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

1308 points rickybule | 2 comments | 28 Aug 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.548s | 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?
1. rieslingspecial ◴[28 Aug 25 19:13 UTC] No.45055869[source]▶
This might not be the case for Indonesia currently, but for countries like Russia, China, Iran most of the mentioned solutions will not work. I've had to evade Russian censorship for years now - the censors (Roskomnadzor) use DPI and other means of classifying network traffic, and currently the following things are outright blocked:

- Tor

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

- OpenVPN

- Shadowsocks (incl. Outline)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

replies(1): >>45077956 #
2. akho ◴[30 Aug 25 20:58 UTC] No.45077956[source]▶
Shadowsocks still works. It can be detected through active probing, but blocking it automatically is a bit above their current capabilities.

No reason not to use the *rays anyway.