bbs VS Cloak

https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/63

People should be aware that privacy tools can make you stand out. Unless methods are used to obfuscate your data.

I never trusted Signal due to https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/60

VPNs are totally detectable - its your traffic eg what ur searching up that is hard or impossible to decrypt. to make the VPN TRAFFIC itself undetectable, you have to obfuscate it. Now there could be a lot of reasons as to how your school blocked your vpn. The ports expressvpn use may have been blocked, for example. I personally don't use express vpn but use my own, but protocols like wireguard which MAY (im not sure) be used by express vpn use udp packets and the school could have just completely dropped them completely (Most games use udp packets since its faster), or the ip ranges you have been assigned on expressvpn may have just been blocked from the school wifi. As for why the cheap free vpn may be able to bypass your school wifi, it could be that it avoids the reasons above OR its something different like a proxy, which is what I use to bypass the restrictions at my high school. The fix, or what I do, is I setup my own servers. The price of a vps server at digital ocean is like 4 dollars a month, probably around the same price if not cheaper than expressvpn. Get yourself one, setup your own proxy server and connect to that. You can search around for tutorials, but the one I use is VMESS+TCP, essentially disguising the proxy traffic as a tcp packet so that the school can't distinguish it from regular traffic. Find a tutorial online, probably ask around on here: https://github.com/net4people/bbs If you followed a guide and still can't get it to work, your gna have to find an unblocked port. I would try 443 or 123 first since usually those aren't blocked but for my school 3478 is the one that works.

You can try cloak? It is meant to circumvent these types of bans.

Already saw this Cloak Underlying proxy configuration guides but could not understand how to do it with outline server.

does this might help you ? https://github.com/cbeuw/Cloak

>it's not clear that Cloak does anything novel when compared to existing systems.

I'm not an expert on censorship-circumvention utilities but I found this comment when browsing the Cloak source repository that may partially answer your question:

https://github.com/cbeuw/Cloak/issues/169#issuecomment-12574...

>, and how do you prevent the censoring regime from finding and blocking them?

The tools like Cloak try to work on the principle "collateral freedom" which hides censored data inside of "internet services that are too big block" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom

And the effectiveness of that strategy depends on the hackability of those internet services as they can sometimes change the rules which close the loopholes of "collateral freedom" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting#Disabling

I recommend https://github.com/cbeuw/Cloak which is designed for this use case.