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

1309 points rickybule | 1 comments | 28 Aug 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.349s | 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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joshryandavis ◴[28 Aug 25 20:57 UTC] No.45056956[source]▶
I lived in China for a while and there were several waves of VPN blocks. Also very few VPN services even try to actively support VPN-blocking nations anymore. Any commercial offering will be blocked eventually.

What I settled on for decent reliability and speeds was a free-tier EC2 hosted in an international region. I then setup a SOCKS5 server and connected my devices to it. You mentioned Cloudflare so whatever their VM service is might also work.

It's very low profile as it's just your traffic and the state can't easily differentiate your host from the millions of others in that cloud region.

LPT for surviving the unfree internet: GitHub won't be blocked and you'll find all the resources and downloads you need for this method and others posted by Chinese engineers.

Edit: If you're worried about being too identifiable because of your static IP, well it's just a computer, you can use a VPN on there too if you want to!

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1. Havoc ◴[29 Aug 25 13:15 UTC] No.45063710[source]▶
>the state can't easily differentiate

I'd be very surprised if the GFW DPI can't pick up SOCKS5 protocol.

More likely version is the handful of people with both ability and means to do this are simply not worth going after