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The Iranian government has harshly cracked down the Internet. Aside from denied access to many websites and services, many VPN services are disrupted. Formerly, Cisco AnyConnect Compatible VPN subscription worked very well on Fedora, but now its connection, if any, is as slow as 4 kbps. How do they technically do this? What is the best way to circumvent such harsh Internet filtering?

It seems that Tor is an answer, but it seems that Tor only allows connecting through its browser, though there are other use cases, for example, updating system software, connecting other software to filtered services, etc.

What should one do in this situation? By the title I mean "protect both one's privacy while having maximum speed in access to Internet resources".

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    Your question is a little undefined, what do you mean by "survive"? What do you want to be able to do? Reach sites? Speed up your VPN? Use Tor? What's your end goal (other than finding a way to never be affected by government control over network traffic)?
    – schroeder ♦
    Jan 6, 2018 at 10:59
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    Your ISP can easily recognize the VPN connection and once they detect they throttle the speed. The solution is Tor with pluggable transports.
    – defalt
    Jan 6, 2018 at 11:40
  • @schroeder you're right. Please see the edited post.
    – djnotes
    Jan 6, 2018 at 13:11
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    Tor does not only allow connecting through its browser. The browser bundle can also run a socks server which you can send all traffic through, or there may be a package that allows you to do this as a system service.
    – multithr3at3d
    Jan 6, 2018 at 15:50
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    You could implement your own reverse proxy on a cloud VM hosted by amazon or something in a non blocked country. You should get decent speeds even with the difference in location.
    – rassa45
    Jan 7, 2018 at 0:06

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ISPs can detect VPNs through a variety of different means, including DPI, detecting total bandwidth through a single connection, timing comparisons, etc. It's also possible that they're using known endpoints for VPN providers to produce a blacklist. (There are many sources for this on the internet.)

Tor provides a general Socks5 proxy, which can proxy any TCP connection -- HTTP and HTTPS traffic are the most common, but you can also perform OS updates, online chatting, etc. Voice and video may be a problem as Tor is often fairly limited in bandwidth (far more users than exit nodes). Thanks to Tor's pluggable transports, it's much harder for filtering to detect via DPI and other techniques, and there are nodes specifically designed to make it harder for oppressive regimes to filter the traffic.

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