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

1308 points rickybule | 1 comments | 28 Aug 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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?
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Arubis ◴[28 Aug 25 18:39 UTC] No.45055488[source]▶
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.
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bsimpson ◴[28 Aug 25 18:42 UTC] No.45055528[source]▶
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.

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1. mikestorrent ◴[28 Aug 25 19:21 UTC] No.45055957[source]▶
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