←back to thread

1309 points rickybule | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.805s | 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
_verandaguy ◴[] No.45055604[source]
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).

replies(13): >>45055852 #>>45055945 #>>45056233 #>>45056299 #>>45056618 #>>45056673 #>>45057320 #>>45057400 #>>45057422 #>>45058880 #>>45061563 #>>45073976 #>>45074923 #
teeray ◴[] No.45056673[source]
> 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.

replies(5): >>45056874 #>>45057270 #>>45057776 #>>45058196 #>>45059764 #
1. downrightmike ◴[] No.45056874[source]
https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand
replies(1): >>45057937 #
2. NamTaf ◴[] No.45057937[source]
Streisand is extremely out of date and wouldn’t last long in China, but I don’t know how sophisticated Indonesia’s firewall is
replies(1): >>45060068 #
3. fsckboy ◴[] No.45060068[source]
i have a few chinese friends and they say it's always easy to get a working vpn. that might not be true in a Tien An Minh type crisis, i dunno, but month in month out year upon year they surf western sites, exchange winnie the pooh pictures, etc. i suppose the people i know could be relatively upper class, i have no idea what type difference that could make. i had a chinese gf in LA who would send... my >cough< pictures... to her mother in china because she enjoyed them
replies(1): >>45082422 #
4. akk0 ◴[] No.45082422{3}[source]
The way you phrased this makes it sound like your ex was sending your dick pics to her mom, which I'm not sure is the intended reading (but more power to them...?)