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

1308 points rickybule | 9 comments | 28 Aug 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.429s | source | bottom

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?
1. dongcarl ◴[28 Aug 25 17:51 UTC] No.45054975[source]▶
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.

replies(4): >>45055464 #>>45056114 #>>45058474 #>>45058820 #
2. McNulty2 ◴[28 Aug 25 18:37 UTC] No.45055464[source]▶
If they're blocking other protocols then likely they're blocking quic also.
replies(1): >>45055742 #
3. dongcarl ◴[28 Aug 25 19:01 UTC] No.45055742[source]▶
Very possible, though many of our users are saying that in network environments where WireGuard is blocked they were able to use Obscura.
replies(1): >>45055995 #
4. tmpfs ◴[28 Aug 25 19:23 UTC] No.45055995{3}[source]▶
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?

replies(1): >>45056255 #
5. ◴[28 Aug 25 19:32 UTC] No.45056114[source]▶
6. dongcarl ◴[28 Aug 25 19:46 UTC] No.45056255{4}[source]▶
We should link it in more places, apologies!

Here it is: https://github.com/Sovereign-Engineering/obscuravpn-client

7. tamimio ◴[29 Aug 25 00:13 UTC] No.45058474[source]▶
Looks good, just one note: btc was never meant for anonymity, if you would add Monero as a payment option that would be great.
8. mmwelt ◴[29 Aug 25 01:02 UTC] No.45058820[source]▶
Looks like MacOS and iOS only, which is unfortunate. Support for at least Windows and Android is needed for wider adoption. Linux would also be nice.
replies(1): >>45070068 #
9. dongcarl ◴[29 Aug 25 22:20 UTC] No.45070068[source]▶
We're working on it! Android is next :-)