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Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by 77pt77 on Thursday August 28, 2025 @05:44PM (#45057400)
Obfs4proxy and Shapeshifter are an absolute PITA to install.

Get your own VPS server (VPS in EU/US with 2GB of ram, 40GB of disk space and TBs/month of traffic go for $10 a year, it's that cheap). Never get anything in the UK and even USA is weird. I'd stick with EU.

Install your software (wireguard + obsfuscation or even tailscale with your own DERP server)

Another simpler alternative is just `ssh -D port` and use it as a SOCKS server. It's usually not blocked but very obvious.

Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by mrb on Thursday August 28, 2025 @06:06PM (#45057598)
In my experience, in China as of 2016, "ssh -D" vasn't reliable at all, I wrote more details at https://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewa... (see "idea 1")
Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by jquery on Thursday August 28, 2025 @07:27PM (#45058167)
I just spent 3 months in China this summer. The GFW has become much more sophisticated than I remember. I found only one method that reliably worked. That was to use Holafly (an international eSIM provider) and use its built-in VPN. China largely doesn’t care if foreigners get around the GFW, I guess.

Another method that usually worked was ProtonVPN with protocol set to Wireguard. Not sure why this worked, it’s definitely a lot more detectable than other methods I tried. But as long as I rotated which US server I used every few days, this worked fine.

No luck with shadowsocks, ProtonVPN “stealth” mode, Outline+Digital Ocean, or even Jump / Remote Desktop. Jump worked the longest at several hours before it became unbearably slow, I’m still not sure if I was actually throttled or my home computer started misbehaving.

I didn’t get around to setting up a pure TLS proxy, or proxying traffic through a domain that serves “legitimate” traffic, so no idea if that still works.

Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by edm0nd on Thursday August 28, 2025 @08:44PM (#45058685)
Holafly (and other "travel" eSim providers) have been caught routing traffic through China.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/travel-esims-secretly-route-t...

Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by jiggawatts on Thursday August 28, 2025 @11:24PM (#45059800)
That article seems bogus.

IP blocks are routinely bought and sold, and hence their geo location database entries are not reliable.

If you’re physically in the EU or the UK and your traffic is routed through China it would be unusably slow and immediately noticeable to non-technical users.

Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by thenthenthen on Thursday August 28, 2025 @10:36PM (#45059447)
Exclusively use Shadowsocks here in the mainland. Was surprised to see Ngrok to work as well, but prolly not very long/reliable.
Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by ghoshbishakh on Friday August 29, 2025 @09:22AM (#45063782)
It is a tunnel, cant be used to browse a site through it isn't it?
Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by 77pt77 on Friday August 29, 2025 @01:49PM (#45067247)
If you have a working tunnel the rest is trivial.
Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by 77pt77 on Friday August 29, 2025 @12:18AM (#45060136)
Regarding your usage:

Organic Maps app can download all maps for offile and works OK in China.

It uses openstreetmap data.

1024 bit RSA keys is laughable. I'm inclined to think this was not by accident.

Idea 1 and 2 are basically the same.

Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by extraduder_ire on Thursday August 28, 2025 @06:46PM (#45057887)
Where are you finding a VPS in the EU for $10/year? Any I've seen are about 5-6 times that much.
Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by danielhep on Thursday August 28, 2025 @07:36PM (#45058240)
Check LowEndTalk and LowEndBox
Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by dannyobrien on Thursday August 28, 2025 @07:39PM (#45058264)
https://lowendtalk.com/

Can recommend. Always a little crazy, always insanely cheap. If it doesn't work out, you can just switch to another provider.

Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by 77pt77 on Thursday August 28, 2025 @10:23PM (#45059365)
https://billing.chunkserve.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0

https://my.servitro.com/cart.php?a=view

https://manager.ouiheberg.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0

1GB or even 512MB and 10GB of storage is very easy and completely doable to use for a VPN + HTTPS server

Traffic is super cheap nowadays.

Your real issue will be IP reputation.

https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers

Is a good source.

Re:Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. ... by kijin on Thursday August 28, 2025 @10:08PM (#45059246)
Which countries you need to avoid depends on your threat model. For example, there is need to avoid the USA if all you're trying to do is bypass the Chinese firewall. There might even be a legitimate use case for pretending to have a UK IP address.

Since OP is in Southeast Asia, a VPS in JP or SG will probably hit a decent balance between latency and censorship avoidance.