Getting Started with Outline: Helping your friends and family access the Open Internet

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Getting Started with Outline.png
  • Date: Tuesday, December 6, 2022
  • Time: 9:30am - 11am EST / 2:30pm - 4pm UTC (What time is it in my city?)
  • Who: Vinicius Fortuna, Software Engineering Manager, Google and Daniel LaCosse, Google
  • Location: Zoom

RSVP: https://digitalrights.formstack.com/forms/vpnvillage2022_3

Getting Started with Outline: Helping your friends and family access the Open Internet (Whorkshop)

Outline is an industry-leading, high performance solution for protecting your online activity. It relies on members of the community to spin up and manage their own VPN servers for others to use - and its Manager software makes it quite straightforward. In this 1.5 hour workshop, participants will learn about what Outline is and how it works, and will then learn how to set up their own Outline VPN server.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In this session, you will be setting up an Outline VPN server through Digital Ocean. The Outline team will provide referral links that will provide a 2-month voucher for free Digital Ocean service, however to create a Digital Ocean account, you will still need to have an international credit card.

You will also need access to a desktop or laptop computer in order to set up an Outline server. You will not be able to set one up on a mobile device. Having a mobile device available during the event is also recommended for some testing, but not necessary.

Please feel free to contact erin@digitalrights.community if you will not have access to an international credit card or a desktop or laptop computer to participate in the event and we can discuss alternatives.

Daniel LaCosse is an engineer on the Outline Team who's previous work includes a TEDx talk on the logic of storytelling and building the Vine web player from scratch (RIP). He spends his free time improvising board games and trying to convince random strangers they should only be building their apps on the web.

Vinicius Fortuna is the engineering lead of the team at Jigsaw that protects people’s ability to participate in the global internet. He has led the team through initiatives to prevent censorship via stronger internet standards and platforms; mitigate censorship via circumvention tools such as the Outline VPN and Intra; and expose censorship via measurements and data analysis.

Notes and Resources

Getting Started with Outline Slides
A resource for picking server locations: https://www.cloudperf.com/?g=1&l=1.66.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In this session, you will be setting up an Outline VPN server through Digital Ocean. The Outline team will provide referral links that will provide a 2-month voucher for free Digital Ocean service, however to create a Digital Ocean account, you will still need to have an international credit card.

You will also need access to a desktop or laptop computer in order to set up an Outline server. You will not be able to set one up on a mobile device. Having a mobile device available during the event is also recommended for some testing, but not necessary.

Today we’re gonna walk you through how to get your Outline server running and connect to it!

Three Main Elements of the Workshop

  • What is Outline
  • Meat and potatoes of setting up an Outline server
  • User cases and fringe issues.

Outline = Outline Manager + Outline Client
Outline Manager = Allows you to set up and manage an Outline server
Outline Client = Allows you to connect to any Outline server

All a person needs is an access code and the Outline Client to access your Outline server. The Outline access key is the key and the Outline Client is the door that you can then open into the open internet.

The location of the VPN is embedded in the access key. The thing about Outline is that it is comparatively way easier to create your own VPN. If your VPN gets compromised, it’s pretty easy to create a new one.

Network operators have techniques for determining if you are running a VPN, by tracing the traffic across a network. Large inflows of traffic into a server with outgoing encrypted traffic etc.

You have control over the number of people who use your VPN, which can make your VPN less easy to identify.

Outline is used by a fairly diverse spectrum of people. We have communities like Code for Africa that manage their own VPN as well as large-scale providers and operators like BeePass VPN.

Outline is localized in 55 languages.

Setting Up Outline
Download the Outline Manager: https://getoutline.org/

  • Once you have a Digital Ocean account, you can share referral codes of your own to get credits too.

For a free Digital Ocean voucher, contact erin@digitalrights.community for more information.

Choose a Cloud Service to set up Outline

  • Select the location of your server, ideally choose a location close to your user base. It could be useful to do some research because the way the network is wired, you can be closer on the network than geographically.

Click “Set up Outline”

Share Access -> Copy Access Key

  • Make sure to choose a client that you trust because this link is literally a password to your server. Chrome lets you create a QR code on the location bar share button.
  • Once you have the access key in your clip-board the Outline app will detect it or you can copy it manually. Then click “Add Server”.

Only some websites with high bot-detection security like bank websites may block your access if you’re using Outline. That doesn’t happen when you’re a server nearby.

Advanced Use Cases

There is an option to set up Outline anywhere. The price is different depending on the provider. Digital Ocean (Cloud Provider) is the easiest and 1Tb is usually enough for one person. Sometimes it could be surprising which location is more performant. For instance, for users in Africa, London is generally the winner.

Outline is collecting Outline tutorials at https://www.reddit.com/r/outlinevpn/wiki/index/

If you want to collaborate with the Outline team on a tutorial, you can reach out to them on Reddit but they are more responsive on the Mattermost channel.

If you can’t use the Outline Client, you can use any Shadowsocks client. OpenVPN for example will not work because it does not support Shadowsocks.

For larger scale distribution of keys, you can create a bot.

Q&A

Questions I know that users can get a free trial of MS Azure with just a new email and can host VPNs from there. Aside from the $200 limit they give you, is there any reason why this also wouldn't work to use as a 'free' cloud provider?

  • I don’t think so. There might be a Microsoft thing. With Google Cloud, you also get to run a server for free. The data is low on Google Cloud, other than that, give it a try.

Is the team working on docker setup, since it helps & takes away the little tech-stuff too?

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