Free VPN apps on Google Play turned Android phones into proxies

limerod@reddthat.commod to Android@lemdro.id – 134 points –
Free VPN apps on Google Play turned Android phones into proxies
bleepingcomputer.com
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Proton is unfortunately using wireguard and openvpn protocols, both of which can be blocked with relative ease.

I used them before moving to China, and within 3 months of arriving, the service was permanently interrupted, and their support acknowledged the outage, said they can't do anything about it, and ghosted me on the refund request since I had an annual subscription.

Mullvad is generally considered the industry leader btw., though for China there's hardly anyone but Astrill that actually works.

Does this cover Proton's new(ish) Stealth protocol too? They made a big deal about it being unblockable, and I (in my relatively light usage) haven't had any problems with it.

I'm not sure, haven't read about that yet. But I'm testing it as we speak, since they make it available in the free version as well, which is nice.

Will report back after some more testing (Lemmy isn't blocked [yet]).

So far so good, I have to say. I've got a subscription for Astrill until November, but will keep the free proton running in parallel as a long term test and then consider switching. Thanks a lot!

@viking@infosec.pub @Mikufan@ani.social
In China there are lot of home brewed solutions like openclash, passwall, vmess...etc. Traditional commercial VPNs are too expensive or suck in China.

Yeah the problem I have with those is that they are mostly run by Chinese, be it on- or offshore, and they can be compromised or extorted. And any service that accepts payment via alipay is sketchy in my books.

It's opensource, You can get a vps and run your own, very easy and the speed is enough to watch 4k youtube.

I had a shadowsocks server on a vps, was dead after a few weeks. Hosted on AWS Hong Kong (before China took over). They blacklist IPs very quickly.

@viking@infosec.pub
SS on AWS is easy to be found and blocked, try Trojan, Hysteria v2, V2Ray..., I had one of V2Ray on GCP hong kong, and it lasted for a very long time.
Usually GCP and Azure has the best connection to CN.

Interesting, thanks! My astrill subscription is still running for a couple months, but will test it as a fallback.

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Unfortunately vpn (and vps) providers are very wary about providing service that specifically target customers in china because when their service inevitable got ip-blocked by the gfw, those customers would immediately issuing chargeback, which is much more expensive to process than refund. The only providers that are still in the market for circumventing gfw now price their service accordingly (i.e. much more expensive than the usual vpn marketrate) to absorb this risk.

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