Hacker News Reader

Comment by someotherperson | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, thanks to the Great Firewall of China, there has been a lot of resources put in to fingerprint VPNs and block them by state actors.

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

View on HN

Outline (https://getoutline.org) is even easier to deploy than Streisand in my experience and uses Shadowsocks.

This is really cool, thanks for sharing! I've been using Tail scale for a while, mostly because it's simple, but I don't love relying on some company for my VPN. Is this more like OpenVPN or Wireguard? Reading their site, it seems like it's closer to a traditional, OpenVPN-like connection, but I'm still interested in this over something like Nebula.

You could also use headscale to self host a tailscale control server

Headscale. https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

>getoutline.org uses cookies from Google to deliver and enhance the quality of its services and to analyze traffic. Learn more.

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

gtfo.

Just decline them in your browser settings...?

all those things are useless.

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.

Shameless plug, there is also wstunnel (i am its author) https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel/, hope you enjoy.

Should point out when people go into the Sturm und Drang of the Great Firewall, that it was largely built by corporate America.

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

What's the current legal risk of using a VPN in China or Russia these days? I found a couple articles about people getting charged, but none I know to be reputable or particularly well written.

China at least, isn’t a strong rule of law country, rather it is more of a rule by law one. So if they want to get you, they’ll find some law to get you on, and if they don’t, they won’t go after you for using a VPN or other minor offenses. So I wouldn’t really worry about it.

Pretty much the same applies to Putin's Russia as well.

Are there any other types of countries? Note: you don't need to put something into law to silence someone.

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.

Yes, they are. There is a world of difference. In the West you normal people have so much power they do not even realise. You see that when you live outside it.

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.

you were also a privilege person in the West and oblivious to poorer people outside of larger cities as the people you saw in China being oblivious to poorer people living outside of larger cities. foreigners, no matter how privileged, hardly can live inside the safety bubbles you yourself lived in the west.

> Yes, they are. There is a world of difference. In the West you normal people have so much power they do not even realise.

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.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

There is no black and white rule of law/rule by law countries. Only ones that tilt more to one or the other. So like China might be a 35 and the states might be a 65.

I guess it depends on what sites you want to visit using VPN. People here in Russia openly use VPN to visit Instagram etc., and no one seems to have an issue with that. But if you want to read some opposition sites, however... Now that's some gray area.

If the VPN is working then they wouldn't know if you're going to instagram or fuckrussianoppression.org tho

That ambiguity is beneficial, they can simply say you did whatever they want to say with the VPN usage as a pretext.

In Russia using VPN itself is not illegal. Using VPN to do certain stuff can be punished, of course.

Don't forget that the "real" risk and the "legal" risk in states like Russia/China can be very different.

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.

"We support democracy and freedom of expression except in these 20,352 exceptions"

Can anyone confirm Shadowsocks works anymore? When I tried to use it a few years ago, it got blocked in a few days.

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

Shadowsocks and ShadowsocksR don’t work anymore in my experience in China or Iran. V2ray does which is the successor to those.

I wonder how many of these services are just state actors, who can then track people more directly.

These are open source proxies, not centralized services, so I think it's unlikely.

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

If I was in Russia I would be a lot less afraid of USA/Britain/Germany MITM than I would of Putin's agents catching wind of the free flow of information and coming for me and my family and throwing us off the roof or putting polonium in our water supply.

Interesting. I said 'state actor' not 'western actor'.

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.

Shadowsocks does work against MITM attacks by my US ISP Comcast though. It is great software.

Wouldn’t plain WireGuard also do that?

WireGuard is a lot heavier than shadowsocks-libev. shadowsocks-libev is literally under 5MB of ram used and very little CPU. Also very quick to compile and config. WireGuard is a full fledged heavy VPN. Shadowsocks can be used as a simple socks proxy if you want; and that's plenty for stopping Comcast from injecting malicious javascript into my HTTP connections.

What "MITM attacks" are you talking about?

Not the person you're replying to, but most ISPs and cellular providers log DNS queries and use that to profile you or resell to data brokers.

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.

Stream-downscaling, ad injection, etc. US isp shenanigans.

Comcast intercepts and rewrites your DNS queries to their own servers. I spent hours figuring out why I wasn't getting NXDOMAIN back from 8.8.8.8 until I realized Comcast was MITMing me.

Comcast started attacking it's customers via MITM about ~2013 or so. Initially it was ads, https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=co... . This would break things like, say, the Steam browser and prevent it from working. I literally had this happen to me. Eventually Comcast changed it's terms of service and violated it's contracts with existing customers and started limiting total data transfer to about 1 TB/mo. When it started doing this it also started MITM injecting JS about your usage into HTTP connections: https://rietta.com/blog/comcast-insecure-injection/

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.

There aren't blocking automatically after heavy exchanges overseas as this mean you couldn't even use Microsoft and Apple services. But they do probe those servers and basically test if they will relay any network request. If they will, then they are a VPN and they will be blocked. Only two VPN providers have found a way arround this those are IVPN and Mullvad. The later use UDP over TVP obfuscation.

I imagine that is something that is not "top secret" that Xi can easily share with Putin and something that could be applied almost immediately to routers in Russia. That sucks that Russians can't see other perspectives. It doesn't seem to matter a lot since 80% of Russians still support him mindlessly, but those other 20% can help set a seed of doubt on his atrocities and autocratic lies but not if they can't get info.

v2ray is a great alternative

Reply on news.ycombinator.com