Resilience

WEPN was built with travelers and remote workers in mind. Some of our users have found themselves or their trusted family behind more complex networking issues and restriction. This article will be updated as we gather more information about volatile networks.

You use Outline? Does it even work?

Outline is one of the apps we recommend for use, along with Shadowsocks (Android) and Potatso (iOS). Outline has Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, and Windows clients. The "technology" Outline uses is Shadowsocks, which was developed for China's networks. We are not affiliated with any of these teams.

Outline is built by Jigsaw which is part of Alphabet/Google. They do not own any of the servers as of now, as confirmed by the team. Even getoutline[.]me is not operated by Outline. Instead, people can create their own servers on data centers such as Digital Ocean, AWS, etc. and give access to themselves or people they trust.

This means that if one Outline server is not reachable, it doesn't mean all other Outline servers are also not reachable. These are independent servers, operated by different people, on different IP addresses.

We tested my WEPN Pod this morning and it didn't work. What now?

Certain countries have resorted to varying filtering based on time and date, and events of that day. For example, in the evening (after 4 PM) they may completely block access to all IP addresses outside of the country. Then in the morning open it up and block a subset of known VPN or social networks. Then, during the day change between larger or smaller blocklists. The list and times also might change if there are events that the filtering agencies are concerned about.

This all means the same server may work at 2PM of today, but not 2PM tomorrow or 8AM the day after. We have also had reports of two people at the same time, on the same cellular provider, having very different experiences with access.

This is an unfortunate turn of events that one behind such filtering needs to constantly search for ways out.

What is a prefix for Outline? And why do I need it?

Some censorship tools detect if all of your traffic is encrypted, and then block it after some time. To avoid this, Outline has introduced a method to add a plain text segment to your traffic.

As of April 2024, we support some default prefixes. Non-Outline shadowsocks clients just ignore this part. To read more, and even to customize the prefix by changing the link text, visit Outline's guide.

So it is not guaranteed to work. Why WEPN then?

WEPN has two advantages over usual VPN services in such volatile network restrictions.

First, it runs on your residential IP address. So if a filtering agency uses known data center IP addresees, it will not automatically filter your access as well.

Second, since you share it only with the people who you trust (and educate them not to share access with others), it will not have the large volume of traffic a typical VPN server has. The filtering agency, using tools to monitor traffic patterns, may not quickly catch on your device.

These two aspects give a fighting chance to survive longer in this game of cat and mouse.