Fortunately, however, there is equally years of some of the smartest minds on the planet working to bypass Chinese censorship, so there are some great OpenVPN alternatives.

I really encourage you to look into something like Shadowsocks which Chinese people have found great success in using over the last several years.

In your case, however, it's worth mentioning that if you can't connect at all then it's likely they've blocked the commercial IPs of the VPN nodes.

It's quite sad that projects like Streisand[0] were archived, but I'm sure there are other alternatives that might make it just as easy to roll onto a server.

[0] https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand

Doesn't even let me decline cookies not required for operation of the website, yet wants me to trust them with my data?

gtfo.

if you have contact out of the country you're already part of a very small elite. if not, you cannot use this. they are so oblivious to the demography they claim to help that the site requires js, a big no if you want to be seen by really f** people having to use tor browser.

all this does is placate some small elite. it helps china/Russia more than anything else.

https://www.wired.com/2008/05/leaked-cisco-do/

If necessary anyone can be canceled. Everybody is "guilty" but select few are prosecuted.

Therefore the real power belongs to those who decides what issues can be ignored.

In the West there is a long History of institutions(like cities) that went against the abuses of the people in charge. You were a servant, you entered a city(burg) you became free, the city protected you. This happened for centuries. In China something like that happened at specific periods, but eventually the Emperor took all the power.

In China the Emperor or the Tzar in Russia could do anything. In Russia those that wanted freedom lost every single time. If a servant entered a city and the city did not deliver the fugitive, the Tzar will burn the city. The same happened with the Soviets. You want your own food? We will kill you all and send your children and wife to Siberia. Everybody else(not the Emperor) were servant. Now Xi or Putin are the new emperors, like Lenin, Stalin or Mao were.

I have lived in China as a privileged engineer/expatriate.

Basically most people have no idea what a country without rule of law(like China) is.

>If necessary anyone can be canceled. Or you can cancel them. You consider yourself a victim, a nobody, but people can get public and get a million views and could do real damage to those in power.

In my West people are jailed without trial (Guantanamo, and other secret prisons) or cases are fabricated to bring them to jail (Assange).

> I have lived in China as a privileged engineer/expatriate.

> Basically most people have no idea what a country without rule of law(like China) is.

So you give up priviledges to return to a country where the rule of law is observed.

No further comments.

The laws are written in specifically vague verbiage as to be interpreted in favor of state actors by judges whenever they need to be. You may be clear in the letter of the law in your mind, until a charge is brought up against you using another law, etc.

To be honest, I think they are blocking anything that exchanges a lot of data with oversesas IPs, after hitting a certain threshold.

If you want to have some fun understanding this better, call up (for example) Verizon and have them send you the data they have on you. It's surprisingly detailed, including timestamped logs of every DNS query (in addition to specific profiling data, like "how likely you are to buy a new phone" or "household income", etc).

https://www.verizon.com/support/download-and-view-vpd-file/

After doing this myself, I always (at a minimum) use a privacy centric DNS and never the ISP's default.

Comcast is the only non-56k ISP available in my area still in 2024. So I use them... but I also have to make sure to protect myself from their attacks. If I did what they're doing I'd go to prison. But some types of legal persons have more rights than human persons.

At least shadowsocks was well researched in the past, I'm not sure about v2ray.

The state, any state, often employs such tactics to make people believe they are protected, and therefore said people will act more openly. There are a myriad of such known cases, in fact the examples are endless.

So if one is in Russia... beware, for ways to get around blocking which work, may be ways secretly controlled by the Russian state. An example is a VPN service which is secretly run by the state, regardless of where it is incorporated or physically located.

Another example is blocking products which are effective, but letting products which are easily MITM by the state to "work", thereby providing the illusion of security and safety.

These tactics are thousands of years old, the employment of such methods is all that has changed. Make those which you distrust, use methods you control to organize. An example; the pub which is uses for meetings, is actually owned by state sympathizers, who claim otherwise.

It isn't consistent. Different ISPs block different hosts and protocols at different times. I assume we are a kind of test and staging environment for censorship in Russia.

In the interest of anonymity I am not going to respond to your questions.

They have been testing it since then.

In China once their AI systems or whatever decides that you are using a VPN you will be punished by increasingly blocking your Internet for more and more time.

This isn’t true. VPN use is widespread here, but I’ve never heard of anyone’s internet getting wholesale blocked because of it.

Selling VPN services, however, is a big no-no.

also HN discussions of it[2]:

[1] https://gfw.report/publications/usenixsecurity23/en/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36531485

[1] https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf

https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2016-July/000184...

... is pretty informative. There is a PSK mode, which really should be essentially indistinguishable from random UDP packets. But I haven't read deeply enough. I do PSK on all my networks, but that has its own disadvantages. I honestly thought that was the only way to do wireguard.

Why analyze when you can whitelist?

In which case what we need is https side channel VPNs.

maybe not

If anyone else has any educated guesses about the mechanism, please do share!

Ah sorry, maybe I should clarify: the above is sarcasm.

My paid VPN provider stopped working months ago. Then my self-hosted Outline server stopped working. Then my self-hosted OpenVPN stopped working too. Both were hosten on Digital Ocean (Frankfurt).

What currently works for me is self-hosted Outline running on an US server, but I suspect that won't last long.

Looks like I have no choice but to learn how to self-host XRay. A smart friend told me that it still works and is hard to block, but unfortunately he has no personal experience with it -- and no need for it anymore, since he emigrated to another country.

Does anyone here have any experience with XRay / XTLS-Reality?

[1]: https://github.com/pilosus/Xray-ansible

For people who don't have bank accounts in other countries, or are of conscription age (means you can't get an international passport which is necessary to cross the border) I'd recommend teaming up with friends who emigrated. Some of them still need rubles in Russia (to pay for mortgages, or help their parents), so you provide them with rubles and they pay for your VPS.

https://mullvad.net/en/help/connecting-to-mullvad-vpn-from-r...

(And allows you to pay by posting cash or paying by cryptocurrency)

But then Russia started to quickly become more and more aggressive, yes, first in the rhetoric, but then Putin came and the shit became real. Now I understand that the Russian society first had a kind of agreement with him - they don't mind the politics and Putin doesn't mind them.

It looks like it has played out well for Putin but not so well for the rest of the Russians.

Closing down close to all of the Internet traffic to the free world feels completely logical when the play of elections is nearing and if it is successful then it will probably remain like this.

Yes, we lost the Cold War. NATO won. Understood.

We got child prostitution, heroine epidemics, kids inhaling acetone vapors from glue to get hi in basements, together with so called 'democracy'. Also lost significant part of science and industry, free education and health care.

Something's terribly missing from you "harmony". Sorry, but this seems like ignorance.

Poland went through roughly the same process but came out much better simply because the Polish people weren't the aggressor, Russia was. And that's why they felt liberated and motivated to make a change. But Russia wasn't liberated, it's just that you exchanged one batch of fat cats for another. Democracy had nothing to do with it, that's just a tool in the box.

After the destruction of the USSR Poland became sort of a showcase. As a limitrof sitting in between Russia and Europe Poland can't afford always being pro-European or pro-Russian. It's being pro-Polish which means finding the right balance at the moment. Simply put, as long as Bruxelles has resources to support Poland Poland stays pro-European.

Seems like this year may be quite interesting in this regard.

In fact, we have the most unfavourable view on Russia in the world... 97% of Poles view Russia unfavourably [1]. There is a reason why Poland took on 1M+ Ukrainian refugees and continues to supply weapons and being major hub for American/European operations.

[1] https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/06/22/only-2-of-poles-view-...

I assume that Russians know but choose to ignore it. Russian frontiers are simply too big to became closed to external info forever. There are a million ways to sneak terabytes of videos among the import containers. Just a pigeon carrier with a SD or micro SD card would pass the blockage.

But it doesn't matter. Showing the carnage and the lies of the government of the last two years will not move a hair. IMAO, Russians are in an archetypal abusive relationship with Putin. In this cases, the abused lives in denial, too afraid to break the bubble. As long as there is a tiny chance that the grinder-meat will stop before they reach top of the list, will obey and remain quiet as a flock of sheep. They will choose to please their abuser hoping to remain low in the punish list.

Most of the 302.000 Russians killed in this war either never see it coming, or were too paralyzed to make a move and put themselves out of the frying pan (And videos in Avdiivka for example are crystal clear showing that is exactly that: a chain of frozen blue hamburgers running towards a giant frying pan).

Unfortunately a lot more will die this year, so the army remains distracted dying, far from turning their focus towards Kremlin. Unless they will break the spell, the eventual disintegration of Russia in smaller states vassals of China seems more and more probable each day.

Wouldn't it be better to host in Asia (Viet-Nam comes to mind) or Central / South America (Nicaragua etc)? Latency might suck but it would be better than no access.

As a French citizen I wouldn't host anything in Russia, not from a moral standpoint but because we're at war (it's a "soft" war for now, but who knows how it will evolve).

UPD: I asked some friends, some of them have faced probmes. I guess it is not protocol block, but instead combination of protocol and "suspicious" server. Mine has stuff other then VPN running on it, so it might have flown under the radar.

https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core

https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core

Here are my configs: https://github.com/acheong08/notes/tree/main/xray

Why this over WireGuard or OpenVPN or commercial solutions? Because it’s obfuscated and you’re much less likely to get caught. Try hosting a small game server on the same machine as well so the traffic doesn’t look too out of place.

For example, I found about some 'world oldest tree' competition through the news that it banned trees from Russia. Curious enough, I found their site and.... it rejected me by IP.

Same from Brazil though probably way less. I blame Cloudflare, overzealous sysadmins and paranoid Wordpress security plugins.

We are supposed to go overthrow Putin to get LinkedIn and Spotify back (or something).

I'd expect the government to cool down expansive internet censorship until the "elections" in March, since hitting the preapproved outcome figures will be harder this way.

https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel/

https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-combined.htm...

Unfortunately, it's probably a matter of time until this system is activated for real and the Iron Curtain drops to the floor. Then Putin will find some way to blame the West and rally against us.

For countries like Russia, the goal isn't necessarily to cut off all connections, the goal is to discourage it, make it expensive, annoying, slow, so that a large majority of the population will opt to use the Russian internet.

I don't they'll hesitate to do it if they see the need to. Putin wants the Soviet times back at any cost. He has many strings he can pull if he feels threatened.

According to a Russian resident I follow on social media, over the last 2 years Russians improved their localized circuses: VK, mail.ru, etc. The guy says these are now somewhat close to the originals i.e. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube.

Internet/media has a very long tail, which Russia can't hope to replace.

but then Russia would have a hard time making their hacking. lol.

It seems to accept sharklasers.com (aka anonymous) email addresses though, so you don't have to use your real email address. :)

It also seems to work via Tor Browser, although it's a bit slow.

use a dummy email -- if you feel so unsafe. At least Squarex is free right now so no credit card needed

However some huge ingress/egress traffic to unknown website with few random pages looks very suspiciously. So it's possible to select those websites using statistics analysis.

Now the question to hackers: how do I hide tunnelled traffic so its statistics does not look suspicious?

Ideally one would use some CDN webserver (like cloudflare or amazon), however without encrypted SNI, host is extractable with DPI.

In my efforts to use Linux (which is not supported by Cisco) I found "OpenConnect" and it's partner: "OCServe"; which are open source compatible client & server software (respectively) for the protocol

On the wire traffic looks like normal HTTPS traffic, and without the SSL "CONNECT" header which DPI loves to drop as it's known used for proxies and vpn solutions.

YMMV, but it's worked for me with aggressive HTTP proxies in other companies too. :)

Some firewalls will simply drop those protocols.

But its very much worth mentioning that Russia has totalitarian laws that criminalize the use of vpns.

https://github.com/Useful-open-source-project/Share-vpn-buil...

  OpenVPN/WireGuard, a protocol similar to VPN, has been identified. What we use now is a proxy protocol. It is not probabilistically recognized by VPN protocol operators or firewalls. After all, they can also enter AI to help them improve their firewalls, so we  We also have to find ways to resist or improve our agency agreement so that he is no longer afraid of the firewall.

It took me all of 10 minutes to set up a OpenVPN server in East Asia on DigitalOcean. The container even comes with a client installer that has the parameters preloaded.

Worked fine.

IDS/IPS's are virtually worthless these days anyway so I can't see much downside if every Window's, Mac's and Linux OS's network traffic appeared to be completely random/obfuscated out-of-box.

VPNs stop and continue working on a somewhat regular schedule for a long time at this point.

What blackouts are you talking about? I'm in Moscow. Never heard of that.

none of the comments below have picked up on this specific thing but Russia has done exercises on exactly this topic. they seem much more prepared to do it / want to appear to be willing to do it than any other large country that isn't already a police state.

I provide some server nodes to certain people there.

The time will show.

I do understand libertarians. I personally was really unhappy to see more and more "regular people" getting internet access since the late 90s. Now the Internet is full of crap. I have trouble finding stuff that was easy to find in, say, 2010.

I do miss "the underground days" of FidoNet. And underground is total denial of the mainstream. But the Internet is not just the mainstream, it's the infrastructure now.

I grew up in Moscow in the 80s-90s and my passion for computers somewhat saved me from the street influence but OTOH I did have the Anarchist's cookbook, for instance, precisely b/c of the computers. Absolutely unregulated. That is I'm sort of the early kind of spoiled kids.

Most Russians had enough of 90s with child prostitution, heroine, skinheads etc. They just want unspoiled kids to continue rebuild the country they lost in 90s but better. They don't need BLM/LGBT/whatever extreme stuff in the mainstream. There's place for that and it's called underground.

Also, I think English-speaking Internet may be viewing modern Russian at least as oppressive as the USSR but this isn't true IMO. They have learnt the lesson and do realize that prohibiting and classifying almost everything is not the way. As well as basing regulations, policies and even international affairs on ideological principles.

That's is the system is very much interested in the existence of underground. It's similar to how enforcing customs regulations totally has turned out to be too expensive and bad for economy. Some expert in the area said that ~10% of smuggling is a healthy balance.

Another example. I once talked to a guy from Sochi who told me that during the preparation of the 2014 Olympics some local hippies were approached by special "people in civilian clothes". The hippies have been told something like: we know you grow shrooms and weed, and that's OK, no worries, but we need you to stay away off during the Olympics.

Yet another example. While visiting the village where my grand-grandfather was born I heard that they got their own potheads and shroom eaters, in the next village or something. Everyone knows about that, police included.

Dumb enforcement never works well for such things. Just remember how desperately the Russian Empire was trying to make the Ashkenazi cultivating the land. The government gave them the rich black earth in Novorossia. That worked perfectly for many of the Germans and the Greeks but not so much for the Ashkenazi. The government didn't want to understand that this just wasn't something Ashkenazi would like to do.

Also, I think most of those young kids thinking they're protecting freedom of speech are just acting like offended children how ran away from home. For how long can they survive? Even if they can, is it good for them? The Soviet Union was a very parentalistic system that everybody was fed up with. People thought that with the destruction of the Union they'll only get freedom. In reality the not only got freedom but lost many things they were taking for granted like free health care and education, science and significant part of the industry.

Here's what my country lost with your 'union': our occupiers, abusers, and enslavers. 'The time' already showed us what's what. Good riddance.

I don't have to stay teenage for the rest of my life.