Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections
For the past three days Russians have been unable to use their VPN services working via OpenVPN/WireGuard protocols, and some even have reported that in certain situations SSH connections have stopped working.
The prospect of an isolated Russian interweb has become oh so real.
As a person currently residing in Russia I can confirm that I've been unable to connect to my favourite VPN provider for the past three days, not even its official application works.
I've not seen any discussions on the English-peaking Internet, not it's been in the news for some reasons despite its importance in preserving freedom of information and opinions.
In the Russian internet it's being hotly debated here: https://habr-com.translate.goog/ru/companies/xeovo/articles/...
More on the topic: https://torrentfreak.com/tag/russia/
267 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadthis screams about blocking, become from those who tried to get money from reselling and mixing traffic to do bad stuff.
UPD: I asked some friends, some of them have faced probmes. I guess it is not protocol block, but instead combination of protocol and "suspicious" server. Mine has stuff other then VPN running on it, so it might have flown under the radar.
IDS/IPS's are virtually worthless these days anyway so I can't see much downside if every Window's, Mac's and Linux OS's network traffic appeared to be completely random/obfuscated out-of-box.
It seems to accept sharklasers.com (aka anonymous) email addresses though, so you don't have to use your real email address. :)
It also seems to work via Tor Browser, although it's a bit slow.
use a dummy email -- if you feel so unsafe. At least Squarex is free right now so no credit card needed
It isn't consistent. Different ISPs block different hosts and protocols at different times. I assume we are a kind of test and staging environment for censorship in Russia.
In the interest of anonymity I am not going to respond to your questions.
Why analyze when you can whitelist?
In which case what we need is https side channel VPNs.
maybe not
https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2016-July/000184...
... is pretty informative. There is a PSK mode, which really should be essentially indistinguishable from random UDP packets. But I haven't read deeply enough. I do PSK on all my networks, but that has its own disadvantages. I honestly thought that was the only way to do wireguard.
[1] https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf
also HN discussions of it[2]:
[1] https://gfw.report/publications/usenixsecurity23/en/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36531485
If anyone else has any educated guesses about the mechanism, please do share!
My condolences. Hope Ukraine and allies can can sustain enough pressure to free those lands.
It's very common and normal, to have a small popularity numbers for the politicians in the democracy. People have a variety of opinions, moods, or sympathies because they are diverse and have different levels of experiences, moods, and feelings.
I'm not going to waste time arguing about fantasy. If you want to have a discussion grounded in reality, I'm up for it. With that said, that statement you made you have in no way shape or form to support it - not about Biden, Trump or Congress, but about Putin.
You have no idea how a country feels under the foot of a dictator that has been murdering, arresting, or crippling any voice that is against Putin.
Not to mention the millions of Russians that left the country, and are now not even allowed to vote in their embassies!
> This is with independent polling as well
How can you have independent polling in a country that has political prosecution? How can you have any semblance of independence when Moscow actively makes an effort to wipe out cultural landmarks, including the language, of the different people who live in Russia?
Moscow has used genocide as a tool to control people, they used it in the past and are currently using it in Ukraine.
Did you know that you have thousands protesting in Russia as we speak, and people are being arrested for it: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-police-make-arr...
Yet the idea that such a thing exists seems widespread?
Can anyone here explain how independent polling under a repressive regime can be accomplished? Please educate me/us!
In Russia, it seems to be promoted a culture of ratting those who are against the government, which is also very common in these regimes - and that has a very deep scarring in societies that go over it.
I'm from Portugal and to this day there's still a cultural undertone of not ratting anyone to authorities, even if it is something that's hurting you or everyone, all because of the disgust and hate towards those who ratted people to the government police.
During our dictatorships, there were also the same theatrical displays of polling, voting, having opposing candidates approved by the state, etc. Salazar was always the man of course.
It's impressive that Russia still hasn't had its societal reform away from dictatorships in the XXI century. Sadly we're now paying the consequences of it, but it might be closer than we think!
They explain their methodology, and discuss things like what kind of questions tend to result in respondents terminating the interview.
I don't know how independent they really are; but I haven't seen evidence that they are effectively state-controlled.
If they are independent, then presumably it's true that most Russians are nationalists and Putinists. That doesn't seem implausible; as far as I can tell, a majority of voters in the USA are nationalists and Trumpists.
I've never visited a country while it was under the fist of a dictator. And in a way, Russia is special; in Russian history, autocracy and tyranny have been a constant, except for the ten years after the collapse of the CCCP. Those ten years were miserable for Russians, so it would be unsurprising if they feel safer and more comfortable with autocracy and tyranny.
To be fair what we consider to be "western democracy style" didn't really exist prior to the late 1800s. Even Britain only started resembling a democratic state in the 1830s.
Russians have lost approximately half of the land they have occupied in the first 3 months of the full-scale war. We have repeatedly observed that Ukrainian government is willing and capable of bringing law and order to these liberated territories.
Ukraine is at war, nothing rosy about that.
Still, living conditions of people north of Kyiv, north of Kharkiv, or in Kherson is dramatically better than GP’s situation. Note GP can’t even freely talk to English-speaking strangers here on HN because they fear the consequences from the Russian invaders who call themselves “government”.
GP has very good reasons for that fear. Russians are doing horrible things to Ukrainians on the occupied territories, for example https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/torture-chambers-ukrain...
They are also dramatically better in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or Vladivostok. Of course being far from the front lines is better than being near them.
> GP can’t even freely talk to English-speaking stranger
People in Ukrainian-controlled territory can't talk freely either, there have been many cases of extrajudicial arrests and even killings of dissidents by Ukrainian government authorities. For example, peruse Gonzalo Lira's list (Lira himself died a week ago in Ukrainian custody): https://twitter.com/GonzaloLira1968/status/15174577687976796...
---
This is a war between two thuggish regimes. One thug might be a bit more brutal than the other, but the war itself is what's doing the most harm to ordinary people.
Kherson is less than 5 km from the active war zone. Northern parts of Kharkiv oblast have a Russian border nearby, with Russian recon groups routinely trying to infiltrate.
> can't talk freely either
I have several friends currently in Ukraine. None of them is scared of expressing their political views, neither IRL nor on the internets. None of them supports Russia for obvious reasons, but not all of them are huge fans of their current government.
> extrajudicial arrests and even killings
Wikipedia has an interesting article about the guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzalo_Lira The article says the arrest was lawful, Ukrainians released him on house arrest, he tried to flee the country, then he was arrested for real and died of pneumonia in custody.
Every death is a tragedy, but I don’t believe Ukrainian government deliberately killed that person. Why would they fake pneumonia during the war, at the time when random civilians are routinely killed by Russian missiles and drones across the whole country?
> This is a war between two thuggish regimes
This is Ukraine’s war of independence. Ukrainians have lost the last time in 1917-1922. This time, things will be different.
He was arrested for political speech, which is ipso facto an unjust violation of his fundamental human rights and of natural law. Putin's Russia also has "laws" that justify the arrest of dissidents, doesn't make it OK. (And many of the other people on Lira's list were simply summarily executed, without any trial or other legal process)
Are you aware that Ukraine engaged in an existential war? Gonzalo Lira was justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine, denying the facts of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian cities, as well as massacres of civilian Ukrainians by Russian invaders in Bucha and other cities.
Then he was taken into custody because he violated the terms of his bail and tried to escape. Originally meant to be under house arrest in Kharkiv, Lira was detained in another part of Ukraine: Zakarpattia Oblast, where he tried to cross the border into Hungary
There are a number of real journalists in Ukraine investigating big corruption cases, some of which have even resulted in the replacement of the Minister of Defense. These journalists have not faced assassination or imprisonment, although there have been instances of them being pressured in some ways
For example, public display of Nazi symbols in the US is a protected free speech under the first amendment. However, the same action in many other countries is a crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bans_on_Nazi_symbols This doesn’t make governments of France or Belgium “thuggish regimes”.
Fingers crossed and some contributions to the cause already done. In the meantime : Slava Ukraini!
Ah sorry, maybe I should clarify: the above is sarcasm.
They have been testing it since then.
In China once their AI systems or whatever decides that you are using a VPN you will be punished by increasingly blocking your Internet for more and more time.
This isn’t true. VPN use is widespread here, but I’ve never heard of anyone’s internet getting wholesale blocked because of it.
Selling VPN services, however, is a big no-no.
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
To be honest, I think they are blocking anything that exchanges a lot of data with oversesas IPs, after hitting a certain threshold.
At least shadowsocks was well researched in the past, I'm not sure about v2ray.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't even let me decline cookies not required for operation of the website, yet wants me to trust them with my data?
gtfo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.wired.com/2008/05/leaked-cisco-do/
VPNs stop and continue working on a somewhat regular schedule for a long time at this point.
To answer your question, I think they were wondering if this would make it more difficult for Russian groups to do perform these psyops jobs. My thought is no: these groups will likely not have to deal much with these firewalls, considering they're explicitly backed by the Kremlin in their effort.
High level reporting of the report contents: https://time.com/5610317/mueller-report-myths-breakdown/
Volume 1 of the report itself, a pretty easy read really: https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download
However some huge ingress/egress traffic to unknown website with few random pages looks very suspiciously. So it's possible to select those websites using statistics analysis.
Now the question to hackers: how do I hide tunnelled traffic so its statistics does not look suspicious?
Ideally one would use some CDN webserver (like cloudflare or amazon), however without encrypted SNI, host is extractable with DPI.
In my efforts to use Linux (which is not supported by Cisco) I found "OpenConnect" and it's partner: "OCServe"; which are open source compatible client & server software (respectively) for the protocol
On the wire traffic looks like normal HTTPS traffic, and without the SSL "CONNECT" header which DPI loves to drop as it's known used for proxies and vpn solutions.
YMMV, but it's worked for me with aggressive HTTP proxies in other companies too. :)
Some firewalls will simply drop those protocols.
To western readers it reads like sarcasm because we acknowledge the truth contained in it. There are tons of addiction problems we are sorting through with these services. But western readers also see clearly the draconian overtones of tyranny in this sort of approach. Hence it reads like sarcasm.
To russian and other readers living in dictatorships, this sort of thing has been repeated so often that I think the draconian aspects are totally missed.
If anyone ever wondered: "How would the Nazi party operate in the 2020's?"
Well, look at Russia.
To be clear, I won't address production quality, that's another subject. What I meant is the underlying idea and execution.
This is a very confusing statement... Why is it laughable to have an education system that teaches us history and critical thinking to see tyranny, even in our societies? Or now you're also on the boat that Stalin was a nice guy after all?
> And let's not even mention the fact that Marxism, fascism and Nazism have all originated in Europe...
The question that you should be asking is: what originated in Russia? Right? Misery, genocide, poverty...
Ones learn from history to avoid it, while modern Russia seems to draw inspiration from Nazi Germany.
Very confusing comment.
I will not dismiss some failures of character of some Western leaders, and questionable moments in modern democracies... but answering your question: in comparison to modern Russia, yes, those anecdotes are laughable.
None of the Western leaders has murdered or attempted to murder political opposition through several methods of assassination;
None of them has been on a rampage of oligarch executions to seize their assets and consolidate power;
None of the administrations arrests people for holding blank pieces of paper in front of their governance buildings;
In Western countries you don't have one, and only one press - the state press.
I mean I can go on with this list just to highlight the absurdity of thinking the sad anecdotes of the Western countries' governance remotely compares to the sht show of Russia. People live in misery there, by choice of governance.
In case you didn't realize, there's a genocide going on in Ukraine and it's being promoted in Russian state media.
But it's good that you uphold West as the ultimate standard of civilization, to the point that you get triggered about anecdotes.
Option 2: Take to the internet, kvetch about the oppressive goverment with no real action
Do you realize that the government restricting access to alternative media sources even more will result in fewer and fewer people in russia opposing the status quo?
And don’t be too quick to assume more authoritarian government isn’t coming for you. The more successful they are at this, the more likely it is to spread. I’m nervous because our water is definitely getting warmer in the US, and our next regime change might love to follow Russia and China’s examples on crowd control.
This also applies to the parts of Ukraine that Russia has occupied.
none of the comments below have picked up on this specific thing but Russia has done exercises on exactly this topic. they seem much more prepared to do it / want to appear to be willing to do it than any other large country that isn't already a police state.
Besides manufacturing capability, I think determining whether something is a "failed state" or not, you need to look at other things, focusing more on social details. Is the government truly democratic? Is the law applied more-or-less fairly and equally? Is the press free, and are people able to discuss things without fear?
Aside from manufacturing exports, how is the internal economy - are people able to afford the basics, and things that might be considered luxuries? How's education, how's the ability to travel both internally and externally, how's economic and social mobility?
I don't think container-ship-tonnage is a great metric of whether something is a failed state or not.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/failed-state
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/failed-state
Russia does not appear to qualify as a failed state by the definition published in any of these three sources.
That doesn't makes much sense. Also, it hardly fits the definition of a "failed state", the current authoritarian (verging on totalitarian) Russian government has been pretty effective at maintaining political stability and had (and generally still has) very effective control over its people (more so than successful democratic, not that it's really comparable) over the last 20 years.
The same applied to the USSR during most of its history.
I'd expect the government to cool down expansive internet censorship until the "elections" in March, since hitting the preapproved outcome figures will be harder this way.