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StreisandEffect
streisand
Shell2014–2025
StreisandEffect / streisand · Archived

streisand

Streisand sets up a new server running your choice of WireGuard, OpenConnect, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, sslh, Stunnel, or a Tor bridge. It also generates custom instructions for all of these services. At the end of the run you are given an HTML file with instructions that can be shared with friends, family members, and fellow activists.

114Distinct people
155Mentions
4Explicit recommenders
23.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Streisand sets up a new server running your choice of WireGuard, OpenConnect, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, sslh, Stunnel, or a Tor bridge. It also generates custom instructions for all of these services. At the end of the run you are given an HTML file with instructions that can be shared with friends, family members, and fellow activists.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

3 years ago I installed Project Streisand [0] on one of my Digitaocean droplets which configured automatically different VPN protocols and my favorite one has been Wireguard.…

babayega2 used a recommendation phrase. 4 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 8:03:49 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year155 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-07-24 21:43:37 UTC to 2025-10-25 16:04:17 UTC.

0102030402014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 2 submissions, 5 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 22 mentions; 5 submissions, 17 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 38 mentions; 2 submissions, 36 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 28 mentions; 0 submissions, 28 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 30 mentions; 1 submissions, 29 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 2 submissions, 4 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC725
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC22517
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC38236
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC28028
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC30129
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC624
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Streisand English, Français, 简体中文, Русский | Mirror Streisand Silence censorship. Automate the effect. The Internet can be a little unfair. It's way too easy for ISPs, telecoms, politicians, and corporations to block access to the sites and information that you care about. But breaking through these restrictions is tough. Or is it? If you have an account with a cloud computing provider, Streisand can set up a new node with many censorship-resistant VPN services nearly automatically. You'll need a little experience with a Unix command-line. (But without Streisand, it could take days for a skilled Unix administrator to configure these services securely!) At the end, you'll have a private website with software and instructions. Here's what a sample Streisand server looks like. There's a list of supported cloud providers; experts may be able to use Streisand to install on many other cloud providers. VPN services One type of tool that people use to avoid network censorship is a Virtual Private Network (VPN). There are many kinds of VPNs. Not all network censorship is alike; in some places, it changes from day to day. Streisand provides many different VPN services to try. (You don't have to install them all, though.) Some Streisand services include add-ons for further censorship and throttling resistance: OpenSSH Tinyproxy may be used as an HTTP proxy. OpenConnect / Cisco AnyConnect This protocol is widely used by multi-national corporations, and might not be blocked. OpenVPN Stunnel add-on available. Shadowsocks, The V2ray-plugin is installed to provide robust traffic evasion on hostile networks (especially those implementing quality of service (QOS) throttling). A private Tor bridge relay Obfsproxy with obfs4 available as an add-on. WireGuard, a modern high-performance protocol. See also: A more technical list of features A more technical list of services Cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS) Microsoft Azure Digital Ocean Google Compute Engine (GCE) Linode Rackspace Other providers We recommend using one of the above providers. If you are an expert and can set up a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 server elsewhere, there are "localhost" and "existing remote server" installation methods. For more information, see the advanced installation instructions. Installation You need command-line access to a Unix system. You can use Linux, BSD, or macOS; on Windows 10, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) counts as Linux. Once you're ready, see the full installation instructions. Things we want to do better Aside from a good deal of cleanup, we could really use: Easier setup. Faster adoption of new censorship-avoidance tools We're looking for help with both. If there is something that you think Streisand should do, or if you find a bug in its documentation or execution, please file a report on the Issue Tracker. Core Contributors Jay Carlson (@nopdotcom) Nick Clarke (@nickolasclarke) Joshua Lund (@jlund) Ali Makki (@alimakki) Daniel McCarney (@cpu) Corban Raun (@CorbanR) Acknowledgements Jason A. Donenfeld deserves a lot of credit for being brave enough to reimagine what a modern VPN should look like and for coming up with something as good as WireGuard. He has our sincere thanks for all of his patient help and high-quality feedback. We are grateful to Trevor Smith for his massive contributions. He suggested the Gateway approach, provided tons of invaluable feedback, made everything look better, and developed the HTML template that served as the inspiration to take things to the next level before Streisand's public release. Huge thanks to Paul Wouters of The Libreswan Project for his generous help troubleshooting the L2TP/IPsec setup. Starcadian's 'Sunset Blood' album was played on repeat approximately 300 times during the first few months of work on the project in early 2014.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

22 sources
I've been playing with this lately: https://github.com/jlund/streisand It's essentially a set of Ansible scripts that will install a set of VPN daemons on your cloud instance* , such as OpenVPN, Stunnel, OpenConnect, L2TP/IPsec, Shadowsocks, and more. Seems to be running well so far. * supported providers are Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine, Linode and Rackspace.
In AWS OpenVPN Endpoint Script
One can achieve this locally, on a laptop/desktop, using https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts Or you can combine that with https://github.com/jlund/streisand to have a VPN service that happens to adblock (great for mobile). That said... I like that Optimal have made this too, because neither of the above can work for all devices in a household and more things in the house are tracking you and serving adverts (TV!). The real questions I have are: Who sources the list of domain names in there that they will null route? How will this work with DNSSEC protected sources or whether they anticipate this at all? How will they become aware of new domains being used by smart devices that are not shared by web sites (and therefore no-one notices and adds it to any blacklist)?
In Optimal DNS Ad Blocker
The article recommends 'Streisand' [1]. According to their GitHub page their VPN is resistant to DPI. >Distinct services and multiple daemons provide an enormous amount of flexibility. If one connection method gets blocked there are numerous options available, most of which are resistant to Deep Packet Inspection. I don't know too much about networking, but didn't realise it was possible? How can they do that? What protocol/service can bypass this? The network security team at work challenged me to see if I could bypass their WSA, so would like to give it a try. [1]: https://github.com/jlund/streisand
In The impossible task of creating a “best VPNs” list

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