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1309 points rickybule | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.234s | 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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_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).

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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.

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mfiro ◴[] No.45057270[source]
The problem is the countries, which censor Internet and block VPNs, also jam shortwave radio signals.
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1. godelski ◴[] No.45059212[source]
It's possible but also difficult to jam radio. That's part of why programs like Radio Free Asia[0,1] exist. Even if you can't broadcast from inside a territory you can broadcast from outside. It can be jammed but it is a tough cat and mouse game and jamming isn't precise. So when you jam there are causalities. Not to mention that jamming can be quite expensive.

I'm not saying that makes the problem easy, but I'll say that jamming isn't a very strong defense.

Though the bigger issue here is probably bandwith. It's hard to be both long range and data dense. There's probably easier ways to distribute this. Hell, both Koreas are known to transport different things via balloons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia

[1] It is also why projects like Tor and Signal get funding from RFA. Maybe the US doesn't want encrypted services here, but if anything, it's for the same reason they do want encrypted services in other countries.