How we created AmneziaFree and fought Internet censorship in different countries

Hi all! The Amnesia team is in touch. And if you have been following us for a long time, you remember how we were a very small startup that was taking the first steps to create a more or less modern application with open source code to create a VPN on our own server. We understood that such a solution was needed, but we did not yet understand how much it was needed and what exactly we would do next.

AmnesiaFree. Start

Probably, we would have continued to remain simply developers of a self-hosted client, if not for the massive blocking of socially important sites in the spring of 2022 in Russia. The blocking of the incredibly popular Instagram was especially painful.

Then, with the support of activists and various media, we took the most obvious tools – we rented server capacity from partners, took the open source WireGuard application as a basis and created a telegram bot that distributes configurations for each user – and literally a month later, we had a free service ready for access to blocked AmnesiaFree sites. It became unexpectedly popular, almost 250,000 users received configs using this bot in a short period of time.

The service did not show ads, it did not need to be turned on and off, since the traffic was strictly tunneled only to certain sites. He had no restrictions on the duration of his work and he did not cut speed. In short, there were no unpleasant “surprises” in it, unlike many other free VPN services.

AmnesiaFree. Lock

Since August 2023, we began to receive complaints from users that AmneziaFree stopped working. You may have read about the WireGuard blocking in Russia at the beginning of August 2023 – that was exactly the problem. WireGuard is still not blocked for everyone, but nevertheless, this problem had to be solved somehow.

AmnesiaFree. Second Life

I must say, at that time we had already added support for many protocols, such as OpenVPN with the Cloak and ShadowSocks plugin to our self-hosted client AmneziaVPN and knew about how they work and their disadvantages, including, so it was very difficult to part with WireGuard did not want.

Then the founder of the project came up with the idea to change some protocol parameters by which DPI systems recognize it, and change them not to static values, but to random ones, so that it would be impossible to write a universal rule for recognition. And it worked! We call this protocol AmnesiaWG. True, we had to make our own forks of all repositories related to WireGuard: wireguard-go, wireguard-android, wireguard-apple and the like.

So the project received a new life. You can use it again by going to our telegram bot @free_vpn_amnesia_bot. The bot will give you a key that will need to be inserted into the latest version of the AmneziaVPN application.

• Android – Google Play
• iOS – App Store
• Windows, macOS, Linux, Android APK – Download from website amnesia.org, mirror or Download from GitHub .

Even if you don't need a VPN right now, believe me, you will definitely need it at some point!

AmnesiaFree for Iran and other countries.

Back in 2023, we understood that we could create similar services for other countries, so even then we began developing AmneziaFree for Iran with the OpenVPN over Cloak protocol, but literally a week before the release we were informed that they had learned to block Cloak there.

We accepted the challenge and, as an experiment, created AmneziaFree with the AmneziaWG protocol for Iran too – and it worked. We don’t even know who could tell the Iranian audience about AmneziaFree, but in the first few days about 3 thousand people joined us without any advertising. As it turned out, a free working VPN with good traffic (with which you can even watch YouTube) is very rare for Iran, so for the most part they learned about us through word of mouth.

We have also created similar services for Myanmar And Kyrgyzstan. And we don't plan to stop.

Amnezia has become something more than just a startup with a self-hosted application. Amnezia is now a global platform providing free access to information to users around the world. Our mission is not only to develop software, but also to protect the rights to free access to information in the face of increasing Internet censorship.

Go to our telegram bot @free_vpn_amnezia_bot and join the community.

We also have a commercial VPN with a location in the Netherlands to tunnel all traffic, that is, the usual classic VPN from Amnezia – link to VPN pay. And we are already working on a cooler version.

Instagram* – banned in the Russian Federation. By a court decision dated March 21, 2022, Meta was recognized as an extremist organization on the territory of the Russian Federation.