But they are still effective in many countries, e.g. These bridges are essentially public, which is why more aggresive censorship systems (such as China’s Great Firewall) block them. The simplest method of censorship circumvention in Tor Browser is to use the built-in bridges - a set of a dozen bridges that come with Tor Browser. Bridges are unlisted Tor relays and, depending on the bridge type, they can obfuscate network traffic in a way that’s more difficult for censors to detect. In countries where you cannot directly connect to the Tor network, you need to use bridges. First, we need to configure Tor to use a bridge. Once you have downloaded it, run the installer to install Tor Browser on your PC.ĭo not connect directly, though. For example, users from China can download Tor Browser from the Tor Project’s GitHub mirror.Īt the time of writing, the installer. At least one of these hosting providers should be accessible from any country. These download links point to GitHub, GitLab, the Internet Archive, and Google Drive. It will automatically respond with alternative download links for Tor Browser. In many countries, you can download Tor Browser from Some countries block the domain making it difficult for netizens to get a copy of Tor Browser.

And watch out for free VPNs based in mainland China which are under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. In the past, at least one provider turned out to be dishonest in this respect. Also be skeptical of claims not to keep logs. whose payment methods are accessible from your countryĪs you search for a suitable VPN provider, beware of affiliate pages posing as reviews.

who allows you to connect to their servers from Tor nodes.

These are only possibilities, and not necessarily recommendations. Some privacy-focused providers you might consider are IVPN, Mullvad, and AirVPN. You need a VPN provider so that you can connect to a VPN server after passing through Tor. The client in our examples runs Windows 10. This can be useful if you visit websites that block or impede Tor users. This solution has the additional advantage that your exit node will be a VPN server, and not an obvious Tor server.

To overcome domestic blocking of Tor, we use a bridge.

We pass our traffic through Tor before it gets to the OpenVPN server by defining Tor as a SOCKS proxy to the OpenVPN client.

We collect all the computer’s network traffic by installing a virtual private network (VPN) client.

In the solution we describe in this article:

Tor vpn custom openvpn configuration