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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: 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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reisse ◴[28 Aug 25 18:30 UTC] No.45055399[source]▶
You've come to a wrong place to ask. Most people here (judging by recommendations of own VPN instances, Tor, Tailscale/other Wireguard-based VPNs, and Mullvad) don't have any experience with censorship circumvention.

Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.

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kragen ◴[28 Aug 25 19:00 UTC] No.45055738[source]▶
VPNs that are advertised are for-profit products, which means:

1. They are in most cases run by national spy agencies.

2. They will at least appear to work, i.e., they will provide you with access to websites that are blocked by the country you are in. Depending on which country's spies run the system, they may actually work in the sense of hiding your traffic from that country's spies, or they may mark you as a specific target and save all your traffic for later analysis.

My inclination is to prefer free (open-source) software that isn't controlled by a company which can use that control against its users.

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some_random ◴[28 Aug 25 19:02 UTC] No.45055752[source]▶
Do you have any evidence for either of these claims?
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Daishiman ◴[28 Aug 25 19:05 UTC] No.45055787[source]▶
It is absolutely self-evident that VPNs are considered high-value targets and that all spy agencies invest a chunk of resources to go after high-value targets.
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some_random ◴[29 Aug 25 15:44 UTC] No.45065577[source]▶
Yeah obviously, do you think that's evidence that every single one is a honeypot?
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1. Daishiman ◴[29 Aug 25 21:47 UTC] No.45069790{3}[source]▶
No. You don't need to compromise every single VPN, just enough that the investment makes sense.