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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: 0.214s | 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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nneonneo ◴[28 Aug 25 22:26 UTC] No.45057745[source]▶
An expensive but functional option is to enable roaming on a foreign eSIM. Getting an eSIM is relatively easy. Roaming mobile traffic is routed from the country in which the SIM is from, not the country that you're in, meaning that an eSIM from e.g. an American carrier will not be subject to the censorship in your country.

I've used this on multiple trips to China over the past decade (including a trip last year). You can find carriers that will charge very low (or even no) roaming rates.

replies(2): >>45058207 #>>45058822 #
1. gck1 ◴[28 Aug 25 23:32 UTC] No.45058207[source]▶
Data-only eSIMs (e.g. ones you get from Airalo and apps like that) are not going to cut it though. You need a "full" eSIM that gives you a real number and even then, it's not a guarantee that your traffic will be routed via the country eSIM is from. Tello does route (or rather, exit) via US for example, but it's 2¢/MB.

Chinese forums / blogs have a lot of information about this stuff. I usually ask ChatGPT to translate "Research topic re: some form of circumvention and give me forum posts and blog posts about it" to Chinese, then paste that into DeepSeek with search enabled and just let Chrome translate the responses. Does a really good job. At least better than what I can manage with Baidu.