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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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/
- 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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/
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).
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/
AmneziaWG client worked just fine with normal Wireguard servers in Egypt where official Wireguard clients doesn't, WGTunnel app on android support both protocols.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
I'm curious. How does a state actor do actual DPI without pushing certs to end user devices?
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Sorry I’m referring to WireGuard/ovpn server IPs, not the binaries/configs used to setup a client.
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.
> 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)
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 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
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).
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...
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.
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?
Furthermore, you can always run another VPN on top of that if you don’t trust the outer one with the actual plaintext traffic.
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.
Do you have any evidence for either of these claims?
From gemini.. (edited for brevity)
Kape Technologies Owns: ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate
> is there any suspicion that Kape Technologies is influenced or has ties to the Mossad?
Yes, there is significant suspicion and public discussion about Kape Technologies having ties to former Israeli intelligence personnel. While a direct operational link to Mossad has not been proven, the concerns stem from the company's history, its key figures, and their backgrounds.
...
Kape Technologies is owned by Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi. While Sagi himself does not have a documented intelligence background, his business history, which includes a conviction for insider trading in the 1990s, has been a point of concern for some privacy advocates. The consolidation of several major VPN providers under his ownership has raised questions about the potential for centralized data access.
----
Sure there isn't direct proof but there wasn't any proof the CIA was driving drug trade while it was happening. Proof materializes when the dust settles on such matters.
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.
For 99% of use cases - piracy and porn, does that matter?
This thread's not about that 99% use case.
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
You can always do v2ray -> Mullvad in a docker container routed with gluetun for censorship avoidance and privacy
what's wrong with those solutions?
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
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 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?
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).
https://www.reddit.com/r/dumbclub/
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..
- 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.
> 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?
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.
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 $5-10 a month, no?
Yeah they can be cheap, but I would definitely recommend having at least 3 for redundancy. If one get shut down or it's IP blacklisted you still hopefully have a backup line to create a replacement.
No, unless you pay month to month. If you wait till BF you can find some really good deals on sites like lowendspirit
Thank you so much for this. It is very helpful.
> cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ 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.
or simply RDP into a windows VPS.
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)
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?
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...
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.
It's not that they couldn't handle the rape gangs; it's that they turned a blind eye towards them.
That absolutely sounds like a world I should be worried about, where our only choices are dodgy ones
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.
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?
90% of “citizen journalism” is nothing of the sort. Just like “citizen science” researching vaccines.
> 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.
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
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 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.
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...
Try a ssh socks5 proxy to a cheap vps.
It worked well for me in UAE when other solutions didn’t
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.
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...
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...
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.
Same in Egypt.
XRay protocol based VPN worked for me in Uzbekistan when I were travelling there.
Wireguard is indeed blocked.
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.
You should use a jet. Actually that's a Russian joke.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
In case known VPN providers are blocked you can pick a small VPS from a hoster like Hetzner and setup your own VPN.
I like mullvad. You can buy a prepaid card off amazon. I figured out how to setup wireguard on various unixes Mac/linux/openbsd
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.
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
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
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...
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...
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!
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/
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.
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
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.
Just curious: Anyone know if things like Starlink are viable?
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.
Please consider the potential consequences of circumventing the ban. Do what you do, but above all stay safe!
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.
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.
does this include bali? curious as that would impact the large international population.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
In this case the blockage will probably just be up for a few days, until the protests calmed down.
Other than that: tor
I'd recommend Obscura because it uses Wireguard over QUIC and it pretty good at avoiding these blocks. It's also open source.
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"
SSH tunnel on cheap VPS, a couple.
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.
Depending on the circumstances, maybe ditch the landline local ISP for a satellite connection with a foreign ISP?
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
shortwave radios would enable you to still get news of major events - not 2 way though
Remote desktop (RDP/AnyDesk/etc) into a VM hosted somewhere else?
Use an ethical one
https://www.boycat.io/vpn
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.
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.
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.
Residential VPNs, but try to find ones that are ran ethically.
Mullvad
Mullvad doesn't really have any modern censorship circumvention options.
Genuine question is Shadowsocks outdated? Because it supports it
If you are a journalist or other, contact Team Cymru.
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.
People in Turkey use https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI together with DNS over HTTPS (DoH).
Psiphon works
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.
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.
OVH VPS-1 and your own configuration.
localtunnel.me, some node in the cloud, tunnel…
ssh -D 48323 -p 61423 my-vps.big-company.com
HTTPS to you own proxy on a foreign VPS.
Get a cheap VPS anywhere, and use DSVPN https://github.com/jedisct1/dsvpn
Uses TCP and works pretty much anywhere.
Just please be safe and necessarily paranoid
One way they tend to "solve" workarounds is making examples of people
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbOtyWTRZ_g
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.
Emigration.
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.
You should use another government.
megavpn, should be around a dollar a month for 5 devices.
Maybe you could buy VPS in another country and set up VPN server yourself?
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
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.