A quick and simple VPN

I’m currently on vacation abroad and need access to one of the government-run websites to coordinate a time-sensitive matter. As a very cheap security measure, said government website doesn’t work if accessed from a foreign VPN. A courteous explanation would be that the attack/usage ratio from abroad is much higher. A less favorable one would be that they’re just lazy.

I used my AWS account to access the website really quickly:

1. Create a tiny server in a physical region that would be accepted by the website. Allow SSH from 0.0.0.0 and external IP, as per the defaults.
2. Run this to create a local SOCKS proxy over SSH that routes traffic via that server: ssh -i ~/.ssh/aws.pem ubuntu@EXTERNALIP -D 1234
3. Run Chromium on a guest profile connecting to said SOCKS proxy: chromium --proxy-server="socks5://localhost:1234" --guest. I think one could use this Firefox equivalent (untested): firefox --proxy-server="socks5://localhost:1234" --private-window

Surf away. Don’t forget to terminate the server once you’re done, or else you’ll incur (checks notes…) $3.5 a month.