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

1308 points rickybule | 5 comments | 28 Aug 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | 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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rd07 ◴[28 Aug 25 22:51 UTC] No.45057924[source]▶
I live in Indonesia, and I don't find any recent news that mention X (formerly Twittwr) and or Discord being blocked by the government. The only relevant news from a quick Google search I can find is about the government threatened to block X due to pornography content in 2024. You can even check for yourself if a domain is blocked by visiting https://trustpositif.komdigi.go.id/.

Also for your unability to access the VPN, as far as my experience goes, in the past some providers do block access to VPN. But, I am not experiencing that for at least the last 5 years.

So, maybe you can try changing your internet provider and see if you can connect to VPN?

replies(2): >>45058797 #>>45058946 #
1. andunie ◴[29 Aug 25 01:00 UTC] No.45058797[source]▶
How can it be that one person living in Indonesia says everything is blocked and the country is in chaos and another, very calmly, is completely unaware and can't even find any news about it? This is so odd. What is the truth?
replies(3): >>45058911 #>>45059170 #>>45059874 #
2. atsuzaki ◴[29 Aug 25 01:16 UTC] No.45058911[source]▶
The context that was likely left out due to HN rules is, there are mass protests turned violent in the face of police brutality in several cities. The Indonesian government has a history of blocking/throttling internet access in immediate areas of the unrest to limit coverage.
replies(1): >>45062786 #
3. konimex ◴[29 Aug 25 01:56 UTC] No.45059170[source]▶
Indonesia is a big country with over ten thousand islands and uneven coverage. What is blocked on one ISP might not be enforced on another (e.g. the state-owned ISP might block or use DNS poisoning on several "non-compliant" DNS providers but my current ISP doesn't). Also, in addition to what the sibling commenter (and another commenter regarding Cloudflare outage) said there might be a general overload on the mobile network near the affected areas since there are lots of users and limited bandwidth.
4. csomar ◴[29 Aug 25 03:36 UTC] No.45059874[source]▶
It's a 270 million people country with over 10K+ islands. Last year I visited Borobudur and was surprised that the Yogjakarta region is autonomous and they have their own king.
5. JCharante ◴[29 Aug 25 11:45 UTC] No.45062786[source]▶
Ah the India strat