April 3, 2026
Censors vs. 126 KB of chaos
Show HN: Mtproto.zig – High-performance Telegram proxy with DPI evasion
Tiny “invisible” Telegram tool promises to dodge censors — cheers, side‑eye, and an AI-cred fight
TLDR: A tiny Zig-built Telegram proxy claims to hide chats as normal web traffic, promising a way around internet blocks. Commenters are torn between hope it helps people under shutdowns, praise for its polish, and a spicy debate over whether a human or AI actually built it—trust meets tech in a pocket-sized package.
Hacker News lit up after a dev dropped mtproto.zig, a 126 KB Telegram proxy written in Zig that “dresses up” chat traffic to look like ordinary secure web browsing (think: the internet’s trench coat). It boasts boots in under 2 milliseconds, runs on almost no memory, and needs no extra software. The thread split fast: freedom-of-information hopefuls asked if this could actually work during blackouts, while performance nerds fawned over the clean tooling and tiny footprint.
The most upvoted sentiment was hope: one commenter begged, will this help people in places like Iran, where shutdowns make existing tools “slow and unstable”? Others applauded the craftsmanship—“attention to detail” got multiple shout‑outs—calling it rare to see developer experience this polished in a scrappy project. Then the drama hit: a skeptic crashed the party with the now‑classic jab—did a human build this, or did AI? That sparked a mini‑brawl about trust, authenticity, and whether “AI-coded” projects deserve the same cred. Jokes followed fast: folks quipped the proxy is “smaller than a selfie,” and called it a “Houdini cloak for chats.” In short, a tiny tool with a big promise—evade nosy networks, keep conversations flowing—and a community split between hope, hype, and who actually wrote the code.
Key Points
- •mtproto.zig is a Zig-based Telegram MTProto proxy that disguises traffic as TLS 1.3 HTTPS to bypass DPI censorship.
- •It features small footprint (126 KB binary, ~120 KB RAM), fast startup (<2 ms), and zero external dependencies.
- •DPI evasion techniques include DRS, IPv6 hopping via Cloudflare API, TCPMSS-induced fragmentation, TCP desync (zapret/nfqws), Split-TLS, and a Zero-RTT method using a local Nginx server.
- •Security capabilities include MTProto v2 obfuscation with AES-256-CTR, multi-user secret-based access control, anti-replay protection, masking, and Fast Mode zero-copy S2C.
- •Build, test, benchmark, and deployment workflows are provided via Make targets, with server updates handled through GitHub Releases while preserving configuration.