←back to thread

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

1309 points rickybule | 4 comments | 28 Aug 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.79s | source

Indonesia is currently in chaos. Earlier today, the government blocked access to Twitter & Discord knowing news spread mainly through those channels. Usually we can use Cloudflare's WARP to avoid it, but just today they blocked the access as well. What alternative should we use?
Show context
doix ◴[28 Aug 25 17:14 UTC] No.45054598[source]▶
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.

replies(12): >>45054650 #>>45054735 #>>45055091 #>>45055491 #>>45055790 #>>45055875 #>>45055896 #>>45055899 #>>45055988 #>>45056253 #>>45056285 #>>45061323 #
1. daveidol ◴[28 Aug 25 17:25 UTC] No.45054735[source]▶
Wow, kinda crazy to think about a government blocking a protocol that just simply lets two computers talk securely over a tunnel.
replies(2): >>45054868 #>>45056019 #
2. roscas ◴[28 Aug 25 17:40 UTC] No.45054868[source]▶
That is how you know they haven't got a clue on what they're doing.
replies(1): >>45061372 #
3. mikestorrent ◴[28 Aug 25 19:25 UTC] No.45056019[source]▶
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.

4. tsimionescu ◴[29 Aug 25 07:52 UTC] No.45061372[source]▶
On the contrary, it shows that they know very well what they're doing. Their goal is censorship. If that disrupts connectivity for some niche but valid use cases, so be it. The vast majority of people have never used a WireGuard tunnel, so they are unimpacted. Some corporate use cases that even that government would approve of are disrupted, but they can either lie with that or have a whitelist. Most non-corporate use of this and other similar protocols is not something the government would allow.

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