Quick Overview of the Psiphon Tool

Hello, dear subscribers! This is Pavluu. I’d like to present a brief overview of a useful tool for bypassing internet restrictions—Psiphon. While not new or particularly popular in Russia, there may come a time when it becomes very useful.

Psiphon is a censorship circumvention tool developed by Psiphon Inc. It uses VPN, SSH, and HTTP proxy technologies to access blocked resources. Your Psiphon client automatically receives information about new servers, increasing your chances of bypassing censorship. I first mentioned this service here.

Creators, How It Works, and Usage

Psiphon was launched in 2006 by a group of researchers from the University of Toronto, led by Michael Hull, who continues to develop the project. From the start, the creators stated that the service was designed to bypass internet blocks in countries with censorship, with the main user base coming from Iran and China.

Main countries using Psiphon:

• Belarus
• China
• Iran
• Iraq
• Syria
• Turkey
• Sudan
• Uganda
• Brazil
• Vietnam

Psiphon is actively used during crisis periods when governments start blocking the internet. According to Hull in an interview with DW on August 10, when Telegram was blocked in Iran in 2017–2018, the service had up to 10 million daily users. In normal times, without major crises, Psiphon is used by over 20 million people worldwide each month. The service is also used by media outlets whose websites are blocked in China, as it can bypass the “Great Firewall.” In 2018, the BBC recommended the app, and in 2019, The Intercept released a news app based on Psiphon.

Psiphon gives users internet access through a proxy server in another country and automatically switches servers if the previous one becomes unavailable. Currently, the company operates 3,500 servers simultaneously, according to Hull.

Psiphon has a complex architecture and a “smart mechanism”—its traffic cannot be easily detected by DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) filtering systems, which are likely used in Belarus. DPI allows filtering and blocking user access to certain sites and services.

Unlike anonymizers like Tor, which use a large number of obfuscated nodes, Psiphon does not guarantee anonymity online. The service encrypts user traffic but warns that it does not prevent browser history from being saved or cookies from being used.

Psiphon is an open-source project and is available on GitHub.

The service is not intended for everyday use and should not be used as a regular VPN. Psiphon is designed for situations of total network blockage. This raises the question: “How do you download the client if the entire network is blocked?”

The simplest option is to download the client now, while everything is still working. The client is available on Google Play, the App Store, and the developer’s website. You can also request the installation file by email from the developers.

I won’t go into how to use or configure it—it’s all intuitive, so there’s no need for a technical review.

The service is paid, but there is a 30-day trial. Pricing ranges from $1 to $100.

Official website: https://psiphon3.com

Download page: https://psiphon3.com/ru/download.html

Of course, there are other noteworthy tools: mesh networks, i2p, yggdrasil, and so on. However, these are relatively complex for the average user who just needs to click a few buttons to access blocked resources and a free internet.

Download Psiphon just in case—it never hurts to be prepared!
Yours, Pavluu