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).
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?
Yeah, you could use forward error correction too, so any n bits would be enough to reconstruct the input.
Of course then you get into needing software to decode the more advanced encodings; maybe start with a voice transmission explaining in plain language how to decode the first layer, which gives you a program that can decode the second layer, or something.
300 baud. Was enough to download grainy porn pics. With a proper download tool that continues after hangups etc you can just leave it on for a week and I have when downloading software end 70s. No problem. Also via the airwaves: we had software via the radio every sunday. Works fine. Modern software is shitty large: it would be nice if a VPN provider would just release the driver and a cli which should not weigh over a mega (far less but outside mr Whitney i am not sure if that type of software dev still exists) for this type of transfer.
sure there is, you can send files over HF, it may not be FAST, but once you get it into the country, you can just copy the file with a faster method (eg: usb drive), WINLINK supports attachments, so you could absolutely send these files over HF
btw, veracrypt is the name if the follow up project. truecrypt shut down over a decade ago rather abruptly, so anything labeled truecrypt today is suspect as either out of date or potential malware.
Nah, just drop a few thousand 1GB flash drives from a plane. Load them with a tor browser, a wireguard client, and instructions on finding a remote exit. Only one copy needs to survive and it can spread very quickly and irreversibly by foot.
Yeah, this is a great approach if you're already at war with a country.
If you're not and they're still allowing your planes to fly through their airspace then this is a great way to ensure that they lock your (and your friends') planes out.
It's possible but also difficult to jam radio. That's part of why programs like Radio Free Asia[0,1] exist. Even if you can't broadcast from inside a territory you can broadcast from outside. It can be jammed but it is a tough cat and mouse game and jamming isn't precise. So when you jam there are causalities. Not to mention that jamming can be quite expensive.
I'm not saying that makes the problem easy, but I'll say that jamming isn't a very strong defense.
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.
[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.
I’m not sure that’s super feasible any longer with the advent of cheap SDRs. Over-the-horizon HF broadcast can be heard with a simple speaker wire antenna inside your house. If anyone is interested in trying to deploy such an idea, I’d love to participate as an avid ham.
Could I ask for a source on that and how common it is?
Seems like it was used way back in the cold war (and even then not blocked/jammed) and I'd guess that current authoritarian regimes would perhaps not bother considering how few could use it.
i have a few chinese friends and they say it's always easy to get a working vpn. that might not be true in a Tien An Minh type crisis, i dunno, but month in month out year upon year they surf western sites, exchange winnie the pooh pictures, etc. i suppose the people i know could be relatively upper class, i have no idea what type difference that could make. i had a chinese gf in LA who would send... my >cough< pictures... to her mother in china because she enjoyed them
This is no 'nothing special' with Obfs4proxy. DPI sees it as random byte stream, thus your government can decide to block unknown protocols. Instead, you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS.
Hi, posting from my main account (I'm also the poster of the GP comment).
"Nothing special" in this case was meant to describe the fact that it's random data with no identifiable patterns inherent to the data; you're absolutely right that that's what obfs4 does. I understand the confusion though, this phrasing could be better.
> 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.
> 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.
The only VPN technology I see that blends as HTTPS is MASQUE IP Proxying, and the only implementation I know that does this is iCloud Private Relay. It is also trivial to block because blocking 443/udp doesn't really affect accessing the Internet.
Exactly this. Hell, for OP's use case of accessing things like twitter, a good old fashioned https proxy would be entirely fine, and likely not even illegal.
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.
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?
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.
The "inspection" part of DPI isn't limited to encrypted payloads. It's straightforward enough to look at application-level protocol headers and identify e.g. a Wireguard or OpenVPN or SSH connection, even if you can't decrypt the payload. That could be used as sufficient grounds to either block the traffic or punish the user.
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.
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/
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.
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?
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.
Patterns of data transmission (network behavioral analysis, I just made that term up), analyzing IP and ports, inspecting SSL handshakes for destination site. In short, metadata.
Obfs4proxy and Shapeshifter are an absolute PITA to install.
Get your own VPS server (VPS in EU/US with 2GB of ram, 40GB of disk space and TBs/month of traffic go for $10 a year, it's that cheap). Never get anything in the UK and even USA is weird. I'd stick with EU.
Install your software (wireguard + obsfuscation or even tailscale with your own DERP server)
Another simpler alternative is just `ssh -D port` and use it as a SOCKS server. It's usually not blocked but very obvious.
I just spent 3 months in China this summer. The GFW has become much more sophisticated than I remember. I found only one method that reliably worked. That was to use Holafly (an international eSIM provider) and use its built-in VPN. China largely doesn’t care if foreigners get around the GFW, I guess.
Another method that usually worked was ProtonVPN with protocol set to Wireguard. Not sure why this worked, it’s definitely a lot more detectable than other methods I tried. But as long as I rotated which US server I used every few days, this worked fine.
No luck with shadowsocks, ProtonVPN “stealth” mode, Outline+Digital Ocean, or even Jump / Remote Desktop. Jump worked the longest at several hours before it became unbearably slow, I’m still not sure if I was actually throttled or my home computer started misbehaving.
I didn’t get around to setting up a pure TLS proxy, or proxying traffic through a domain that serves “legitimate” traffic, so no idea if that still works.
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.
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.
There are some techniques like fragmented TLS and reordered packets that work in some cases. Also using vanilla HTTPS transport is a good start for many places. URnetwork is an open source, decentralized option that does all of these out of the box. You can get it on the major stores or F-Droid.
Mullvad is a bad choice for this particular case because they publish all their IPs, which makes them very easy to block. You should look into VPN providers that do not publish their IPs and that have a wide range of IP classes and multiple ASNs, which look like ordinary networks not associated with VPNs. In my experience, NordVPN and ExpressVPN have many of these.
That's an interesting idea, and probably something you might be able to achieve with a tool like h26forge.
It's also probably more useful to just have a connection be fully dedicated to a VPN, and have the traffic volume over time mimic what you'd see in a video, rather than embedding it in a video -- thanks to letsencrypt, much of the web's served over TLS these days (asterisks for countries like KZ and TM which force the use of a state-sponsored CA), so going to great lengths to embed your VPN in a video isn't really practical.
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
When I worked in China (not for long periods but frequently enough that the Great Firewall became an irritant) I hosted an OpenVPN server on port 443 and/or port 22 of a server I owned. That worked sufficiently well most of the time.
This doesn't work anymore; the GFW no longer detects VPN connections by port but instead by performing deep packet inspection to characterize the type of traffic going over every connection. Using this technique in combination with some advanced ML systems, they're able to detect any encrypted VPN connection and cut it off; it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore, and it's usually not even possible to _tunnel_ a VPN connection through some other protocol because the GFW now detects that too.
Stepping back and looking at it from a purely technical perspective, it's actually insanely impressive.
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.
> 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)
When I lived in China 10 years ago, GFW had a pretty effective way by slowing constant traffic that goes to an outside china ip address more and more over time. I had about 6 hours per ip (it starting to get slower and slower during that time) before having to rotate because even basic webpages didn't get through and ssh was unusable.
Assuming they don't MITM SSH, you should still be able to use something like wireguard over an SSH tunnel. At least I would think.. it's all SSH traffic as far as any DPI listener is concerned, you'd of course need to ensure the connection signature through another vector though.
> it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore.
Really? Because the paper you linked says they don't block any TLS connections so you can just run a VPN over TLS:
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Number two reason why Tor is dead is all other antifraud protections combined. Try paying with Stripe through Tor. There is quite a big chance you'll get an "unknown error" of sorts on Stripe side. Try to watch Netflix in Tor - exit nodes are banned.
Everyone kept shouting "Tor bad, Tor for criminals", and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's really hard to do just browse web normally in Tor, because all "normal" sites consider it bad. The "wrong" sites, however, who expect Tor visitors...
I understand where you are coming from but there’s a flip side to this.
Cloudflare obfuscating such a huge segment of origin servers gives a privacy advantage to anyone using a private DNS, since most of the IPs you can be seen connecting to are just…Cloudflare.
I live in Indonesia, and I don't find any recent news that mention X (formerly Twittwr) and or Discord being blocked by the government. The only relevant news from a quick Google search I can find is about the government threatened to block X due to pornography content in 2024.
You can even check for yourself if a domain is blocked by visiting https://trustpositif.komdigi.go.id/.
Also for your unability to access the VPN, as far as my experience goes, in the past some providers do block access to VPN. But, I am not experiencing that for at least the last 5 years.
So, maybe you can try changing your internet provider and see if you can connect to VPN?
How can it be that one person living in Indonesia says everything is blocked and the country is in chaos and another, very calmly, is completely unaware and can't even find any news about it? This is so odd. What is the truth?
The context that was likely left out due to HN rules is, there are mass protests turned violent in the face of police brutality in several cities. The Indonesian government has a history of blocking/throttling internet access in immediate areas of the unrest to limit coverage.
Indonesia is a big country with over ten thousand islands and uneven coverage. What is blocked on one ISP might not be enforced on another (e.g. the state-owned ISP might block or use DNS poisoning on several "non-compliant" DNS providers but my current ISP doesn't). Also, in addition to what the sibling commenter (and another commenter regarding Cloudflare outage) said there might be a general overload on the mobile network near the affected areas since there are lots of users and limited bandwidth.
It's a 270 million people country with over 10K+ islands. Last year I visited Borobudur and was surprised that the Yogjakarta region is autonomous and they have their own king.
There was a reported outage of cloudflare in Jakarta, while simultaneously people can't access Twitter and Discord. The worst part is that it coincides with the time when people need the information to find a safe route to go home after the protest.
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.
America's Founders saw civil rights as inherent in the Constitution's framework, rooted in natural law. They added the Bill of Rights as an explicit bulwark. That's why we have the 1st Amendment's free speech, and if that falls, the 2nd Amendment ensures we have guns.
Sorry for the snide comment, but considering the last 6 - 8 months in the US, at least from what is being reported in the outside world, the 1st amendment doesn't seem to be providing much in the way of protection, and unless I'm missing something the general public doesn't seem to have the level of interest that would be required for your 2nd amendment to play out in any meaningful way.
It’s working fantastic. US media is great at generating hysteria (competitive market pressures in the war for attention), but the US is at essentially very little risk for speech suppression at the level of the UK right now.
UK too, and concerned. I agree that amendment 1 and 2 provisions effectively underpin individual freedom in the US due to founder perspicacity. My fear re US constitutional provision is on separation of powers, and transfer of power. Fortunately Pence held to the constitution. Nobody ever willingly takes their hands of the levers of power!
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...
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.
No American citizens’ rights have been taken away or can be taken away by a President.
We have whistleblowers and leakers from the administration itself on a literal weekly basis, our own Department of State actively funds Signal and Tor, our media has been heavily criticizing Trump and his allies for years. A couple organizations got hit with lawsuits for publishing misinformation or skirting campaign law, but that’s about it.
They tried to make flag burning illegal - which is illegal in Mexico, most of South America, all of Asia, and most of Europe - and it was shot down almost immediately as even that comes under 1st amendment rights.
Please don’t lump us into the same bucket as the UK. We may have a sharply divided electorate but we don’t have a failing state!
You know what, I think I've become lethargic after all the backwards garbage going on in my country attacking my way of life on all fronts - from rampant crime to government censorship.
Your comment just gave me a kick up the ass. I'm gonna try and get some local stuff going in opposition to this lunacy.
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.
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. :)
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.
They can barely handle wolf-whistlers let alone pedophile rape gangs consisting of the lowest IQ dregs of our society.
I know it’s only painfully stupid people who think the law is stupid, but dodgy Dave down the way tends to fly under the radar. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many of them.
One of the problems with authoritarianism is that even though most dodgy Daves will be fine because the political apparatus doesn't have the time or energy to arrest everyone for everything, they retain the ability to arrest anyone for anything.
The moment your dodgy Dave offends your local cadre, even for reasons entirely other than being dodgy, they'll throw the book at him. And because there is now 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> People need to stick it to the government and demand their freedoms.
It will only work if they admit that they supported this and all forms of totalitarianism during COVID. You can't fall for that and then be surprised when the world keeps going down that obvious path.
In matters of public health, you cannot trust the public to do the right thing.
The problem with covid is that we weren't totalitarian enough. Regulations you could drive a coach & horses through and no way to enforce is a sop.
The first lock down needed to be a proper 'papers, please' affair. When we get a properly lethal pandemic, we're fucked. Hopefully Laurence Fox and Piers Corbyn will catch it quickly and expire in a painful and televised way, it's the only hope of people complying with actual quarantine measures.
At this point, anyone who has been watching politics for a few decades understands that the left/right dichotomy is primarily one designed to keep the majority of people within a certain set of bounds. We see it revealed when politicians and ideologies that should be in opposition to one another still cooperate on the same strategies, like this one.
The goal right now is to make online anonymity impossible. Adult content is the wedge issue being used to make defending it unpalatable for any elected official, but nobody actually has it as a goal to prevent teenagers from looking at porn - if they did, they would be using more direct and efficient strategies. No, it's very clear that anonymous online commentary is hurting politicians and they are striking back against it.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
I guess 99% of mainstream "journalism" is irrelevant and/or inaccurate, hence citizen journalism is a 10x improvement in accuracy and relevancy! Not 10% better, 900% better! This makes a huge difference to our society as a whole and in our daily lives!
But this misses the most important point which is that the user should have the right to choose for themselves what they say and read. Making citizen journalism unduly burdensome deprives everyone of that choice.
Citizen journalism avoids the main weakness of a centralised system: it's incredible suspectible to capture. A prime example of this is the mass opposition around the world to Israel's genocide in Gaza. Israel committed such genocides prior to the event of social media, such as the Nakba, but it was rarely reported on, due to media ownership being concentrated in the hands of a few pro-Zionist individuals.
- 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.
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.
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.
True, but OP's threat model doesn't involve state actors outside Indonesia, so traffic analysis of the "last mile" between Mullvad node and whatever non-Indonesian service OP is trying to use (Twitter, Discord, …) is not really relevant here. (Assuming Indonesia doesn't have capabilities we don't know of.)
What might be more interesting is the case where the Indonesian government forces Twitter/Discord to give up IP addresses (which I find hard to believe but it's certainly not impossible). But then they'd still have to overcome Mullvad. It's much more likely that if OP has an account on Twitter/Discord, it is already tied to their person in many ways, and this would probably be the main risk here.
And using another VPN like NordVPN or ProtonVPN is probably in the same category as Mullvad, but worth being cautious. If it's free, you are the product. If you pay, you're still sending your traffic to a publicly (usually) known server of a VPN. That metadata alone in some jurisdictions can still put you in danger.
This is good overview, I just wanted to add that a VPS IP is not a residential IP. You will encounter roadblocks when you try to access services if you appear to be coming from a VPS. Not that I had a better solution, just to clarify what you can expect.
Wireguard is not censorship-resistant, and most VPN-averse countries block cross-border Wireguard. Why reply a practical question in an area in which you have no experience?
Because Indonesia is new to the game and might still be catching up. They’re probably playing whackamole with the most common public VPN providers and might not be doing deep packet inspection yet. I worked with someone getting traffic out of Hong Kong a year ago and there was a lot trial and error figuring out what was blocked and what was not. Wireguard was one that worked.
They recommend Tailscale in particular. Tailscale control plane and DERPs (which are functionally required on mobile) will be among the first to go.
Outline (shadowsocks-based) and amnezia (obfuscated wg and xray) both offer few-click install on your own VPS, which is easier than setting up headscale or static wg infrastructure, and will last you longer.
Also, you did not answer my "why" question. I'm not sure what question you were answering.
IMO most people should have a VPS even if you don't need it for tunneling. Living without having a place to just leave services/files is very hard and often "free" services will hold your data hostage to manipulate your behavior which is annoying on a good day.
Yeah they can be cheap, but I would definitely recommend having at least 3 for redundancy. If one get shut down or it's IP blacklisted you still hopefully have a backup line to create a replacement.
> 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.
nextdns recently created geo spoofing methods, I may be wrong, I usually am but I am curious as to if these censorship can be fixed by nextdns.
I don't know if indonesia is becoming exactly like china/ so a complete crackdown as people are discussing things as if its for china, but I feel like that there are definitely some easier things than hosting your own server or using shadowsocks.
Check if proton vpn/mullvad vpn are working once please, they are definitely plug n play and proton even offers a free tier.
The great thing about China's Great Firewall is that really good options to circumvent censorship have been around for a while. Was waiting for someone to bring up XRay! Alternatively, here is a great write up of using V2Ray[1]. May be worth OP looking into, as a blogger I found noted[2] is an alternative to a VPN, and may work.
[1]: https://www.v2ray.com/en/
[2]: https://sequentialread.com/v2ray-caddy-to-access-the-interne...
Also sing-box [1]. I don't use it for its primary use case of censorship circumvention, but rather for some highly complex routing configurations it supports.
My use case consists of passing some apps on my Android through interface A (e.g. banking apps through my 5G modem), some apps through US residential proxy (for US banks that don't like me visiting from abroad), and all the rest through VPN. And no root required!
It's wild that GFW triggered creation of this and nothing like it existed / exists.
*ray clients typically allow configuration of routing. So you can send only blocked stuff through the tunnel; or, in reverse, send some known-working stuff (e. g. local domain) direct. Also works as adblock.
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.
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.
A year ago I was traveling through Uzbekistan while also partly working remotely. IKEv2 VPN was blocked but thankfully I was able to switch to SSL VPN which worked fine. I didn't expect that, everything else (people, culture) in the country seemed quite open.
Cloak + wireguard should work fine on the server side. The problem is that I didn't find any clients for Android and I doubt there are clients for iOs that can (a) open a cloak tunnel and then (b) allow wireguard to connect to localhost...
It's UDP, not TCP (like TLS) and has a distinguishable handshake. Wireguard is not designed as a censorship prevention tool, it's purely a networking solution.
The tunnel itself is encrypted, but the tunnel creation and existence is not obfuscated.
Mastodon is not easy for regimes to completely block, and most instances won't block you for using Tor. Mastodon saw a huge migration from Brazil when X was blocked there.
It would be easy to block on protocol level. Countries that block VPNs usually progress to that level pretty fast once they discover that simple IP blocks don't work.
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.
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.
That will give you a hard to snoop proxy service that should completely circumvent a government blockaid (they likely aren't going to be watching or blocking ssh traffic).
Probably just an unfortunate timing. Cloudflare is going down in this region [1] at the same time with the protests and unrest caused by the news of a motorcycle taxi driver who got run over by a swat car during a protest [2].
Such coincidence might seems like the government trying to do some damage control by restricting internet access, but I hope that's not what happen here. At the moment, cloudflare status for Jakarta is still "rerouted".
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).
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/
Give Obscura a try, we get around internet restrictions by using QUIC as transport, which looks like HTTP/3 and doesn't suffer from TCP-over-TCP meltdown: https://obscura.net/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The issue these days is that all of the EC2 IP ranges are well known, and are usually not very high-reputation IPs, so a lot of services will block them, or at least aggressively require CAPTCHAs to prevent botting.
Source: used to work for a shady SEO company that searched Google 6,000,000 times a day on a huge farm of IPs from every provider we could find
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.
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
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.
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.
shadowsocks was the winner of the state of the art I had to do at work. It address the "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 stat)" comment.
Someone should create a vpn protocol that pretends to be a command and control server exfiltrating US corporate secrets from hacked servers. The traffic pattern should be similar, and god forbid Xi blocks the real exfiltrations
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.
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.
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.
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.
AmneziaWG client worked just fine with normal Wireguard servers in Egypt where official Wireguard clients doesn't, WGTunnel app on android support both protocols.
there is a major protest currently happening due to the legislative body representative just giving themselves a monthly domicile stipend of ~$3300 on top of their salaries (yes, multiple), while the average people earned ~$330 monthly. the information about the protest are not broadcasted on local TVs, so the only spread of information is through social media. i guess since a lot of people went around it using VPN, the gov decided to block it too.
“Some demonstrators on Monday were seen on television footage carrying a flag from the Japanese manga series One Piece, which has become a symbol of protest against government policies in the country.”
The official word is to counter gambling. Lately the government is not really popular after some decisions that could be interpreted as authoritative, and as citizens have spoken out about it online, causing more voices to join and protests erupting..
So well, my guess is they're trying to control it.
Get a cheap VPS for less than $10/mo or a dedicated server for like $25/mo and ssh tunnel into it. You can also use it to be your devserver, run your blog, etc. I've been using french located OVH servers in France for many years, it just works.
I'd recommend using Outline - it's a one click setup that lets you provision your own VPN on a cloud provider (or your own hardware).
Since you get to pick where the hardware is located and it is just you (or you and a small group of friends & family) using the VPN, blocking is more difficult.
If you don't want the hassle of using your own hardware you can rent a Digital Ocean droplet for <$5 per month.
I’ve set this up for friends in fairly heavily censored countries before, it has been working well so far, but as others have said, this is a cat and mouse game
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.
> 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.
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.
Chinese have developed a significant amount of sophisticated tools countering internet censorship. V2ray as far as I recall is the state-of-the-art.
To use them, one need to first rent a (virtual) server somewhere from a foreign cloud provider as long as the payment does not pose a problem. The first step sometimes proves difficult for people in China, but hopefully Indonesia is not at that stage yet. What follows is relatively easy as there are many tutorials for the deployment like: https://guide.v2fly.org/en_US/
Some good ideas, though. There seems to be OSS alternatives for TailScale control servers which would make it harder to block - I'd go that route. The top recommendation boils down to, "Set up several different methods, and one will always work".
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
> 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?
> 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
It was the liberal West who helped China build the Great Firewall – Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Nortel, Siemens and others.
As long as a lucrative commercial opportunity was there, they seized upon it shoving the liberal values up the orifice where the sun does not shine.
As someone based in China, it's a bit surprising that techniques used by Chinese people get very few mentions here, while I do think they are quite effective against access blocking, especially after coevolving with GFW for the past decade. While I do hope blocking in Indonesia won't get to GFW level, I will leave this here in case it helps.
I found this article [0] summarizing the history of censorship and anti-censorship measures in China, and I think it might be of help to you if the national censorship ever gets worse. As is shown in the article, access blocking in China can be categorized into several kinds: (sorted by severity)
1. DNS poisoning by intercepting DNS traffic. This can be easily mitigated by using a DOT/DOH DNS resolver.
2. Keyword-based HTTP traffic resetting. You are safe as long as you use HTTPS.
3. IP blocking/unencrypted SNI header checking. This will require the use of a VPN/proxy.
4. VPN blocking by recognizing traffic signatures. (VPNs with identifiable signatures include OpenVPN and WireGuard (and Tor and SSH forwards if you count those as VPNs), or basically any VPN that was designed without obfuscation in mind.) This really levels up the blocking: if the government don't block VPN access, then maybe any VPN provider will do; but if they do, you will have a harder time finding providers and configuring things.
5. Many other ways to detect and block obfuscated proxy traffic. It is the worse (that I'm aware of), but it will also cost the government a lot to pull off, so you probably don't need to worry about this. But if you do, maybe check out V2Ray, XRay, Trojan, Hysteria, NaiveProxy and many other obfuscated proxies.
But anyways, bypassing techniques always coevolve with the blocking measures. And many suggestions here by non-Indonesian (including mine!) might not be of help. My personal suggestion is to find a local tech community and see what techniques they are using, which could suit you better.
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...
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?
The best time to develop meshnets was 15 years ago. The second best time is now. What is actually holding us back here? Almost everyone has powerful radio equipment these days.
If so you can run BrowserBox in a GitHub action runner exposed via IP or ngrok tunnel. That will give you a browser in a free region. Easy set up via workflow.
You’ll need a ngrok API key and a BrowserBox key. Hit us up: sales@dosaygo.com for a short term key at a discount if it works for you.
We will offer keys for free to any journalists in censored regions.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
How do you propose they coordinate the political activities when they can't use external communications sites/tools, and internal sites are actively monitored by an authoritarian government?
Step 1 is establishing a secure means of communication.
Personally, I like Amnezia VPN, it has some ways to work around blocks: https://amnezia.org/en
You can very easily self-host it, their installer automatically works on major cloud platforms.
Though if Indonesia has blocked VPNs only now, possibly they only block major providers and don't try to detect the VPN protocol itself, which would make self-hosting any VPN possible.
Starlink is a legitimate business (ISP) that wants to make money from customers in that country. They will comply with all of the regulations and bans imposed by the government in that country or risk getting banned completely.
It's not about blocking the sky. Starlink sends the internet connection back down to the ground somewhere in the country you are in.
That being said, if I have an American starlink account, and I go to Indonesia, what happens? Does my internet connection go back down through Indonesia or does it go through somewhere else?
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:
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.
In countries where it comes to government blocking/censoring internet traffic, traditional media is cleared of all dissent and fully controlled long before. Last stages of that are happening in my country, Serbia, currently.
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...
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.
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.
Using full-blown VPNs under such environments has the disadvantage of affecting your use of domestic web services. You might want to try something like https://github.com/database64128/shadowsocks-go, which allows you to route traffic based on domain and IP geolocation rules.
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?
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
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
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?
Can you try both WireGuard and MASQUE? you can do that by using `warp-cli tunnel protocol set MASQUE'. if you want to try WireGuard, `warp-cli tunnel protocol set WireGuard'
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.
Usually when countries block websites they don't block major cloud providers, like AWS and Google Cloud. Because most websites are hosted on them. So you can get a cheap VPS from AWS or GCP (always free VM is available) and host OpenVPN on it.
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.
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.
Set up a VM on AWS/azure/gcp/... in the desired cell, install a VPN server and done. Once you have automation in place it takes ~2 minutes to start, you can run it on demand so you can pay per minute.
All the various proxy solutions offered are good (although the simplest ones - like squid - haven't been mentioned yet). You can also use a remote desktop or even just ssh -Y me@remote-server "firefox"
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.
You could also buy a VPS and use SSH tunneling to access a tor daemon running on a VPS. Host some sort of web service on the VPS so it looks inconspicuous
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
Launch an EC2 instance in the US region (Ubuntu, open ports 22 and 1194), then connect via SSH and run the OpenVPN install script. Generate the .ovpn profile with the script and download it to your local machine. Finally, import the file into the OpenVPN client and connect to route traffic through the US server.
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?
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.
It should also be possible to use a tunnel to get around the blocking of WireGuard, for example.
You can then use it as an exit node if needed. It should work in theory, I have never tried this though. I just speak as a very frequent user of Tailscale with a bunch of nodes that are geographically located in different cities around me.
Sure, I know and use it too. But I saw you being downvoted so I responded to that. I think, reading the rest of the thread, your response (as mine would be) does not work as signals 0 experience with actually oppressing regimes. Not?
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).
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).
Soooo... what are good VPNs that don't do shady stuff, keeps your privacy in mind, have a reasonably sized server footprint and have features that go beyond basic traffic proxying? There is IVPN, Mullvad, and maybe even Windscribe. All are audited, have open source clients and in case of Windscribe, also court proven to keep no logs (ask me about that 1 time I got criminally charged in Greece for actions of a Windscribe user).
If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
Shadowsocks used to be the thing that _really_ worked in CN. Not sure what's current there.
AWS ap-southeast-3 should still be up, and isn't in a different partition like CN, govcloud, iso etc. So a VM there and a vpc peer in the US should get you around a lot of stuff.
Shadowsocks isn't a viable method in 2025 it seems. Not by itself apparently.
Shadowsocks generates high-entropy noise via packet analysis, which typically is easy to spot out as it looks irregular.
You could rent a cheapo instance at a cloud provider and tunnel https over ssh.
That’s basically undetectable. Long lived ssh connection? Totally normal. Lots of throughput? Also normal. Bursts throughput? Same.
Not sure how to do this on mobile.
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.
Use an Actual Private Network? Radio links that you control. Peer with someone who owns a Starlink terminal. Rent instances in GCP's Jakarta datacenter.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
> 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.
It's very sad that every sane and informed comment (like reisse's) has to meet this kind of snarky comment whose only purpose is being snarky on HN.
Perhaps you should stop and think about why people living in countries where governments actually censor a lot hardly use these "well-established providers" to circumvent censorship. Tip: it's not because they're stupid.
Actually, my main original purpose was to call (more) attention to the fact that looking for somebody specifically advertising a VPN to your particular country, for a censorship-resistance purpose, has a vastly greater chance of getting you a honey pot than almost any other possible way of looking for a relay. Honey pots are particularly dangerous in one-hop protocols with cleartext exit.
The part about the unreliable ad-hockery is also true, albeit less critical. The fact is that you don't know what your adversary is doing now, and you definitely don't know what they're going to to roll out next. You don't have to be stupid to decide to take that risk, but you also don't have to be particularly stupid to not think about that risk in the first place, especially when people are egging you on to take it.
The greater purpose underlying both is to keep people from unknowingly getting in over their heads. I have seen lots of people do actually stupid things, up close and personal, especially when given instructions without the appropriate cautions.
And "services and providers" doesn't necessarily mean commercial VPNs. In fact those were way down the list of what I had in mind. Your own VPS is a "provider". So is Tor or I2P (not that those won't usually run into problems). So is your personal friend in another country.
> Actually, my main original purpose was to call (more) attention to the fact that looking for somebody specifically advertising a VPN to your particular country, for a censorship-resistance purpose
Please re-read my post then. I do not call to look for VPN for your or anyone's particular country, I call to look for VPNs for these specific countries because they have the current bleeding edge blocking tech, and if VPN works there now, it will 100% work in every other country. If you're in China, you don't have to look for Chinese VPNs, some of Russian ones will work there too.
At DefCon 26 (25?) I attended two presentations that scared me:
1. there was a presentation about several admins in a hostile country who had been arrested because someone from Harvard pinged a server they ran as part of IPv4 measurement. The suggestion was to avoid measuring countries with strong censorship laws to prevent accidental imprisonment of innocent IT.
2. similar presentation about ToR project struggling to find fresh egress/ingress addresses. Authoritarian countries were making lists of any IP addresses that were known ToR IPs and prosecuting/imprisoning users associated with them as a result of traffic on those addresses.
I would be extremely careful trying to bypass authoritarian restrictions unless I was 110% confident what I was doing.
> Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran.
If I was working for a secret service for these countries, I would set up many "VPNs that are advertised specifically for x" as honeypots to gather data about any dissidents.
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.
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.
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
Spell out your argument more. Find some hard evidence. Even “major player” needs to be backed up.
Do you even know how many users Mullvad has in CN? I don’t. Searching says the whole company apparently has ~500k users. I don’t think that’s enough to be a significant presence in China.
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
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
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.
>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.
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.
^ 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.
Mullvad worked OK in China for me recently. Sometimes I'd have to try a few different endpoints before it worked. Something built specifically to work in those places would probably be better, but it wasn't too much trouble. Not necessarily a recommendation, just sharing one data point.
VPNs that are advertised are for-profit products, which means:
1. They are in most cases run by national spy agencies.
2. They will at least appear to work, i.e., they will provide you with access to websites that are blocked by the country you are in. Depending on which country's spies run the system, they may actually work in the sense of hiding your traffic from that country's spies, or they may mark you as a specific target and save all your traffic for later analysis.
My inclination is to prefer free (open-source) software that isn't controlled by a company which can use that control against its users.
Well, you have to host your free open-source VPN software somewhere. And then, (N. B.: technical and usability stuff aside, I'm talking only about privacy bits here) everything boils down to two equally nightmarish options.
First, you use well-known cloud or dedicated hoster. All your traffic is now tied to the single IP address of that hoster. It may be linked to you by visiting two different sites from the same IP address. Furthermore, this hoster is legally required to do anything with your VPN machine on demand of corresponding state actors (this is not a speculative scenario; i. e. Linode literally silently MitMed one of their customers on German request). Going ever further, residential and company IPs have quite different rules when it comes to law enforcement. Seeding Linux ISOs from your residential IP will be overlooked almost everywhere (sorry, Germany again), but seeding Linux ISOs from AWS can easily be a criminal offense.
Second, you use some shady abuse-proof hosting company, which keeps no logs (or at least says that) and accepts payments in XMR. Now you're logging in to your bank account from an IP address that is used to seedbox pirate content or something even more illegal, and you still don't know if anyone meddles with your VPN instance looking for crypto wallet keys in your traffic.
VPN services have a lot of "good" customers for a small amount of IP addresses, so even if they have some "bad" actors, their IPs as a whole remain "good enough". And, as the number of customers is big, each IP cannot be reliably tied to a specific customer without access logs.
Tor is a third option, at least as one layer, and seeding Linux ISOs is not, to my knowledge, a criminal offense in any jurisdiction, not even in China. I don't know where you got that idea.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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?
Wireguard ships with the Linux kernel so you only need to receive ~60 bytes of configuration information.
The user-facing software is not included in the kernel, but you need that to configure wireguard.
Yeah, you could use forward error correction too, so any n bits would be enough to reconstruct the input.
Of course then you get into needing software to decode the more advanced encodings; maybe start with a voice transmission explaining in plain language how to decode the first layer, which gives you a program that can decode the second layer, or something.
Starting to sound like an interesting project.
You never used dialup did you?
300 baud. Was enough to download grainy porn pics. With a proper download tool that continues after hangups etc you can just leave it on for a week and I have when downloading software end 70s. No problem. Also via the airwaves: we had software via the radio every sunday. Works fine. Modern software is shitty large: it would be nice if a VPN provider would just release the driver and a cli which should not weigh over a mega (far less but outside mr Whitney i am not sure if that type of software dev still exists) for this type of transfer.
zmodem to the rescue!
sure there is, you can send files over HF, it may not be FAST, but once you get it into the country, you can just copy the file with a faster method (eg: usb drive), WINLINK supports attachments, so you could absolutely send these files over HF
If you're going to be using USB drives anyway, then using them to move files into the country would be faster.
More dangerous though. You'd need something like truecrypt, too.
btw, veracrypt is the name if the follow up project. truecrypt shut down over a decade ago rather abruptly, so anything labeled truecrypt today is suspect as either out of date or potential malware.
Nah, just drop a few thousand 1GB flash drives from a plane. Load them with a tor browser, a wireguard client, and instructions on finding a remote exit. Only one copy needs to survive and it can spread very quickly and irreversibly by foot.
Yeah, this is a great approach if you're already at war with a country.
If you're not and they're still allowing your planes to fly through their airspace then this is a great way to ensure that they lock your (and your friends') planes out.
Wait until you find out what people used to do with phone lines!
The problem is the countries, which censor Internet and block VPNs, also jam shortwave radio signals.
It's possible but also difficult to jam radio. That's part of why programs like Radio Free Asia[0,1] exist. Even if you can't broadcast from inside a territory you can broadcast from outside. It can be jammed but it is a tough cat and mouse game and jamming isn't precise. So when you jam there are causalities. Not to mention that jamming can be quite expensive.
I'm not saying that makes the problem easy, but I'll say that jamming isn't a very strong defense.
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.
I’m not sure that’s super feasible any longer with the advent of cheap SDRs. Over-the-horizon HF broadcast can be heard with a simple speaker wire antenna inside your house. If anyone is interested in trying to deploy such an idea, I’d love to participate as an avid ham.
Could I ask for a source on that and how common it is?
Seems like it was used way back in the cold war (and even then not blocked/jammed) and I'd guess that current authoritarian regimes would perhaps not bother considering how few could use it.
Source: trust me bro, but you can find HF jamming pretty easily on Internet connected SDRs, especially near "sensitive" countries.
The USSR had an extensive shortwave radio jamming program!
if it became a widespread practice, wouldnt even the countries that yet dont do it probably start doing it?
But then couldn't the authorities just intercept it too and then block those ips?
https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand
Streisand is extremely out of date and wouldn’t last long in China, but I don’t know how sophisticated Indonesia’s firewall is
i have a few chinese friends and they say it's always easy to get a working vpn. that might not be true in a Tien An Minh type crisis, i dunno, but month in month out year upon year they surf western sites, exchange winnie the pooh pictures, etc. i suppose the people i know could be relatively upper class, i have no idea what type difference that could make. i had a chinese gf in LA who would send... my >cough< pictures... to her mother in china because she enjoyed them
This is no 'nothing special' with Obfs4proxy. DPI sees it as random byte stream, thus your government can decide to block unknown protocols. Instead, you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS.
Hi, posting from my main account (I'm also the poster of the GP comment).
"Nothing special" in this case was meant to describe the fact that it's random data with no identifiable patterns inherent to the data; you're absolutely right that that's what obfs4 does. I understand the confusion though, this phrasing could be better.
This does happen, though when I worked in the industry it wasn't common. Blocking of specific protocols was much more of an obstacle. 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.
> 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.
China blocked https last week: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/ch...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958621
They blanket blocked connections to port 443 for an hour. There was no protocol sniffing.
The only VPN technology I see that blends as HTTPS is MASQUE IP Proxying, and the only implementation I know that does this is iCloud Private Relay. It is also trivial to block because blocking 443/udp doesn't really affect accessing the Internet.
Cloudflare WARP (1.1.1.1 tunnel or Zero Trust) run by default on MASQUE
Ah that's true, they originally started off with a rust implementation of Wireguard but have since moved to MASQUE.
WebRTC is another great option: https://snowflake.torproject.org
It's used for a lot of legitimate traffic as well, so a bit harder to block.
Exactly this. Hell, for OP's use case of accessing things like twitter, a good old fashioned https proxy would be entirely fine, and likely not even illegal.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle...
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?
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.
Have you heard about Safing's "SPN"? Could you comment on that?
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/
If you are on a limited data plan, beware, DAITA produces a lot of traffic.
I'm curious. How does a state actor do actual DPI without pushing certs to end user devices?
The "inspection" part of DPI isn't limited to encrypted payloads. It's straightforward enough to look at application-level protocol headers and identify e.g. a Wireguard or OpenVPN or SSH connection, even if you can't decrypt the payload. That could be used as sufficient grounds to either block the traffic or punish the user.
Network fingerprinting, like https://github.com/FoxIO-LLC/ja4
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.
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/
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.
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?
> It seems like an adversarial network partition
plus an MITM attack, if I understand correctly.
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.
Patterns of data transmission (network behavioral analysis, I just made that term up), analyzing IP and ports, inspecting SSL handshakes for destination site. In short, metadata.
Obfs4proxy and Shapeshifter are an absolute PITA to install.
Get your own VPS server (VPS in EU/US with 2GB of ram, 40GB of disk space and TBs/month of traffic go for $10 a year, it's that cheap). Never get anything in the UK and even USA is weird. I'd stick with EU.
Install your software (wireguard + obsfuscation or even tailscale with your own DERP server)
Another simpler alternative is just `ssh -D port` and use it as a SOCKS server. It's usually not blocked but very obvious.
In my experience, in China as of 2016, "ssh -D" vasn't reliable at all, I wrote more details at https://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewa... (see "idea 1")
I just spent 3 months in China this summer. The GFW has become much more sophisticated than I remember. I found only one method that reliably worked. That was to use Holafly (an international eSIM provider) and use its built-in VPN. China largely doesn’t care if foreigners get around the GFW, I guess.
Another method that usually worked was ProtonVPN with protocol set to Wireguard. Not sure why this worked, it’s definitely a lot more detectable than other methods I tried. But as long as I rotated which US server I used every few days, this worked fine.
No luck with shadowsocks, ProtonVPN “stealth” mode, Outline+Digital Ocean, or even Jump / Remote Desktop. Jump worked the longest at several hours before it became unbearably slow, I’m still not sure if I was actually throttled or my home computer started misbehaving.
I didn’t get around to setting up a pure TLS proxy, or proxying traffic through a domain that serves “legitimate” traffic, so no idea if that still works.
Holafly (and other "travel" eSim providers) have been caught routing traffic through China.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/travel-esims-secretly-route-t...
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.
Exclusively use Shadowsocks here in the mainland. Was surprised to see Ngrok to work as well, but prolly not very long/reliable.
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.
Where are you finding a VPS in the EU for $10/year? Any I've seen are about 5-6 times that much.
Check LowEndTalk and LowEndBox
https://lowendtalk.com/
Can recommend. Always a little crazy, always insanely cheap. If it doesn't work out, you can just switch to another provider.
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
1GB or even 512MB and 10GB of storage is very easy and completely doable to use for a VPN + HTTPS server
Traffic is super cheap nowadays.
Your real issue will be IP reputation.
https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers
Is a good source.
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.
There are some techniques like fragmented TLS and reordered packets that work in some cases. Also using vanilla HTTPS transport is a good start for many places. URnetwork is an open source, decentralized option that does all of these out of the box. You can get it on the major stores or F-Droid.
Mullvad is a bad choice for this particular case because they publish all their IPs, which makes them very easy to block. You should look into VPN providers that do not publish their IPs and that have a wide range of IP classes and multiple ASNs, which look like ordinary networks not associated with VPNs. In my experience, NordVPN and ExpressVPN have many of these.
Express and Nord are completely useless in China. Mullvad worked fine two years ago but is getting worse, not sure if it still works currently.
I wonder if it can be embedded in a video stream, like a video of a lava lamp that you always have open, but the lsb of ever byte is meaningful.
That's an interesting idea, and probably something you might be able to achieve with a tool like h26forge.
It's also probably more useful to just have a connection be fully dedicated to a VPN, and have the traffic volume over time mimic what you'd see in a video, rather than embedding it in a video -- thanks to letsencrypt, much of the web's served over TLS these days (asterisks for countries like KZ and TM which force the use of a state-sponsored CA), so going to great lengths to embed your VPN in a video isn't really practical.
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
How about IPv6 over S3?
https://xeiaso.net/blog/anything-message-queue/
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.
If VPNs don't work for you, I recommend using an anti-censorship tool with an obfuscation protocol like v2ray which is commonly used in China.
https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core https://github.com/net4people/bbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall
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!
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.
How easy is it to get a VPS in China.
Could HK work?
HK "outside" the firewall, for now. It's where you would place the outside VM.
When I worked in China (not for long periods but frequently enough that the Great Firewall became an irritant) I hosted an OpenVPN server on port 443 and/or port 22 of a server I owned. That worked sufficiently well most of the time.
This doesn't work anymore; the GFW no longer detects VPN connections by port but instead by performing deep packet inspection to characterize the type of traffic going over every connection. Using this technique in combination with some advanced ML systems, they're able to detect any encrypted VPN connection and cut it off; it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore, and it's usually not even possible to _tunnel_ a VPN connection through some other protocol because the GFW now detects that too.
Stepping back and looking at it from a purely technical perspective, it's actually insanely impressive.
Here's a USENIX paper from a few years ago on how it is done: https://gfw.report/publications/usenixsecurity23/en/
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.
It's possible it worked in the past and doesn't work any more.
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)
So they'll just block any constant rate stream that isn't containing AV data or a whilelisted streaming service.
Aren't many/most audio/video streaming services variable bitrate now?
When I lived in China 10 years ago, GFW had a pretty effective way by slowing constant traffic that goes to an outside china ip address more and more over time. I had about 6 hours per ip (it starting to get slower and slower during that time) before having to rotate because even basic webpages didn't get through and ssh was unusable.
Assuming they don't MITM SSH, you should still be able to use something like wireguard over an SSH tunnel. At least I would think.. it's all SSH traffic as far as any DPI listener is concerned, you'd of course need to ensure the connection signature through another vector though.
That is impressive. Beyond bonkers, but impressive.
> it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore.
Really? Because the paper you linked says they don't block any TLS connections so you can just run a VPN over TLS:
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
v2ray and similar servers do exactly that, and I would assume they're still working as they're actively developed.
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).
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.
GitHub was briefly blocked a couple of years ago in Indonesia. SSH was also blocked briefly by one of the largest mobile providers.
Isn't VPS's public IP blocks are well known and very easy to block? I read that this is not a viable solution in case of China's firewall.
Denying the entire country the ability to ssh into ec2 instances would be pretty economically damaging, even for china
Github is blocked 90% of the time here in China. It is weird.
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.
Number two reason why Tor is dead is all other antifraud protections combined. Try paying with Stripe through Tor. There is quite a big chance you'll get an "unknown error" of sorts on Stripe side. Try to watch Netflix in Tor - exit nodes are banned.
Everyone kept shouting "Tor bad, Tor for criminals", and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's really hard to do just browse web normally in Tor, because all "normal" sites consider it bad. The "wrong" sites, however, who expect Tor visitors...
I understand where you are coming from but there’s a flip side to this.
Cloudflare obfuscating such a huge segment of origin servers gives a privacy advantage to anyone using a private DNS, since most of the IPs you can be seen connecting to are just…Cloudflare.
Or, at least, that’s how it would work if it wasn’t for SNI…
Cloud Flare supports ECH. https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/edge-certificates/ech/
I live in Indonesia, and I don't find any recent news that mention X (formerly Twittwr) and or Discord being blocked by the government. The only relevant news from a quick Google search I can find is about the government threatened to block X due to pornography content in 2024. You can even check for yourself if a domain is blocked by visiting https://trustpositif.komdigi.go.id/.
Also for your unability to access the VPN, as far as my experience goes, in the past some providers do block access to VPN. But, I am not experiencing that for at least the last 5 years.
So, maybe you can try changing your internet provider and see if you can connect to VPN?
How can it be that one person living in Indonesia says everything is blocked and the country is in chaos and another, very calmly, is completely unaware and can't even find any news about it? This is so odd. What is the truth?
The context that was likely left out due to HN rules is, there are mass protests turned violent in the face of police brutality in several cities. The Indonesian government has a history of blocking/throttling internet access in immediate areas of the unrest to limit coverage.
Indonesia is a big country with over ten thousand islands and uneven coverage. What is blocked on one ISP might not be enforced on another (e.g. the state-owned ISP might block or use DNS poisoning on several "non-compliant" DNS providers but my current ISP doesn't). Also, in addition to what the sibling commenter (and another commenter regarding Cloudflare outage) said there might be a general overload on the mobile network near the affected areas since there are lots of users and limited bandwidth.
It's a 270 million people country with over 10K+ islands. Last year I visited Borobudur and was surprised that the Yogjakarta region is autonomous and they have their own king.
There was a reported outage of cloudflare in Jakarta, while simultaneously people can't access Twitter and Discord. The worst part is that it coincides with the time when people need the information to find a safe route to go home after the protest.
Yes, this is the most likely explanation I can find, not a nationwide blockade.
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.
I would have laughed in your face if you wrote this comment merely 6 months ago. Now I'm just depressed. (UK)
America's Founders saw civil rights as inherent in the Constitution's framework, rooted in natural law. They added the Bill of Rights as an explicit bulwark. That's why we have the 1st Amendment's free speech, and if that falls, the 2nd Amendment ensures we have guns.
How's that working for you at the moment?
Sorry for the snide comment, but considering the last 6 - 8 months in the US, at least from what is being reported in the outside world, the 1st amendment doesn't seem to be providing much in the way of protection, and unless I'm missing something the general public doesn't seem to have the level of interest that would be required for your 2nd amendment to play out in any meaningful way.
It’s working fantastic. US media is great at generating hysteria (competitive market pressures in the war for attention), but the US is at essentially very little risk for speech suppression at the level of the UK right now.
UK too, and concerned. I agree that amendment 1 and 2 provisions effectively underpin individual freedom in the US due to founder perspicacity. My fear re US constitutional provision is on separation of powers, and transfer of power. Fortunately Pence held to the constitution. Nobody ever willingly takes their hands of the levers of power!
Yeah just physical suppression with active military patrolling major cities.
Only to watch the GOP completely disregard every aspect of it.
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...
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.
No American citizens’ rights have been taken away or can be taken away by a President.
We have whistleblowers and leakers from the administration itself on a literal weekly basis, our own Department of State actively funds Signal and Tor, our media has been heavily criticizing Trump and his allies for years. A couple organizations got hit with lawsuits for publishing misinformation or skirting campaign law, but that’s about it.
They tried to make flag burning illegal - which is illegal in Mexico, most of South America, all of Asia, and most of Europe - and it was shot down almost immediately as even that comes under 1st amendment rights.
Please don’t lump us into the same bucket as the UK. We may have a sharply divided electorate but we don’t have a failing state!
Don't worry. You'll call us conspiracy theories once you get used to the new goalposts and we warn you about the next thing.
How about instead of being depressed you start being vocal and defiant?
You know what, I think I've become lethargic after all the backwards garbage going on in my country attacking my way of life on all fronts - from rampant crime to government censorship. Your comment just gave me a kick up the ass. I'm gonna try and get some local stuff going in opposition to this lunacy.
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.
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. :)
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.
I wouldn’t worry about it.
They can barely handle wolf-whistlers let alone pedophile rape gangs consisting of the lowest IQ dregs of our society.
I know it’s only painfully stupid people who think the law is stupid, but dodgy Dave down the way tends to fly under the radar. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many of them.
One of the problems with authoritarianism is that even though most dodgy Daves will be fine because the political apparatus doesn't have the time or energy to arrest everyone for everything, they retain the ability to arrest anyone for anything.
The moment your dodgy Dave offends your local cadre, even for reasons entirely other than being dodgy, they'll throw the book at him. And because there is now 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.
Very well explained
It's not that they couldn't handle the rape gangs; it's that they turned a blind eye towards them.
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.
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.
That absolutely sounds like a world I should be worried about, where our only choices are dodgy ones
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.
I'd default assume black market VPNs will monitor internet activity since it's both easy and profitable
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> People need to stick it to the government and demand their freedoms.
It will only work if they admit that they supported this and all forms of totalitarianism during COVID. You can't fall for that and then be surprised when the world keeps going down that obvious path.
In matters of public health, you cannot trust the public to do the right thing.
The problem with covid is that we weren't totalitarian enough. Regulations you could drive a coach & horses through and no way to enforce is a sop.
The first lock down needed to be a proper 'papers, please' affair. When we get a properly lethal pandemic, we're fucked. Hopefully Laurence Fox and Piers Corbyn will catch it quickly and expire in a painful and televised way, it's the only hope of people complying with actual quarantine measures.
This type of thinking is why we are heading in a direction of authoritarianism everywhere.
And COVID was not "totalitarian enough"? Yet people were forbidden from leaving their homes for a time.
It was really amazing what fear could do to a population, how it rallied mostly together.
I am just waiting for red states in the US to try this too since their current laws requiring ID verification for porn sites aren’t effective.
> red states
Well you'd be surprised to find out that this stupid policy (and many more) have been brought forward by Labour (Left).
At this point, anyone who has been watching politics for a few decades understands that the left/right dichotomy is primarily one designed to keep the majority of people within a certain set of bounds. We see it revealed when politicians and ideologies that should be in opposition to one another still cooperate on the same strategies, like this one.
The goal right now is to make online anonymity impossible. Adult content is the wedge issue being used to make defending it unpalatable for any elected official, but nobody actually has it as a goal to prevent teenagers from looking at porn - if they did, they would be using more direct and efficient strategies. No, it's very clear that anonymous online commentary is hurting politicians and they are striking back against it.
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.
Labour supported it but it was proposed and passed by Parliament in 2023 during the Tory government
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.
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.
Yep, here in Australia the social media age restriction was pushed through by both sides. Two sides of the same coin.
90% of “citizen journalism” is nothing of the sort. Just like “citizen science” researching vaccines.
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?
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.
> Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.
Both matter.
>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.
You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
> 90% of “citizen journalism” is (trash)
You're right. But compared to what?
I guess 99% of mainstream "journalism" is irrelevant and/or inaccurate, hence citizen journalism is a 10x improvement in accuracy and relevancy! Not 10% better, 900% better! This makes a huge difference to our society as a whole and in our daily lives!
But this misses the most important point which is that the user should have the right to choose for themselves what they say and read. Making citizen journalism unduly burdensome deprives everyone of that choice.
Citizen journalism avoids the main weakness of a centralised system: it's incredible suspectible to capture. A prime example of this is the mass opposition around the world to Israel's genocide in Gaza. Israel committed such genocides prior to the event of social media, such as the Nakba, but it was rarely reported on, due to media ownership being concentrated in the hands of a few pro-Zionist individuals.
- 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.
> - 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.
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.
True, but OP's threat model doesn't involve state actors outside Indonesia, so traffic analysis of the "last mile" between Mullvad node and whatever non-Indonesian service OP is trying to use (Twitter, Discord, …) is not really relevant here. (Assuming Indonesia doesn't have capabilities we don't know of.)
What might be more interesting is the case where the Indonesian government forces Twitter/Discord to give up IP addresses (which I find hard to believe but it's certainly not impossible). But then they'd still have to overcome Mullvad. It's much more likely that if OP has an account on Twitter/Discord, it is already tied to their person in many ways, and this would probably be the main risk here.
> 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting
Typo? Wireguard-capable VPSes are available for $20-$30 per year. (https://vpspricetracker.com/ is a good site for finding them.)
I mean multiple VPSs for redundancy. Contabo is maybe the cheapest I've seen and it's like 3$ mtl for the smallest?
Sure, but ten servers is a bit too much redundancy, no? Depending on how many people you want to share it with it might make sense though.
And using another VPN like NordVPN or ProtonVPN is probably in the same category as Mullvad, but worth being cautious. If it's free, you are the product. If you pay, you're still sending your traffic to a publicly (usually) known server of a VPN. That metadata alone in some jurisdictions can still put you in danger.
Stay safe
This is good overview, I just wanted to add that a VPS IP is not a residential IP. You will encounter roadblocks when you try to access services if you appear to be coming from a VPS. Not that I had a better solution, just to clarify what you can expect.
Tor also has anti-censorship mechanisms (snowflakes, ...). Depending on how aggressive the blocking is, Tor might be the most effective solution.
Wireguard is not censorship-resistant, and most VPN-averse countries block cross-border Wireguard. Why reply a practical question in an area in which you have no experience?
Is it possible to identify wireguard traffic that isn't on a common port?
Yes. Fixed packet headers, predictable packet sizes. I don't know what "a common port" means in relation to wg.
51820 is the one they use in the docs, that's probably the most common one.
They mean UDP port 51820
Yeah. Tailscale uses 41641, and you can generally use whatever. I don't think there's any consensus, or majority.
Because Indonesia is new to the game and might still be catching up. They’re probably playing whackamole with the most common public VPN providers and might not be doing deep packet inspection yet. I worked with someone getting traffic out of Hong Kong a year ago and there was a lot trial and error figuring out what was blocked and what was not. Wireguard was one that worked.
They recommend Tailscale in particular. Tailscale control plane and DERPs (which are functionally required on mobile) will be among the first to go.
Outline (shadowsocks-based) and amnezia (obfuscated wg and xray) both offer few-click install on your own VPS, which is easier than setting up headscale or static wg infrastructure, and will last you longer.
Also, you did not answer my "why" question. I'm not sure what question you were answering.
IMO most people should have a VPS even if you don't need it for tunneling. Living without having a place to just leave services/files is very hard and often "free" services will hold your data hostage to manipulate your behavior which is annoying on a good day.
Minimums for a VPS should be closer to $5-10 a month, no?
Yeah they can be cheap, but I would definitely recommend having at least 3 for redundancy. If one get shut down or it's IP blacklisted you still hopefully have a backup line to create a replacement.
No, unless you pay month to month. If you wait till BF you can find some really good deals on sites like lowendspirit
> cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ 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 $10 PER YEAR!
https://billing.chunkserve.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0
https://my.servitro.com/cart.php?a=view
https://manager.ouiheberg.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0
Thank you so much for this. It is very helpful.
or simply RDP into a windows VPS.
> cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ 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.
nextdns recently created geo spoofing methods, I may be wrong, I usually am but I am curious as to if these censorship can be fixed by nextdns.
I don't know if indonesia is becoming exactly like china/ so a complete crackdown as people are discussing things as if its for china, but I feel like that there are definitely some easier things than hosting your own server or using shadowsocks.
Check if proton vpn/mullvad vpn are working once please, they are definitely plug n play and proton even offers a free tier.
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].
[1]: https://cscot.pages.dev/2023/03/02/Xray-REALITY-tutorial/
[2]: https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-examples/blob/main/VLESS-TCP-XT...
The great thing about China's Great Firewall is that really good options to circumvent censorship have been around for a while. Was waiting for someone to bring up XRay! Alternatively, here is a great write up of using V2Ray[1]. May be worth OP looking into, as a blogger I found noted[2] is an alternative to a VPN, and may work. [1]: https://www.v2ray.com/en/ [2]: https://sequentialread.com/v2ray-caddy-to-access-the-interne...
Also sing-box [1]. I don't use it for its primary use case of censorship circumvention, but rather for some highly complex routing configurations it supports.
My use case consists of passing some apps on my Android through interface A (e.g. banking apps through my 5G modem), some apps through US residential proxy (for US banks that don't like me visiting from abroad), and all the rest through VPN. And no root required!
It's wild that GFW triggered creation of this and nothing like it existed / exists.
[1]: https://github.com/SagerNet/sing-box
im curious, isn't ALL of your traffic appearing to be to just one website the most obvious giveaway?
*ray clients typically allow configuration of routing. So you can send only blocked stuff through the tunnel; or, in reverse, send some known-working stuff (e. g. local domain) direct. Also works as adblock.
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.
We've had success using wireguard over wstunnel in places where wireguard is blocked.
https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel
This looks great, thanks.
I should have mentioned that our use case isn't avoiding government firewalls, it's transiting through broken network environments.
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.
Wow, kinda crazy to think about a government blocking a protocol that just simply lets two computers talk securely over a tunnel.
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.
That is how you know they haven't got a clue on what they're doing.
> surprised that wireguard as a protocol is just blocked.
Honestly this is the route I'm sure the UK will decide upon in the not too distant future.
The job of us hackers is going to become even more important...
A year ago I was traveling through Uzbekistan while also partly working remotely. IKEv2 VPN was blocked but thankfully I was able to switch to SSL VPN which worked fine. I didn't expect that, everything else (people, culture) in the country seemed quite open.
Cloak + wireguard should work fine on the server side. The problem is that I didn't find any clients for Android and I doubt there are clients for iOs that can (a) open a cloak tunnel and then (b) allow wireguard to connect to localhost...
AmneziaWG is obfuscated, wireguard-based, and has clients for whatever.
Same in Egypt.
XRay protocol based VPN worked for me in Uzbekistan when I were travelling there.
Wireguard is indeed blocked.
xray is a proxy. They may have needed an actual VPN.
Same in Russia
how can they detect it is wireguard, I thought the traffic is encrypted?
how does it differ from regular TLS 1.3 traffic?
It's UDP, not TCP (like TLS) and has a distinguishable handshake. Wireguard is not designed as a censorship prevention tool, it's purely a networking solution.
The tunnel itself is encrypted, but the tunnel creation and existence is not obfuscated.
Mastodon is not easy for regimes to completely block, and most instances won't block you for using Tor. Mastodon saw a huge migration from Brazil when X was blocked there.
https://joinmastodon.org/
Wouldn't it be easy to block the individual servers, e.g. https://mastodon.social?
There are many instances of Mastodon, and due to its federated nature, you can use any of them to access it, and even host your own.
What's stopping them from just blocking them all and continuing to block new ones?
Nothing is stopping them, but like most things in blocking free speech, it’s a game of cat and mouse.
The long tail is very long
It's not that long. You could probably these servers with an automated process.
Sure, but if you have an account on a different server, you can still see things posted on mastodon.social if you have followed someone there.
It would be easy to block on protocol level. Countries that block VPNs usually progress to that level pretty fast once they discover that simple IP blocks don't work.
The traffic looks like any other web page.
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.
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.
For an example of a proxy service https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...
That will give you a hard to snoop proxy service that should completely circumvent a government blockaid (they likely aren't going to be watching or blocking ssh traffic).
Advanced enough censors (who have DPI) do block or slow down ssh, e.g.: https://serverfault.com/questions/1122015/ssh-blockedfor-for...
That's a pretty strict censorship that basically locks your digital infrastructure into your country.
That hasn't worked for china since before 2020, you're years out of date.
Probably just an unfortunate timing. Cloudflare is going down in this region [1] at the same time with the protests and unrest caused by the news of a motorcycle taxi driver who got run over by a swat car during a protest [2].
Such coincidence might seems like the government trying to do some damage control by restricting internet access, but I hope that's not what happen here. At the moment, cloudflare status for Jakarta is still "rerouted".
[1] https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/1chpg2514kq8
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jONV0mb9nw
I'm in Indonesia right now as well and my Proton VPN still works. But I would see it as a short-term solution.
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.
> 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.
> Windows (which afaik doesn't have an ssh client built-in)
It has had both SSH client and SSH server built-in since Win10.
Windows has had both ssh client/server for years
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/
Give Obscura a try, we get around internet restrictions by using QUIC as transport, which looks like HTTP/3 and doesn't suffer from TCP-over-TCP meltdown: https://obscura.net/
Technical details: https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/
Let us know what you think!
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Obscura.
Looks like MacOS and iOS only, which is unfortunate. Support for at least Windows and Android is needed for wider adoption. Linux would also be nice.
If they're blocking other protocols then likely they're blocking quic also.
Very possible, though many of our users are saying that in network environments where WireGuard is blocked they were able to use Obscura.
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?
We should link it in more places, apologies!
Here it is: https://github.com/Sovereign-Engineering/obscuravpn-client
Looks good, just one note: btc was never meant for anonymity, if you would add Monero as a payment option that would be great.
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.
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!
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
State censorship circumvention is exactly what Psiphon is for! So yes, try it.
(Disclaimer: I work there.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anything more then small text bandwidth use is also detected . Not about interactivity instead this case
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.
The issue these days is that all of the EC2 IP ranges are well known, and are usually not very high-reputation IPs, so a lot of services will block them, or at least aggressively require CAPTCHAs to prevent botting.
Source: used to work for a shady SEO company that searched Google 6,000,000 times a day on a huge farm of IPs from every provider we could find
I watched a season of Doctor Who that way back when the BBC were being precious about it. But Digital Ocean, so $5.
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.
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
Furthermore, you can always run another VPN on top of that if you don’t trust the outer one with the actual plaintext traffic.
Not on mobile - iOS doesn't support nested VPNs, and neither does stock Android.
I'm reading posts that indicate (at least some of) the blocking is at the DNS level.
https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/WkwkwkLand/comments/...
Cloudflare says some issue affecting Jakarta has been resolved. They aren't saying what the issue was.
https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/1chpg2514kq8
What I'm worried most are that most people are not even aware of what is DNS and how to change it.
I can't imagine those who are caught in the chaos with only their phone and unable to access information that could help them to be safe.
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.
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.
In this scenario, Chinese have very rich experience. you need to use the advance proxy tool like clash ,v2ray, shadowsocks etc.
shadowsocks was the winner of the state of the art I had to do at work. It address the "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 stat)" comment.
Someone should create a vpn protocol that pretends to be a command and control server exfiltrating US corporate secrets from hacked servers. The traffic pattern should be similar, and god forbid Xi blocks the real exfiltrations
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.
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.
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.
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.
In case known VPN providers are blocked you can pick a small VPS from a hoster like Hetzner and setup your own VPN.
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.
Isn't there an SSH proxy command as long as you have shell access ?
AmneziaWG client worked just fine with normal Wireguard servers in Egypt where official Wireguard clients doesn't, WGTunnel app on android support both protocols.
https://github.com/amnezia-vpn/amneziawg-go https://github.com/wgtunnel/wgtunnel
On a related note, does anyone have insight into *why* the Indonesian government is doing this?
there is a major protest currently happening due to the legislative body representative just giving themselves a monthly domicile stipend of ~$3300 on top of their salaries (yes, multiple), while the average people earned ~$330 monthly. the information about the protest are not broadcasted on local TVs, so the only spread of information is through social media. i guess since a lot of people went around it using VPN, the gov decided to block it too.
If it helps, here's some recent coverage:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/26/indonesia-prot...
“Some demonstrators on Monday were seen on television footage carrying a flag from the Japanese manga series One Piece, which has become a symbol of protest against government policies in the country.”
The official word is to counter gambling. Lately the government is not really popular after some decisions that could be interpreted as authoritative, and as citizens have spoken out about it online, causing more voices to join and protests erupting..
So well, my guess is they're trying to control it.
https://tech.yahoo.com/social-media/articles/indonesia-urges...
Get a cheap VPS for less than $10/mo or a dedicated server for like $25/mo and ssh tunnel into it. You can also use it to be your devserver, run your blog, etc. I've been using french located OVH servers in France for many years, it just works.
I'd recommend using Outline - it's a one click setup that lets you provision your own VPN on a cloud provider (or your own hardware).
Since you get to pick where the hardware is located and it is just you (or you and a small group of friends & family) using the VPN, blocking is more difficult.
If you don't want the hassle of using your own hardware you can rent a Digital Ocean droplet for <$5 per month.
https://getoutline.org/
I’ve set this up for friends in fairly heavily censored countries before, it has been working well so far, but as others have said, this is a cat and mouse game
Use a less-known DoH or DoT provider.
They just "blocked" Reddit today, I selected another DoH provider from the menu in my browser settings, and continued.
What is going on if you don’t mind my asking? Our local news does not mention anything. Nor does ddging help? Any sources?
Massive protests have occurred due to obvious government corruption. In particular the housing allowance for a month for a parliamentarian is now ten times the minimum wage for a month.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/26/indonesia-prot...
Sorry I don't have a better freely accessible source, maybe someone with more knowledge can fill it in.
> the housing allowance for a month for a parliamentarian is now ten times the minimum wage for a month.
I'm almost positive that everyone in the US Congress is making at least ten times the minimum wage in this country. The "housing allowance" being referred to is separate from their normal salary in Indonesia, but still, interesting to imagine how much more seriously people there would take that disparity than in 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.
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.
Chinese have developed a significant amount of sophisticated tools countering internet censorship. V2ray as far as I recall is the state-of-the-art.
To use them, one need to first rent a (virtual) server somewhere from a foreign cloud provider as long as the payment does not pose a problem. The first step sometimes proves difficult for people in China, but hopefully Indonesia is not at that stage yet. What follows is relatively easy as there are many tutorials for the deployment like: https://guide.v2fly.org/en_US/
Agreed, the best tools for circumventing The Great Firewall of China are from Chinese developers. https://github.com/txthinking/brook comes to mind..
Somewhat dated read here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tailscale/comments/16zfag4/travelin...
Some good ideas, though. There seems to be OSS alternatives for TailScale control servers which would make it harder to block - I'd go that route. The top recommendation boils down to, "Set up several different methods, and one will always work".
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
> 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?
> 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
It was the liberal West who helped China build the Great Firewall – Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Nortel, Siemens and others.
As long as a lucrative commercial opportunity was there, they seized upon it shoving the liberal values up the orifice where the sun does not shine.
You can also setup your own, get a VM in the free world and setup an open VPN server. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...
As someone based in China, it's a bit surprising that techniques used by Chinese people get very few mentions here, while I do think they are quite effective against access blocking, especially after coevolving with GFW for the past decade. While I do hope blocking in Indonesia won't get to GFW level, I will leave this here in case it helps.
I found this article [0] summarizing the history of censorship and anti-censorship measures in China, and I think it might be of help to you if the national censorship ever gets worse. As is shown in the article, access blocking in China can be categorized into several kinds: (sorted by severity)
1. DNS poisoning by intercepting DNS traffic. This can be easily mitigated by using a DOT/DOH DNS resolver.
2. Keyword-based HTTP traffic resetting. You are safe as long as you use HTTPS.
3. IP blocking/unencrypted SNI header checking. This will require the use of a VPN/proxy.
4. VPN blocking by recognizing traffic signatures. (VPNs with identifiable signatures include OpenVPN and WireGuard (and Tor and SSH forwards if you count those as VPNs), or basically any VPN that was designed without obfuscation in mind.) This really levels up the blocking: if the government don't block VPN access, then maybe any VPN provider will do; but if they do, you will have a harder time finding providers and configuring things.
5. Many other ways to detect and block obfuscated proxy traffic. It is the worse (that I'm aware of), but it will also cost the government a lot to pull off, so you probably don't need to worry about this. But if you do, maybe check out V2Ray, XRay, Trojan, Hysteria, NaiveProxy and many other obfuscated proxies.
But anyways, bypassing techniques always coevolve with the blocking measures. And many suggestions here by non-Indonesian (including mine!) might not be of help. My personal suggestion is to find a local tech community and see what techniques they are using, which could suit you better.
[0] https://danglingpointer.fun/posts/GFWHistory
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...
Western governments should have entire budgets focused on software to circumvent great firewalls.
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?
May I suggest getting a cheap VPS in another country and using SSH to tunnel traffic, or even setup a window manager on the VPS.
Try the Tor Browser, and use bridged mode to to make it look like you aren't using Tor.
https://www.torproject.org/
The best time to develop meshnets was 15 years ago. The second best time is now. What is actually holding us back here? Almost everyone has powerful radio equipment these days.
Do you still have access to GitHub?
If so you can run BrowserBox in a GitHub action runner exposed via IP or ngrok tunnel. That will give you a browser in a free region. Easy set up via workflow.
You’ll need a ngrok API key and a BrowserBox key. Hit us up: sales@dosaygo.com for a short term key at a discount if it works for you.
We will offer keys for free to any journalists in censored regions.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
I'm saying slacktivism won't get you anywhere. There is no technical solution to cultivating a better political culture.
How do you propose they coordinate the political activities when they can't use external communications sites/tools, and internal sites are actively monitored by an authoritarian government?
Step 1 is establishing a secure means of communication.
Personally, I like Amnezia VPN, it has some ways to work around blocks: https://amnezia.org/en You can very easily self-host it, their installer automatically works on major cloud platforms.
Though if Indonesia has blocked VPNs only now, possibly they only block major providers and don't try to detect the VPN protocol itself, which would make self-hosting any VPN possible.
Just curious: Anyone know if things like Starlink are viable?
Starlink, by policy, connects you through a ground station in the same country. They wouldn't be allowed to operate otherwise.
Why? Can someone block the sky? (I have 0 satellite knowledge)
Starlink is a legitimate business (ISP) that wants to make money from customers in that country. They will comply with all of the regulations and bans imposed by the government in that country or risk getting banned completely.
It's not about blocking the sky. Starlink sends the internet connection back down to the ground somewhere in the country you are in.
That being said, if I have an American starlink account, and I go to Indonesia, what happens? Does my internet connection go back down through Indonesia or does it go through somewhere else?
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/
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.
Aren't there local (online or print) newspapers to get news from, as an alternative to Discord? Hope I'm not asking a dumb question
In countries where it comes to government blocking/censoring internet traffic, traditional media is cleared of all dissent and fully controlled long before. Last stages of that are happening in my country, Serbia, currently.
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...
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.
AmneziaWG is a decent option for censorship resistance, and it can be installed as a container on your own server.
AmneziaWG clients works just fine with normal Wireguard servers by the way.
Get a Digitalocean droplet, and host your own Outline instance. Their manager app makes this a 1-click process.
Weird. I'm in Indonesia and can access VPNs, X and Discord.
I just wake up in Jakarta and there is nothing wrong with X or Discord
Try this, https://github.com/database64128/swgp-go, setup is a bit complicated but it works extremely well.
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/
Go here. https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues
Very helpful community.
You could use something like https://github.com/database64128/swgp-go to obfuscate WireGuard traffic.
Using full-blown VPNs under such environments has the disadvantage of affecting your use of domestic web services. You might want to try something like https://github.com/database64128/shadowsocks-go, which allows you to route traffic based on domain and IP geolocation rules.
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.
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?
I've heard of shadowsocks being advertised for such use cases.
https://shadowsocks.org/
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
Use Astrill - if you can afford. You could try AirVPN, much cheaper, but if Astrill does not work, probably no VPN will. https://expatcircle.com/cms/privacy/vpn-services/
Why is Indonesia in chaos?
>> Why is Indonesia in chaos?
I was wondering that too, looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Indonesian_protests.
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.
Grab a VPS and use SOCKS5 tunneling via SSH.
SSH is often targeted by deep packet inspection and protocol binding filters.
i.e. One is better off tunneling over https://www.praise-the-glorious-leader.google.com.facebook.c...
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
lolwut
At least it isn't goatse...
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
tangent: what is the significance of the "=3" you sign your messages with?
Don't worry about it... =3
https://amnezia.org/
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?
In person or not at all.
At that point you've essentially lost.
You either hope another country sees value in spreading you some democracy, or you rise up and hope others join you.
Or not and you accept the protection the state is graciously providing to you.
SneakerNet or bust, eh? That sucks.
Encrypted hand written notes tied to pigeons
Can you try both WireGuard and MASQUE? you can do that by using `warp-cli tunnel protocol set MASQUE'. if you want to try WireGuard, `warp-cli tunnel protocol set WireGuard'
I block Twitter at home… it’s not a huge loss
Your first option until you get settled is to use an SSH reverse proxy:
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
It’s -D, -R is for forwarding specific ports.
Thanks I have updated my comment as well.
Sorry for the brain rot!
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.
Usually when countries block websites they don't block major cloud providers, like AWS and Google Cloud. Because most websites are hosted on them. So you can get a cheap VPS from AWS or GCP (always free VM is available) and host OpenVPN on it.
vps install tailscale on it use it as exit node
In this case the blockage will probably just be up for a few days, until the protests calmed down.
Other than that: tor
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.
Maybe TOR? https://www.torproject.org/
URnetwork works where many don't http://ur.io . It used a grab bag of techniques, open source
SOCKS proxy over SSH?
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.
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
For web browsing, Firefox lets you configure socks on android.
Set up a VM on AWS/azure/gcp/... in the desired cell, install a VPN server and done. Once you have automation in place it takes ~2 minutes to start, you can run it on demand so you can pay per minute.
All the various proxy solutions offered are good (although the simplest ones - like squid - haven't been mentioned yet). You can also use a remote desktop or even just ssh -Y me@remote-server "firefox"
Get a VPS, arrange your own IPV6. Setup a tunnel and block all non encrypted traffic.
Use the open-source SoftEther VPN. It sends your traffic over software-defined Ethernet wrapped in HTTPS. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN
Here's a list of public instances hosted by volunteers: https://www.vpngate.net/en/
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.
Try looking into tor bridges.
You could also buy a VPS and use SSH tunneling to access a tor daemon running on a VPS. Host some sort of web service on the VPS so it looks inconspicuous
I recommend using tor over snowflake relays to connect. It is meant to be censorship proof.
An alternative is using an eSIM with an “internet breakout” via another country.
Esimdb is a good place to start.
As an aside about professional and engineering ethics:
If you’ve ever worked in the DPI space and actively participated in the development or installation of state surveillance and censorship products…
Shame.
Shame.
Shame.
Remote desktop (RDP/AnyDesk/etc) into a VM hosted somewhere else?
I like mullvad. You can buy a prepaid card off amazon. I figured out how to setup wireguard on various unixes Mac/linux/openbsd
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!
I'd recommend Obscura because it uses Wireguard over QUIC and it pretty good at avoiding these blocks. It's also open source.
Launch an EC2 instance in the US region (Ubuntu, open ports 22 and 1194), then connect via SSH and run the OpenVPN install script. Generate the .ovpn profile with the script and download it to your local machine. Finally, import the file into the OpenVPN client and connect to route traffic through the US server.
Doesn't work in China, this is a method for last decades censorship.
Please consider the potential consequences of circumventing the ban. Do what you do, but above all stay safe!
Make your own VPN using a VPS and something like openvpn.
Not every website will allow it, but it should get you access to more than you have now.
A proxy service like shadow socks works. There are thousands of providers for $X/month for a decent amount of traffic
Depending on the circumstances, maybe ditch the landline local ISP for a satellite connection with a foreign ISP?
does this include bali? curious as that would impact the large international population.
Mullvad
Mullvad doesn't really have any modern censorship circumvention options.
Genuine question is Shadowsocks outdated? Because it supports it
Yes, it's superseded by V* stuff and derivatives (VLess...), and probably by Trojan, but the latter is less popular.
Works in China just fine.
Try a ssh socks5 proxy to a cheap vps.
It worked well for me in UAE when other solutions didn’t
Buy a VSP elsewhere and run Wireguard over IPSec
You should use a jet. Actually that's a Russian joke.
An airport.
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.
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.
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.
It should also be possible to use a tunnel to get around the blocking of WireGuard, for example.
You can then use it as an exit node if needed. It should work in theory, I have never tried this though. I just speak as a very frequent user of Tailscale with a bunch of nodes that are geographically located in different cities around me.
Sure, I know and use it too. But I saw you being downvoted so I responded to that. I think, reading the rest of the thread, your response (as mine would be) does not work as signals 0 experience with actually oppressing regimes. Not?
Residential VPNs, but try to find ones that are ran ethically.
SSTP or other HTTPS like VPN
The closest I've come to this is on an airplane where almost everything was blocked. SSTP to a server I spun up worked well.
localtunnel.me, some node in the cloud, tunnel…
surfshark works also Im on MTM no issues! Same with Biznet
try Bright Data / luminati and the traffic is http to the proxy as well.
shortwave radios would enable you to still get news of major events - not 2 way though
Psiphon works
If you are a journalist or other, contact Team Cymru.
I can relate to this because my country has an election soon and I'm sure we wont have internet for 3 - 5 days then.
Tailscale
People in Turkey use https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI together with DNS over HTTPS (DoH).
Tor should be pretty good even for environments where they crack down on VPNs, although it can be a bit slow, at least it works.
Then you will be blocked by Twitter and Discord, which is the same thing.
Yeah, sucks, but really should find better places for people to gather regardless, if you're in that sort of environment.
How is this practical advice in a thread where someone mentions that the clampdown happened without notice?
The "shoulda done..." advice isn't useful in the slightest, and I'd argue is malicious with how often it's done simply to satiate a poster's ego.
There's a new VPN that you might try, built by Boycat.
https://www.boycat.io/vpn
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.
sshuttle. Tunnel your connections inside ssh.
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).
Soooo... what are good VPNs that don't do shady stuff, keeps your privacy in mind, have a reasonably sized server footprint and have features that go beyond basic traffic proxying? There is IVPN, Mullvad, and maybe even Windscribe. All are audited, have open source clients and in case of Windscribe, also court proven to keep no logs (ask me about that 1 time I got criminally charged in Greece for actions of a Windscribe user).
If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
TIL
Get a cheap VPS anywhere, and use DSVPN https://github.com/jedisct1/dsvpn
Uses TCP and works pretty much anywhere.
Starlink?
Shadowsocks used to be the thing that _really_ worked in CN. Not sure what's current there.
AWS ap-southeast-3 should still be up, and isn't in a different partition like CN, govcloud, iso etc. So a VM there and a vpc peer in the US should get you around a lot of stuff.
Use shadowsocks for the past 2 years in CN works fine. Also Trojan. Not sure what the servers actually run.
Shadowsocks isn't a viable method in 2025 it seems. Not by itself apparently. Shadowsocks generates high-entropy noise via packet analysis, which typically is easy to spot out as it looks irregular.
ssh -D 48323 -p 61423 my-vps.big-company.com
Can you SSH outside the country?
If so, then you have a VPN.
SSH tunnel on cheap VPS, a couple.
Use an ethical one
https://www.boycat.io/vpn
You could rent a cheapo instance at a cloud provider and tunnel https over ssh.
That’s basically undetectable. Long lived ssh connection? Totally normal. Lots of throughput? Also normal. Bursts throughput? Same.
Not sure how to do this on mobile.
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.
OVH VPS-1 and your own configuration.
HTTPS to you own proxy on a foreign VPS.
Just please be safe and necessarily paranoid
One way they tend to "solve" workarounds is making examples of people
SSH SOCKS proxy if you have an SSH host somewhere that is not Indonesia.
SSH tunneling on port 80 could work since it's rarely blocked, rent a cheap vps.
megavpn, should be around a dollar a month for 5 devices.
Use an Actual Private Network? Radio links that you control. Peer with someone who owns a Starlink terminal. Rent instances in GCP's Jakarta datacenter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMSAT-OSCAR_7#Use_by_Polish_an... <-- "Radio links you control", and is hard to block/detect.
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
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).
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.
Maybe you could buy VPS in another country and set up VPN server yourself?
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.
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.
@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.
> 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.
Maybe that's "solving" it, maybe not.
It's very sad that every sane and informed comment (like reisse's) has to meet this kind of snarky comment whose only purpose is being snarky on HN.
Perhaps you should stop and think about why people living in countries where governments actually censor a lot hardly use these "well-established providers" to circumvent censorship. Tip: it's not because they're stupid.
Actually, my main original purpose was to call (more) attention to the fact that looking for somebody specifically advertising a VPN to your particular country, for a censorship-resistance purpose, has a vastly greater chance of getting you a honey pot than almost any other possible way of looking for a relay. Honey pots are particularly dangerous in one-hop protocols with cleartext exit.
The part about the unreliable ad-hockery is also true, albeit less critical. The fact is that you don't know what your adversary is doing now, and you definitely don't know what they're going to to roll out next. You don't have to be stupid to decide to take that risk, but you also don't have to be particularly stupid to not think about that risk in the first place, especially when people are egging you on to take it.
The greater purpose underlying both is to keep people from unknowingly getting in over their heads. I have seen lots of people do actually stupid things, up close and personal, especially when given instructions without the appropriate cautions.
And "services and providers" doesn't necessarily mean commercial VPNs. In fact those were way down the list of what I had in mind. Your own VPS is a "provider". So is Tor or I2P (not that those won't usually run into problems). So is your personal friend in another country.
> Actually, my main original purpose was to call (more) attention to the fact that looking for somebody specifically advertising a VPN to your particular country, for a censorship-resistance purpose
Please re-read my post then. I do not call to look for VPN for your or anyone's particular country, I call to look for VPNs for these specific countries because they have the current bleeding edge blocking tech, and if VPN works there now, it will 100% work in every other country. If you're in China, you don't have to look for Chinese VPNs, some of Russian ones will work there too.
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.
> Yeah, maybe V* and derivatives are random ad-hoc hackery, but they also are the well-known standard now.
A lot of people use Telegram and think it's private, too.
What about the part about choosing your VPN provider in the way most likely to get you an untrustworthy one who's after you personally?
[flagged]
At DefCon 26 (25?) I attended two presentations that scared me:
1. there was a presentation about several admins in a hostile country who had been arrested because someone from Harvard pinged a server they ran as part of IPv4 measurement. The suggestion was to avoid measuring countries with strong censorship laws to prevent accidental imprisonment of innocent IT.
2. similar presentation about ToR project struggling to find fresh egress/ingress addresses. Authoritarian countries were making lists of any IP addresses that were known ToR IPs and prosecuting/imprisoning users associated with them as a result of traffic on those addresses.
I would be extremely careful trying to bypass authoritarian restrictions unless I was 110% confident what I was doing.
Yeah. If an authoritarian government controls the network infrastructure, there's no way to use that network infra without risk.
To actually bypass this, you need your own network. Does anyone know of any sneakernet protocols that would be useful here?
Scuttlebut, Briar and NNCP come to mind.
> Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran.
If I was working for a secret service for these countries, I would set up many "VPNs that are advertised specifically for x" as honeypots to gather data about any dissidents.
It doesn't matter, he should look into the open source protocols that these services use. He doesn't have to use them.
VLESS / v2ray works in Russia, as far as I know.
Yeah, I'm using v2less on rented VPS, it's been workin for almost 2 years already (Russia)
Just run second VPN inside the honeypotted VPN
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.
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-...
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.
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
Actually I do, we sell a lot of proxy types designed specifically to circumvent such filters. Trojan works great for our Iran and China users: https://www.anonymous-proxies.net/products/residential-troja...
You can always do v2ray -> Mullvad in a docker container routed with gluetun for censorship avoidance and privacy
Mullvad worked okay in China in June for me. I imagine it will be better in Indonesia with their less sophisticated blocking.
This makes no sense.
On the one hand they do DPI with ML.
On the other hand a major player is open!
Something is not right here...
FWIW, Mullvad did not work for me in June in China :)
Spell out your argument more. Find some hard evidence. Even “major player” needs to be backed up.
Do you even know how many users Mullvad has in CN? I don’t. Searching says the whole company apparently has ~500k users. I don’t think that’s enough to be a significant presence in China.
OP: look into VLESS (and similar). And read up on ntc.party (through Google translate). There are certain VPN providers that offer the protocol.
I think REALITY is the newer protocol. I remember VLESS being somewhat more detectable
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
what's wrong with those solutions?
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
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.
>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.
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.
^ this comment is right on. The cutting edge of VPN circumvention is the one marketed to people in China. Last I poked at this there were a lot of options.
Can I have a list of these options?
Despite its silly name, the reddit forum r/dumbclub is probably the place to start, they are focused on GFW-related discussions.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dumbclub/
v2/Vless
Mullvad worked OK in China for me recently. Sometimes I'd have to try a few different endpoints before it worked. Something built specifically to work in those places would probably be better, but it wasn't too much trouble. Not necessarily a recommendation, just sharing one data point.
I remember always needing obfuscation enabled in Mullvad, but it would work in the end (as you said, after trying a few endpoints).
VPNs that are advertised are for-profit products, which means:
1. They are in most cases run by national spy agencies.
2. They will at least appear to work, i.e., they will provide you with access to websites that are blocked by the country you are in. Depending on which country's spies run the system, they may actually work in the sense of hiding your traffic from that country's spies, or they may mark you as a specific target and save all your traffic for later analysis.
My inclination is to prefer free (open-source) software that isn't controlled by a company which can use that control against its users.
Well, you have to host your free open-source VPN software somewhere. And then, (N. B.: technical and usability stuff aside, I'm talking only about privacy bits here) everything boils down to two equally nightmarish options.
First, you use well-known cloud or dedicated hoster. All your traffic is now tied to the single IP address of that hoster. It may be linked to you by visiting two different sites from the same IP address. Furthermore, this hoster is legally required to do anything with your VPN machine on demand of corresponding state actors (this is not a speculative scenario; i. e. Linode literally silently MitMed one of their customers on German request). Going ever further, residential and company IPs have quite different rules when it comes to law enforcement. Seeding Linux ISOs from your residential IP will be overlooked almost everywhere (sorry, Germany again), but seeding Linux ISOs from AWS can easily be a criminal offense.
Second, you use some shady abuse-proof hosting company, which keeps no logs (or at least says that) and accepts payments in XMR. Now you're logging in to your bank account from an IP address that is used to seedbox pirate content or something even more illegal, and you still don't know if anyone meddles with your VPN instance looking for crypto wallet keys in your traffic.
VPN services have a lot of "good" customers for a small amount of IP addresses, so even if they have some "bad" actors, their IPs as a whole remain "good enough". And, as the number of customers is big, each IP cannot be reliably tied to a specific customer without access logs.
Tor is a third option, at least as one layer, and seeding Linux ISOs is not, to my knowledge, a criminal offense in any jurisdiction, not even in China. I don't know where you got that idea.
I read that as a euphemism for piracy.
Pirating Linux ISOs is legal, though.
Piracy is by definitin illegal, no?
Do you have any evidence for either of these claims?
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.
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.
>... 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.
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.
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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.
For 99% of use cases - piracy and porn, does that matter?
This thread's not about that 99% use case.
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Please don't do this here.
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Recommendations for any 'good' ones?
Blocking Twitter is a good start, now Facebook, Instagram, Whatsup and TikTok.
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.
I can't stand most of these things you want blocked but this is bonkers.
The issue with that is where do they draw the line. Next thing you know each country becomes North Korea.