- Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes. Pros: little setup but not more than installing and configuring a program, faster than Got, very versatile. Cons: deep packet inspection can probably identify your traffic is using Mullvad, costs some money.
- Your own VPSs with Wireguard/Tailscale. Pros: max control, you control how fast you want it, you can share with people you care about (and are willing to support). Cons: the admin effort isn't huge but requires some skill, cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting.
It's the first time I've encountered where the entire protocol is just blocked. Worth checking what is blocked and how before deciding which VPN provider to use.
This is a good start but more should be blocked. Then force ISP to block ads.
Not just for Indonesia but all countries. But we still have a lot more to do to fix the web.
https://www.stunnel.org/index.html
https://github.com/yarrick/iodine
https://infocondb.org/con/black-hat/black-hat-usa-2010/psudp...
..and many many more, as networks see reduced throughput as an error to naturally route around. =3
https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/WkwkwkLand/comments/...
Cloudflare says some issue affecting Jakarta has been resolved. They aren't saying what the issue was.
Something quite depressing is if we (HN crowd) find workarounds, most regular folks won't have the budget/expertise to do so, so citizen journalism will have been successfully muted by government / big media.
Uses TCP and works pretty much anywhere.
Technical details: https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/
Let us know what you think!
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Obscura.
Since you get to pick where the hardware is located and it is just you (or you and a small group of friends & family) using the VPN, blocking is more difficult.
If you don't want the hassle of using your own hardware you can rent a Digital Ocean droplet for <$5 per month.
What with certain countries (they know who they are) and their hatred for encryption, it got me wondering how people would communicate securely if - for example - Signal/WhatsApp/etc. pulled out and the country wound up disconnecting the submarine cables to "keep $MORAL_PANIC_OF_THE_DAY safe."
How would people communicate securely and privately in a domestic situation like that?
Go on https://lowendbox.com and get a cheap cheap cheap VPS. Use ssh SOCKS proxy in your browser to send web traffic through it.
Very unfancy, a 30+ year old solution, but uses such primitive internet basics that it will almost certainly never fail. Builtin to everything but Windows (which afaik doesn't have an ssh client built-in).
Tailscale is also super fantastic.
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.
Other than that: tor
Then, setup Tailscale on the server. You can VPN into it and essentially browse the internet as someone from NA.
- First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs. Many providers who are aware of VPN censorship and cater to these locales distribute their VPNs through hard-to-block channels and in obfuscated packages. S3 is a popular option but by no means the only one, and some VPN providers partner with local orgs who can figure out the safest and most efficient ways to distribute a VPN package in countries at risk of censorship or undergoing censorship.
- Once you've got the software, you should try to use it with an obfuscation layer.
Obfs4proxy is a popular tool here, and relies on a pre-shared key to make traffic look like nothing special. IIRC it also hides the VPN handshake. This isn't a perfectly secure model, but it's good enough to defeat most DPI setups.
Another option is Shapeshifter, from Operator (https://github.com/OperatorFoundation). Or, in general, anything that uses pluggable transports. While it's a niche technology, it's quite useful in your case.
In both cases, the VPN provider must provide support for these protocols.
- The toughest step long term is not getting caught using a VPN. By its nature, long-term statistical analysis will often reveal a VPN connection regardless of obfuscation and masking (and this approach can be cheaper to support than DPI by a state actor). I don't know the situation on the ground in Indonesia, so I won't speculate about what the best way to avoid this would be, long-term.
I will endorse Mullvad as a trustworthy and technically competent VPN provider in this niche (n.b., I do not work for them, nor have I worked for them; they were a competitor to my employer and we always respected their approach to the space).
[0] https://wannaflix.net/aff.php?aff=1013 (affiliate link)
Prepare to fill in Cloudflare captchas all day, but that's what it takes to have a bit of privacy nowadays.
Not every website will allow it, but it should get you access to more than you have now.
Don't know if it will help in this situation as it's designed to be a VPN not controlled by Israel, but it might be worth a try.
ssh -R 9999 user@my.server
This gets you a temporarily usable system and if you can tunnel this way successfully installing some WireGuard or OpenVPN stuff will likely work.
One way they tend to "solve" workarounds is making examples of people
https://github.com/amnezia-vpn/amneziawg-go https://github.com/wgtunnel/wgtunnel
Using full-blown VPNs under such environments has the disadvantage of affecting your use of domestic web services. You might want to try something like https://github.com/database64128/shadowsocks-go, which allows you to route traffic based on domain and IP geolocation rules.
Another obfuscated solution is Amnezia
If you are not ready to set up your own VPN server and need any kind of connection right now, try Psiphon, but it's a proprietary centralized service and it's not the best solution.
I followed [1] to set up my own proxy, which works pretty fine. More config examples may be helpful, e.g. [2].
[1]: https://cscot.pages.dev/2023/03/02/Xray-REALITY-tutorial/
[2]: https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-examples/blob/main/VLESS-TCP-XT...
Though if Indonesia has blocked VPNs only now, possibly they only block major providers and don't try to detect the VPN protocol itself, which would make self-hosting any VPN possible.
I found this article [0] summarizing the history of censorship and anti-censorship measures in China, and I think it might be of help to you if the national censorship ever gets worse. As is shown in the article, access blocking in China can be categorized into several kinds: (sorted by severity)
1. DNS poisoning by intercepting DNS traffic. This can be easily mitigated by using a DOT/DOH DNS resolver.
2. Keyword-based HTTP traffic resetting. You are safe as long as you use HTTPS.
3. IP blocking/unencrypted SNI header checking. This will require the use of a VPN/proxy.
4. VPN blocking by recognizing traffic signatures. (VPNs with identifiable signatures include OpenVPN and WireGuard (and Tor and SSH forwards if you count those as VPNs), or basically any VPN that was designed without obfuscation in mind.) This really levels up the blocking: if the government don't block VPN access, then maybe any VPN provider will do; but if they do, you will have a harder time finding providers and configuring things.
5. Many other ways to detect and block obfuscated proxy traffic. It is the worse (that I'm aware of), but it will also cost the government a lot to pull off, so you probably don't need to worry about this. But if you do, maybe check out V2Ray, XRay, Trojan, Hysteria, NaiveProxy and many other obfuscated proxies.
But anyways, bypassing techniques always coevolve with the blocking measures. And many suggestions here by non-Indonesian (including mine!) might not be of help. My personal suggestion is to find a local tech community and see what techniques they are using, which could suit you better.
We tried things like Proton VPN and Windscribe VPN, as well as enabling MT proxy on Telegram, but soon govts find it easier to just mass ban internet access.
Use Netblocks.org to analyse the level of internet blockage and try to react accordingly.
That’s basically undetectable. Long lived ssh connection? Totally normal. Lots of throughput? Also normal. Bursts throughput? Same.
Not sure how to do this on mobile.
Tailscale might be an option too (they have a free account for individuals and an exit node out of country nearly bypasses your problem) It uses wireguard which might not be blocked and which comes with some plausible deniability. It’s a secure network overlay not a VPN. It just connects my machines, honest officer.
You could also buy a VPS and use SSH tunneling to access a tor daemon running on a VPS. Host some sort of web service on the VPS so it looks inconspicuous
To use them, one need to first rent a (virtual) server somewhere from a foreign cloud provider as long as the payment does not pose a problem. The first step sometimes proves difficult for people in China, but hopefully Indonesia is not at that stage yet. What follows is relatively easy as there are many tutorials for the deployment like: https://guide.v2fly.org/en_US/
Very helpful community.
It worked well for me in UAE when other solutions didn’t
What I settled on for decent reliability and speeds was a free-tier EC2 hosted in an international region. I then setup a SOCKS5 server and connected my devices to it. You mentioned Cloudflare so whatever their VM service is might also work.
It's very low profile as it's just your traffic and the state can't easily differentiate your host from the millions of others in that cloud region.
LPT for surviving the unfree internet: GitHub won't be blocked and you'll find all the resources and downloads you need for this method and others posted by Chinese engineers.
Edit: If you're worried about being too identifiable because of your static IP, well it's just a computer, you can use a VPN on there too if you want to!
Hope it helps!
If so, then you have a VPN.
There are 2 paths you can take here:
1. Roll your own VPN server on a VPS at a less common cloud provider and use it. If you're tech savvy and know what you're doing, you can get this going in <1hr. Be mindful of the downsides of being the sole user of your custom VPN server you pay for: cloud providers log all TCP flows and traffic correlation is trivial. You do something "bad", your gov subpoenas the provider who hands over your personal info. If you used fake info, your TCP flows are still there, which means your ISP's IP is logged, and deanonymizing you after that is a piece of cake (no court order needed in many countries).
2. Get a paid commercial VPN service that values your privacy, has a diverse network of endpoints and protocols. Do not use any random free VPN apps from the Play/App stores, as they're either Chinese honeypots (https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/china-...) or total scams (https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/vpns/this-shady-vpn-has-...).
Do not go with a VPN service that is "mainstream" (advertised by a Youtuber) or one that has an affiliate program. Doing/having both of these things essentially requires a provider to resort so dishonest billing practices where your subscription renews at 2-5x of the original price. This is because VPNs that advertise or run affiliate programs don't make a profit on the initial purchase for that amazing deal thats 27 months with 4 months free or whatever the random numbers are, they pay all of this to an affiliate, sometimes more. Since commercial VPNs are not charities, they need ROI and that comes only when someone rebills. Since many people cancel their subscriptions immediately after purchase (to avoid the thing that follows) the rebill price is usually significantly more than the initial "amazing deal". This is why both Nord and Express have multiple class action lawsuits for dishonest billing practices - they have to do it, to get their bag (back). It's a race to the bottom of who can offer the most $ to affiliates, and shaft their customers as the inevitable result.
Billing quirks aside, a VPN you choose should offer multiple VPN protocols, and obfuscation techniques. There is no 1 magic protocol that just works everywhere, as every country does censorship differently, using different tools.
- Some do basic DNS filtering, in which case you don't need a VPN at all, just use an encrypted DNS protocol like DOH, from any provider (Cloudflare, Google, Control D[I also run this company], NextDNS, Adguard DNS)
- Then there is SNI filtering, where changing your DNS provider won't have any effect and you will have to use a VPN or a secure proxy (HTTPS forward proxy, or something fancier like shadowsocks or v2ray).
- Finally there is full protocol aware DPI that can be implemented with various degrees of aggressiveness that will perform all kinds of unholy traffic inspection on all TCP and UDP flows, for some or all IP subnets.
For this last type, having a variety of protocols and endpoints you can connect to is what's gonna define your chance of success to bypass restrictions. Beyond variety of protocols, some VPN providers (like Windscribe, and Mullvad) will mess with packets in order to bypass DPI engines, which works with variable degree of success and is very region/ISP specific. You can learn about some of these concepts in this very handy project: https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI (we borrow some concepts from here, and have a few of our own).
Soooo... what are good VPNs that don't do shady stuff, keeps your privacy in mind, have a reasonably sized server footprint and have features that go beyond basic traffic proxying? There is IVPN, Mullvad, and maybe even Windscribe. All are audited, have open source clients and in case of Windscribe, also court proven to keep no logs (ask me about that 1 time I got criminally charged in Greece for actions of a Windscribe user).
If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
Why is Indonesia in chaos?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tailscale/comments/16zfag4/travelin...
Some good ideas, though. There seems to be OSS alternatives for TailScale control servers which would make it harder to block - I'd go that route. The top recommendation boils down to, "Set up several different methods, and one will always work".
It’s a nice technical question on how to run a VPN but the ultimate goal is not the best technical solution but the ability to avoid detection by the state. And that’s not a technical problem but an opsec one
If someone is participating in online discussions (discord and twitter) to spread local news - then it’s hard to know who is who, and who to trust - and that’s kind of the why Arab spring did not spring “hey wear a red carnation and meet me by the corner” can become a death sentence
The answer to opsec is avoid all digital comms - but at this point you are seriously into “regieme change”, or just as Eastern Europe did, keep your heads down for forty years and hope those who leave you economically behind will half bankrupt them selves bringing you back.
I think in the end, a thriving middle class with a sufficient amount of land reform, wealth taxes which can over a generation push for liberalisation sounds a good idea.
Our job in the very lucky liberal West is to keep what our forefathers won, and then push it further to show why our values are worth the sacrifice in copying
I've used this on multiple trips to China over the past decade (including a trip last year). You can find carriers that will charge very low (or even no) roaming rates.
Yes, it's hard work. Yes, it will take a long time. Yes, you personally may not get very far with your efforts.
But if Indonesians don't take responsibility for and work to improve Indonesia then the rest of it doesn't matter.
It seems to me that using WireGuard (UDP) in conjunction with something like Raptor Forward Error Correction would be somewhat difficult to block. A client could send to and receive from a wide array of endpoints without ever establishing a session and communicate privately and reliably, is that correct?
Also for your unability to access the VPN, as far as my experience goes, in the past some providers do block access to VPN. But, I am not experiencing that for at least the last 5 years.
So, maybe you can try changing your internet provider and see if you can connect to VPN?
Such coincidence might seems like the government trying to do some damage control by restricting internet access, but I hope that's not what happen here. At the moment, cloudflare status for Jakarta is still "rerouted".
Esimdb is a good place to start.
Prior to this, pre-Covid I used to use shadowsocks hosted on a DO droplet. Shadowsocks with obfs, or a newer equivalent (v2ray w/ vmess or vless protocol) and obfs (reality seems to be the current hotness) will probably work within Indonesia given their blocking will be way less sophisticated than China. The difference here is that it’s a proxy, not a VPN, but it makes it a lot easier to obfuscate its true nature than a VPN which stands out because obfuscation isn’t in its design.
Hosting on big public VPSs can be double edged. On one hand, blocking DO or AWS is huge collateral. On the other, it’s an obvious VPN endpoint and can help identify the type of traffic as something to block.
If you have access to reddit, r/dumbclub (believe it or not) has some relatively current info but it’s pretty poor signal to noise. Scratch around there for some leads though.
Note that this stuff is all brittle as hell to set up and I usually have a nightmarish time duct-taping it all together. That’s why I’m overjoyed my WireGuard tunnel has worked whenever I’ve visited for a year now.
One other left-field option, depending on your cost appetite, is a roaming SIM. Roaming by design tunnels all data back to your own ISP before routing out so even in China roaming SIMs aren’t blocked. It’s a very handy backup if you need a clear link to ssh into a box to set up the above, for example.
AWS ap-southeast-3 should still be up, and isn't in a different partition like CN, govcloud, iso etc. So a VM there and a vpc peer in the US should get you around a lot of stuff.
VPNs are for the sheeple.
Also Telegram using MTProto proxies (that you have to host, do not use those free ones out there), if those don't qualify as VPNs.
If so you can run BrowserBox in a GitHub action runner exposed via IP or ngrok tunnel. That will give you a browser in a free region. Easy set up via workflow.
You’ll need a ngrok API key and a BrowserBox key. Hit us up: sales@dosaygo.com for a short term key at a discount if it works for you.
We will offer keys for free to any journalists in censored regions.
If you’ve ever worked in the DPI space and actively participated in the development or installation of state surveillance and censorship products…
Shame.
Shame.
Shame.
let's say Github codespaces. Launch a new codespace, setup vpn or just squid. Use it.
It will not stop working unless your gov. decides to block said service (GitHub) too.
Number one reason why Tor is dead is Cloudflare.
Let me digress here. In my opinion, Cloudflare does a lot more censoring than all state actors combined, because they singlehandedly decide if the IP you use is "trustworthy" or "not", and if they decided it is not, you're cut off from like half of the Internet, and the only thing you can do is to look for another one. I'd really like if their engineers understood what Orwellian mammoth have they created and resign, but for now they're only bragging without the realization. Or at least if any sane antitrust or comms agency shred their business in pieces.
And Cloudflare by default makes browsing with Tor unusable. Either you're stuck with endless captchas, or you're banned outright.
Number two reason why Tor is dead is all other antifraud protections combined. Try paying with Stripe through Tor. There is quite a big chance you'll get an "unknown error" of sorts on Stripe side. Try to watch Netflix in Tor - exit nodes are banned.
Everyone kept shouting "Tor bad, Tor for criminals", and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's really hard to do just browse web normally in Tor, because all "normal" sites consider it bad. The "wrong" sites, however, who expect Tor visitors...
For an example of a proxy service https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...
That will give you a hard to snoop proxy service that should completely circumvent a government blockaid (they likely aren't going to be watching or blocking ssh traffic).
I once considered using an Indonesian VPS to bypass my country's censorship. However, the Indonesian VPS provider actually refused my direct connection request from my country. I was quite frustrated at the time, wondering why they refused me. But now I understand – it turns out these two countries are in cahoots.
Emmm, if you want to break through the censorship, you can start here: https://github.com/free-nodes/v2rayfree
It provides many free proxy nodes that are almost unusable in my country, but might work in Indonesia (although you may need a lot of patience to test which ones actually work).
A good proxy software is Clash.Meta for Linux (you’ll need to install Linux on Windows using VMware, then set up Clash.Meta).
You can start by installing the Windows version of the proxy client software (V2rayN) for a simple way to bypass censorship, but it's not a long-term solution.
A special reminder: these free nodes are not secure (they could very well be "honeypot" lines, but if you're not from my country, the police should have no way of dealing with you). You need to quickly set up your own route by purchasing a U.S. VPS and setting up your own proxy nodes.
Lastly, I recommend a good teacher: ChatGPT. It will solve all the problems you encounter on Linux. Also, use the Chrome browser with translation.
Good luck!
- Tor
- Wireguard and derivatives (incl. Mullvad, Tailscale, ProtonVPN)
- OpenVPN
- Shadowsocks (incl. Outline)
What still works is Xray-core [1] with vless and Reality protocols, whatever those mean. Xray-core is an innovation over v2ray [2]. v2ray might also still work, but I've never tried it. If you have the capacity to run your own VPS, the simplest solution would be to install the 3x-ui [3], which is something like "Xray-core with a simple to use UI in a single package ready-to-use", but you'd also need to setup some basic security measures and a firewall.
For those technically inclined, here [4] is a rough ansible playbook to install 3x-ui on a blank Debian machine. Additional configuration will be needed in the UI itself, there is a lot of online tutorials, and I link to one of them in [5] (in Russian, unfortunately). Don't just trust me blindly, please review before running!
There are also commercial xray-aware VPN providers, but I wouldn't publicly vouch for any of them.
I found it very strange that there is not much info on HN about xray and v2ray, and I also hope it stays this way for most of the people here and not here. However, we live in a weird reality and have to actively engage in such an arms race now.
As a side note, if anyone here has quality info about security of the xray-core implementation, I'd be happy to get familiar. I didn't look at the code myself and still am slightly suspicious, but oh well it works :shrug:
[1]: https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core
[2]: https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core
[3]: https://github.com/MHSanaei/3x-ui/
SSH over socks is another option or you can run your own proxy server, nobody will ever know... This makes me wonder if you cannot just run OpenVPN on a different port like 443 since it's also TLS based.
Here's a list of public instances hosted by volunteers: https://www.vpngate.net/en/
For anyone reading this who still lives in a somewhat free country and has resources to spare, please consider hosting a public instance or mirroring the VPN Gate site.