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Comment by ianburrell | Hacker News Reader

There isn't enough bandwidth in HF to transmit data. Digital HF audio is 20 kHz wide so maybe 50kbps. The entire HF band is only 3-30 MHz.

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50 kb/s x 1000 bits/kb x 3600 s/hr x 24 hr/day x 1 byte/8 bits x 1 MB / 1000000 bytes = 540 MB/day. That's enough to download VPN software and a Linux distribution to run it on in a day.

If you've already got a Linux system, the Debian openvpn package is under 1 MB and at 50 kb/s would take under 3 minutes to download. I don't know if openvpn in particular is suitable for people who are trying to evade their government, but would whatever features it is missing add substantially more size?

You never used dialup did you?

zmodem to the rescue!

300 baud. Was enough to download grainy porn pics. With a proper download tool that continues after hangups etc you can just leave it on for a week and I have when downloading software end 70s. No problem. Also via the airwaves: we had software via the radio every sunday. Works fine. Modern software is shitty large: it would be nice if a VPN provider would just release the driver and a cli which should not weigh over a mega (far less but outside mr Whitney i am not sure if that type of software dev still exists) for this type of transfer.

9600 bps dialup using the protocols commonly used back then such as ZMODEM could do file transfers at 3 MB/hour. That would be fine for grabbing VPN software.

Yeah, you could use forward error correction too, so any n bits would be enough to reconstruct the input.

Of course then you get into needing software to decode the more advanced encodings; maybe start with a voice transmission explaining in plain language how to decode the first layer, which gives you a program that can decode the second layer, or something.

Starting to sound like an interesting project.

Wireguard ships with the Linux kernel so you only need to receive ~60 bytes of configuration information.

The user-facing software is not included in the kernel, but you need that to configure wireguard.

Is that true? I thought wg-quick etc were just convenience functions and that it's relatively trivial to use iproute2 to configure a VPN link

You don't need wg-quick. You do need the "wg" command.

Wireguard is also easily censored and is already censored in the places that censor VPNs.

HF are really noisy. You need a lot of error correction to ensure that the package is consistent and without any error. This will drastically decrease the real bit rate.

sure there is, you can send files over HF, it may not be FAST, but once you get it into the country, you can just copy the file with a faster method (eg: usb drive), WINLINK supports attachments, so you could absolutely send these files over HF

If you're going to be using USB drives anyway, then using them to move files into the country would be faster.

More dangerous though. You'd need something like truecrypt, too.

btw, veracrypt is the name if the follow up project. truecrypt shut down over a decade ago rather abruptly, so anything labeled truecrypt today is suspect as either out of date or potential malware.

Wasn't the conspiracy theory that truecrypt got shut down because it was 'too effective', and the successor projects presumably have intentional backdoors or something?

Truecrypt was likely developed by only 1 man, Paul le roux, who likely shut it down because he was on the run for being an international drug/human smuggler/cartel member. It’s kind of a crazy story.

But either way both truecrypt and veracrypt were independently audited and no major flaws were found. Not sure when the last veracrypt audit was done.

Nah, just drop a few thousand 1GB flash drives from a plane. Load them with a tor browser, a wireguard client, and instructions on finding a remote exit. Only one copy needs to survive and it can spread very quickly and irreversibly by foot.

Yeah, this is a great approach if you're already at war with a country.

If you're not and they're still allowing your planes to fly through their airspace then this is a great way to ensure that they lock your (and your friends') planes out.

Drop them from commercial planes via the toilet?

When you flush the toilet in an airplane the contents is normally vacuumed in to a holding tank which gets emptied after the plane lands.

Then why have people died from getting hit by frozen pee icicles?

pretty sure that's never happened, it's an urban legend

Plugging in a strange USB drive?

What could go wrong.

Would you like a short list, a long list or ...

Or just google drive.

Banned in places that ban VPNs.

I’m not familiar with any HF comms channels other than military or broadcasting that get 20 kHz of bandwidth. Most HF modes get 3 kHz. You might be able to get 5 kbps at 3 kHz BW with some modern modes that can adapt to the frequency selective non stationary channel.

Wait until you find out what people used to do with phone lines!

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