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

1308 points rickybule | 3 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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bdd8f1df777b ◴[29 Aug 25 09:00 UTC] No.45061811[source]▶
If you need to bypass censorship, you'll need a tool specifically designed for anti-censorship, rather than any one repurposed for that.

Since China has the most advanced network censorship, the Chinese have also invented the most advanced anti-censorship tools.

The first generation is shadowsocks. It basically encrypts the traffic from the beginning without any handshakes, so DPI cannot find out its nature. This is very simple and fast and should suffice in most places.

The second generation is the Trojan protocol. The lack of a handshake in shadowsocks is also a distinguishing feature that may alert the censor and the censor can decide to block shadowsocks traffic based on suspicions alone. Trojan instead tries to blend in the vast amount of HTTPS traffic over the Internet by pretending to be a normal Web server protected by HTTPS.

After Trojan, a plethora of protocol based on TLS camouflaging have been invented.

1. Add padding to avoid the TLS-in-TLS traffic characteristics in the original Trojan protocol. Protocols: XTLS-VLESS-VISION.

2. Use QUIC instead of TCP+TLS for better performance (very visible if your latency to your tunnel server is high). Protocols: Hysteria2 and TUIC.

3. Multiplex multiple proxy sessions in one TCP connection. Protocols: h2mux, smux, yamux.

4. Steal other websites' certificates. Protocols: ShadowTLS, ShadowQUIC, XTLS-REALITY.

Oh, and there is masking UDP traffic as ICMP traffic or TCP traffic to bypass ISP's QoS if you are proxying traffic through QUIC. Example: phantun.

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cm2187 ◴[29 Aug 25 09:11 UTC] No.45061881[source]▶
Does starlink work in China?
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bdd8f1df777b ◴[29 Aug 25 09:27 UTC] No.45061969[source]▶
No, it’s illegal to bring starlink devices here, and I heard that Elon Musk chooses to block China from accessing starlink too, to appease the Chinese authorities.
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boxed ◴[29 Aug 25 09:52 UTC] No.45062129[source]▶
"Appease" is such a loaded word. He's literally not allowed by law to do it. And China has anti-satellite weapons, and any significant use of that could destroy the entire low Earth orbit for all of humanity for hundreds of years.
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1. heyamar ◴[29 Aug 25 10:02 UTC] No.45062191[source]▶
> any significant use of that could destroy the entire low Earth orbit for all of humanity for hundreds of years.

I do not want to answer this question in ChatGPT. What happens if someone launches a missile against say... any one satellite cluster?

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2. ethbr1 ◴[29 Aug 25 10:35 UTC] No.45062361[source]▶
You us missile effector(s) against individual satellites. Hence why clouds of smaller satellites are more survivable.

If kinetic, then a bunch of space debris are created. Some larger pieces, some smaller. If those intersect with other satellites, they may generate additional debris (see Kessler Syndrome, what parent was talking about).

But on the other hand, low earth orbits (where Starlink et al operate) will decay much faster than higher orbits, so it's a {wait time} problem rather than a {have to cleanup manually} problem.

And also space, even Earth orbits, is big. Satellites manage not to hit each other most of the time. A limited strike (e.g. the previous US or Chinese demonstrations) probably won't cascade.

3. somenameforme ◴[29 Aug 25 12:27 UTC] No.45063183[source]▶
Even if somehow a Kessler syndrome [1] type event (a chain reaction of debris busting other satellites creating even more debris) was intentionally triggered, the effects are not what most people think. Launches would remain perfectly safe simply because space is massive. What would happen is that certain orbital velocities would end up with an unacceptably high risk of collision over time, and so you wouldn't want to go into orbits that spend any significant amount of time at those velocities.

The neat thing about orbital mechanics is that your orbital altitude is determined 100% by your orbital velocity. Even in the case of an eccentric orbit, your velocity changes as you go from your furthest point to your closest point. A purely circularized orbit is an orbit where your velocity stays constant.

Extremely high energy debris would often end up escaping Earth's orbit and probably end up orbiting the Sun. And lower energy debris would often end up entering the atmosphere and burning up. So only fragments that remain in a sort of demented goldilocks zone would end up being dangerous. So in general I think the answer is - not much, especially in strikes of satellites near LEO. US, Russia, China, and India have all carried out live fire tests of anti-satellite weapons.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome