#privacy

Good advice in top comment: Hello! I've got experience working on censorship circumvention for a major VPN provider (in the early 2020s). - First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs. Many providers who are aware of VPN censorship and cater to these locales distribute their VPNs through hard-to-block channels and in obfuscated packages. S3 is a popular option but by no means the only one, and some VPN providers partner with local orgs who can figure out the safest and most efficient ways to distribute a VPN package in countries at risk of censorship or undergoing censorship. - Once you've got the software, you should try to use it with an obfuscation layer. Obfs4proxy is a popular tool here, and relies on a pre-shared key to make traffic look like nothing special. IIRC it also hides the VPN handshake. This isn't a perfectly secure model, but it's good enough to defeat most DPI setups. Another option is Shapeshifter, from Operator (https://github.com/OperatorFoundation). Or, in general, anything that uses pluggable transports. While it's a niche technology, it's quite useful in your case. In both cases, the VPN provider must provide support for these protocols. - The toughest step long term is not getting caught using a VPN. By its nature, long-term statistical analysis will often reveal a VPN connection regardless of obfuscation and masking (and this approach can be cheaper to support than DPI by a state actor). I don't know the situation on the ground in Indonesia, so I won't speculate about what the best way to avoid this would be, long-term. I will endorse Mullvad as a trustworthy and technically competent VPN provider in this niche (n.b., I do not work for them, nor have I worked for them; they were a competitor to my employer and we always respected their approach to the space).

Gemini recommended this site when I was asking about what non-technical people should do to be independent and privacy concious online.

banning third party cookies would just incentivise setting up cname subdomains on host domain

top comment Right, so there is a genuine moral case for Mozilla doing this. It depends why you hate ads: A: the main problem with ads is tracking and privacy invasion B: the main problem with ads is manipulation and seizure of my attention

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39844960 Interesting comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39847221 Something that's missing from all of these discussions is that transactions on Apple Pay (and all similar wallets like Google Pay, Samsung Pay etc.) are now just as trackable as those done using the underlying card number. While the DPAN is unique to a given device, the merchant's payment service provider these days can receive a unique identifier called PAR in the authorization response from the card network. That identifier is consistent across all DPANs for the same card (and aspirationally even across card number changes on the same underlying account).