darkryder

Great writeup! It's always fun to learn the details of the tools we use daily.

For others, I highly recommend Git from the Bottom Up[1]. It is a very well-written piece on internal data structures and does a great job of demystifying the opaque git commands that most beginners blindly follow. Best thing you'll learn in 20ish minutes.

1. https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/

While it does not yet exist as an end to end solution, BlindTLS[0] is a technique which perfectly fits the description of a "poor man's vpn". You pay the vpn provider for a tiny fraction of the traffic, and you can safely route the rest directly through your own ISP. This should work around most censorship techniques or geographic blocking. It doesn't promise privacy though.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3473604.3474564