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Comment by vogre | Hacker News Reader

Actually the Russian internet censorship is mostly bypassed by simple VPN app/extension. We have problems paying for them because VISA/Mastercard payments don't work, but there are plenty of free ones.

Tor is mostly used for darknet/drugs/weapon selling. Nobody is using it to read some new Navalny's post.

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Mullvad, http://mullvad.net/, accepts bitcoin and monero, which are currently uncensorable payment mechanisms, especially monero because it's base chain is truly anonymous.

Of course, if you're in a state that's already started censoring information as Russia has, they also start censoring on-ramps to crypto, as Russia has begun, https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/07/15/vladimir-putin-ba...

Owning monero and bitcoin in self custody is a "rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it" kind of thing. If you wait until you need it, it's too late.

Using any kind of centralized VPN service is dangerous, they're first to be put on ban lists. Best kind of VPN is tiny personal VPS. You can run simple unobfuscated wireguard and it'll work, nobody cares as long as it stays tiny.

I don't think bitcoin is "uncensorable"... it is certainly traceable while monero not so much.

Tor is free too, and it is distributed enough that a single node won't rat you out to your local gov.

Even if you are setting up your own VPN, I recommend installing your own tor infrastructure instead. It is simply stronger than a VPN.

No, it is not stronger or better for purposes of accessing blocked websites. Internet accessed through TOR is much-unusable due to low speeds and endless captchas.

The goal is not to access blocked websites; the goal is to access blocked websites without the government knowing you did so.

If that is your goal, tor by itself is unlikely to be enough. I don't recall base tor having any effective protection against "government is watching my pipe and I need it to not be possible to tell I'm using tor".

I say "base tor" because I recall some work towards tunneling tor through other traffic to hide that it's happening, but as far as I know tor doesn't do that by default.

How is it better for this than VPN with an exit point outside of your government's reach?

The problem is you have absolutely no idea how many of those nodes may be compromised by a state-level actor.

What censored resoures you (or other people) access throgh vpn that provide information unavailable otherwise in Russia? (political info, not drugs etc)

Today I used VPN to access cilium.io. I'm from Kazakhstan, though, and it seems to be blocked on US side, but who cares. Plenty of useful websites are victims of collateral damage where they're banned for sharing IP with other websites or they ban me for some weird reason.

Twitter is probably the highest-profile one, but there are a lot of resourses that have been banned in Russia over the years, with torproject.org being unblocked only a couple weeks ago.

Makes sense. Tor is too umm specialised and obscure. Although in brave you can simply open a private tab with Tor

Specialized? Obscure? It exposes a SOCKS5 proxy at localhost:9050. If you can figure out how to use a VPN, you can figure out how to use Tor. In a way it is easier than a VPN if you are just using something like Tor Browser or Orbot.

Well you have dl it to begin with. Also, how would even explain having it on your laptop?

Prove it.

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