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

1309 points rickybule | 2 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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nomilk ◴[28 Aug 25 17:27 UTC] No.45054759[source]▶
Australia and UK might soon go down this path.

Something quite depressing is if we (HN crowd) find workarounds, most regular folks won't have the budget/expertise to do so, so citizen journalism will have been successfully muted by government / big media.

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dijit ◴[28 Aug 25 18:55 UTC] No.45055682[source]▶
Don't worry, you shouldn't underestimate the capability of society.

I grew up in a pretty deprived area of the UK, and we all knew "a guy" who could get you access to free cable, or shim your electric line to bypass the meter, or get you pirated CD's and VHS' and whatever.

There will always be "that guy down the pub" selling raspberry pi's with some deranged outdated firmware that runs a proxy for everything in the house or whatever. To be honest with you, I might end up being that guy for a bunch of people once I'm laid off from tech like the rest. :)

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1. primitivesuave ◴[28 Aug 25 21:16 UTC] No.45057137[source]▶
I suppose that for this case, an underground black market of VPN providers might emerge - average individuals setting up VPN software on a cloud service provider, and then selling monthly access to people. Aside from the obvious danger of getting ripped off (someone might put you on a slow shared VPN with many other people, or shut down the server at any time), there is also the possibility of someone monitoring all your Internet activity.
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2. nomilk ◴[28 Aug 25 21:26 UTC] No.45057225[source]▶
I'd default assume black market VPNs will monitor internet activity since it's both easy and profitable