Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

The "shoulda done..." advice isn't useful in the slightest, and I'd argue is malicious with how often it's done simply to satiate a poster's ego.

Advanced VPN tunneling protocols, for example, have to take a lot of special measures to conceal their nature from China's and Russia's deep packet inspecting firewalls.

The point was to include something clowns can't filter without incurring collateral costs, and wrapping the ssh protocol in standard web traffic. =3

I regularly spawn temporary vps for a few hours to use as socks proxy and view sporting event from my country of origin. There is no reason one couldn't write a script that can spin a VPS choosing a provider and country randomly from a list of supported providers.

What might be more interesting is the case where the Indonesian government forces Twitter/Discord to give up IP addresses (which I find hard to believe but it's certainly not impossible). But then they'd still have to overcome Mullvad. It's much more likely that if OP has an account on Twitter/Discord, it is already tied to their person in many ways, and this would probably be the main risk here.

Outline (shadowsocks-based) and amnezia (obfuscated wg and xray) both offer few-click install on your own VPS, which is easier than setting up headscale or static wg infrastructure, and will last you longer.

Also, you did not answer my "why" question. I'm not sure what question you were answering.

So, given their nefarious goal, they are doing a great job by blocking WireGuard (and similar protocols, presumably).

This should be Wikipedia's official motto. I really hate how they handle "reliable sources".

Both matter.

In an age of mass media (where there's a video for anything) or now one step further synthetic media knowing who makes something is much more important than the content, given that what's being shown can be created on demand. Propaganda in the modern world is taking something that actually happened, and then framing it as an authentic piece of information found "on the street", twisting its context.

"what's in the video" is now largely pointless, and anyone who isn't gullible will obviously always focus on where the promoter of any material wants to direct the audiences attention to, or what they want to deflect from.

We have whistleblowers and leakers from the administration itself on a literal weekly basis, our own Department of State actively funds Signal and Tor, our media has been heavily criticizing Trump and his allies for years. A couple organizations got hit with lawsuits for publishing misinformation or skirting campaign law, but that’s about it.

They tried to make flag burning illegal - which is illegal in Mexico, most of South America, all of Asia, and most of Europe - and it was shot down almost immediately as even that comes under 1st amendment rights.

Please don’t lump us into the same bucket as the UK. We may have a sharply divided electorate but we don’t have a failing state!

Sorry for the snide comment, but considering the last 6 - 8 months in the US, at least from what is being reported in the outside world, the 1st amendment doesn't seem to be providing much in the way of protection, and unless I'm missing something the general public doesn't seem to have the level of interest that would be required for your 2nd amendment to play out in any meaningful way.

They're being pushed by media conglomerates News Corp and Nine Entertainment [0] to crush competition (social media apps). With the soon-to-be-introduced 'internet licence' (euphemism: 'age verification'), and it's working. If they ban VPN's, it will make social media apps even more burdensome to access and use.

[0] News Corp and Nine Entertainment together own 90% of Australian print media, and are hugely influential in radio, digital and paid and free-to-air TV. They have a lot to gain by removing access to social media apps, where many (especially young) people get their information now days.

The goal right now is to make online anonymity impossible. Adult content is the wedge issue being used to make defending it unpalatable for any elected official, but nobody actually has it as a goal to prevent teenagers from looking at porn - if they did, they would be using more direct and efficient strategies. No, it's very clear that anonymous online commentary is hurting politicians and they are striking back against it.

Somehow, things that could be unifying protests where the working class of every political stripe are able to overlook their differences and push back against government never seem to happen. It is always polarized so that it's only ever one side at a time, and the other side is against them. How does that work?