Hacker News Reader

Comment by mfjordvald | Hacker News Reader

As a westerner working a tech job in China this is honestly a bad trend.

How am I possibly going to live without access to Facebook?

It's easy – all you need is a standard webserver (any VPS will do, check out Low End Box [1] or just use Digital Ocean [2]) and that's it. No need to install or maintain any kind of VPN or proxy software. Just use the following command to connect to your fresh server:

    ssh -D 8080 username@ipaddress

That will establish a local SOCKS proxy which you can configure your browser (or any other application that supports proxies) to use, with localhost as the address and 8080 as the port.

The biggest difference to a VPN is that you need to separately configure every application to use the local proxy – otherwise, everything sent over the local proxy is encrypted and securely transferred (thanks to the SSH protocol) just like with a VPN.

Of course, you can also install a VPN server if you want, but that's probably a bit more complicated.

[1]: http://www.lowendbox.com/ [2]: https://www.digitalocean.com/

Setup your own VPN.

This is the obvious answer for people with the technical skill to maintain a VPN server but what about everybody else?

Pay someone who has the skill?

Really, we've all been spoiled by credit cards. Checks, money orders, wire transfers, and even cash, all still work.

And while I'm not aware of a properly turn-key solution for a VPN server, it should hardly be an epic undertaking to create one. Setting up a Linode account and running a StackScript is simple enough even for mostly-clueless people.

Using sshuttle[1] you don't even need to setup a VPN, just get a VPS and run a simple command on your client machine to connect.

[1] https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle

You could always connect to a Lahana[1] node for emergency situations. It's not as quick as a normal VPN and you shouldn't run a torrent client through it, but it works.

[1] - http://lahana.dreamcats.org/

Run squid on a VPS outside of China and use ssh port forwarding to access it. In my experience this works better than VPNs while in China, since the latter somewhat recently began to be targeted by the GFW.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com