Not just for Indonesia but all countries. But we still have a lot more to do to fix the web.

platevoltage

2 days ago

I can't stand most of these things you want blocked but this is bonkers.

mr90210

2 days ago

The issue with that is where do they draw the line. Next thing you know each country becomes North Korea.