Engineering notes, deep dives, implementation stories, and practical articles on Windows networking, packet filtering, proxies, VPNs, and related systems work.
Some technologies arrive with a bang, spend a few years at the peak of popularity, and then gradually disappear as something newer takes their place. SOCKS5 is different. It appeared in 1996, when HTTPS was still far from widespread, containers belonged to the future, and cloud services sounded more like science fiction than infrastructure. Since […]
A VPN can encrypt every byte of your application traffic and still be easy to recognize. WireGuard is a good example: its small, predictable handshake is convenient for implementers, but it also gives a network filter a useful signature. Changing the UDP port does not change that signature. This article explores a more interesting idea: […]
On April 8, 2026, WireSock Secure Connect 3.4.4 was released as the first official version in the 3.x branch. For us, this is more than just another update. It marks a transition to a new architectural foundation, one with clearer separation between components, stronger isolation, and new capabilities that both everyday users and administrators have […]
A practical way to run AmneziaWG under your own control, with script-based deployment, local-first administration, and an optional web UI for routine user management. In short: if you do not want to route your traffic through opaque third-party VPN infrastructure, a self-hosted AmneziaWG setup is a reasonable alternative. This approach keeps deployment simple: start with […]
A proxy for one job can be much easier to reason about than a general-purpose SOCKS server. In this case, the job is to carry a WireGuard-based WARP connection through a chosen server, while refusing ordinary web connections and UDP traffic to other destinations. This is the server-side half of the setup I described in […]
After my post about a CancelIoEx bug, I decided to cover another defect in Windows system components, this time in IP Helper (the part of the Windows API responsible for network statistics and connection tables). Among other things, this API lets you map packets intercepted at the network level to local processes. You’d think it’s […]
Cleaning up I/O should be the unremarkable part of shutting down a service. In one Go service on Windows, it became the point where progress stopped: a thread entered CancelIoEx and stayed there. The process was still alive, but the work that depended on it was not moving. I do not use Go every day, […]
In recent months, I’ve continued to encounter cases where traditional VPN connections are becoming less reliable or outright blocked. For users who rely on remote access to home infrastructure or private networks, especially from regions with increasing traffic inspection or censorship, this creates a tangible threat to continuity. My own setup, a home server behind […]
WireGuard encrypts the contents of a connection, but its traffic still has recognizable patterns. A network using deep packet inspection (DPI) can filter those patterns, so an otherwise valid VPN configuration may stop connecting. WireSock Secure Connect gives Windows users ways to change how that traffic looks on the wire. There are two practical starting […]
In our earlier post, we discussed bypassing Egypt’s WireGuard VPN ban by routing handshake packets through a SOCKS5 proxy. However, recent developments indicate this method is no longer sufficient. Together with Shady Nagy, we’ve researched and tested a new approach. In the preliminary WireSock VPN Client v1.2.41, a new parameter, Socks5ProxyAllTraffic, has been added. When […]