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As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp
- amir734jj 4y agoThis protest is very different from previous protests. Look it up. Women in Iran are just tired of being oppressed and their movement is an embodiment of feminism. I'm an Iranian and unfortunately this protest hasn't received world wide attention in the news. This is a first time women taking the lead in protesting against this tyrannical regime.
- tokai 4y ago>this protest hasn't received world wide attention in the news ? Its on every news page I have looked up.
- prox 4y agoIt’s been in the news here (w-europe) a lot and in conversations with colleagues! I also think it’s a worldwide struggle for self determination for women, especially in countries that are run or dominated by men.
- rjsw 4y agoThere have been daily reports on the Guardian website.
- unsigner 4y agoIt’s on every pro-Ukrainian telegram channel I read (and I’m reading way too many), mostly in the context of comparing Iranian boldness to feeble Russian protests against the war.
- influxmoment 4y agoIt's been on the BBC front page about a woman lead protest since a few days ago
- pooriran2 4y ago
- danrocks 4y agoWelcome news, for sure. It seems that Iranians are fierce people who are not afraid of protesting their government. Why do protests usually stall, though? Is it the virulence of the repression machine?
- eternalban 4y agoA legacy of social mistrust. USSR had the same exact feature. A variation on 'Everyone was dissatisfied, but no one trusted anyone else'. This is what keeps any regime in power even when the general population doesn't like them: fear of betrayals at personal and movement levels (in places reinforced by recent historic examples).
- notsureaboutpg 4y ago
- jimbob45 4y agoIran is geographically two countries away from Israel, the country that clandestinely fomented similar riots/insurrections in 10+ other countries that border Israel during the Arab Spring. Furthermore, Israel has been greatly outspoken in its hatred of Iran and Iran's nuclear program, going so far as to deploy the most sophisticated cyberattack in history[1]. It would hardly be a conspiracy theory to pin this on Israel rather than women suddenly waking up and deciding to riot after thousands of years of oppression. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
- mylons 4y agouhm —- even if israel is fanning the flames of this, so what?
- caeril 4y ago
- davisoneee 4y agoOr, you know, provide and expect evidence, rather than conspiracy? Try to improve the situation by providing some real data as to why _this_, or some other event, IS being driven by Mossad/CIA/whoever, rather than just throwing snark into an online chat. The world doesn't benefit from people just throwing shit at each other. If you have evidence, educate the world. If you don't, useful actions would be to _look_ for evidence, not just promote antagonism.
- boeingUH60 4y ago>This protest hasn't received world wide attention in the news I'm in faraway Nigeria, and I'm seeing this stuff on the news much against my wishes even.
- jlundberg 4y agoHere in Sweden this has also been on the national television news the last two days. Hopefully this will somehow be a step towards more freedom in Iran.
- amir734jj 4y agoI hope so. I have lived more of my life in the US than in Iran and I hope to go back and visit one day.
- throwaway2202 4y ago
- nashashmi 4y agoFor anyone confused, the HN title has been changed to "As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp (reuters.com)" before it was, [Social Media] banning Iranian users.
- nashashmi 4y ago
- tokai 4y agoA disgusting lie. And at the same time it is simply not a good argument against the unrest even if true. Irans totalitarian regime deserve to face its people.
- nashashmi 4y agohttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/28/what-we-know-after-11-days-of-protests-in-iran https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/28/what-we-know-after-...
- haskellandchill 4y agowell if misinformation is causing the protests it's still a good thing. the Iranian people need to free themselves of the regime. wether it is done under false pretenses does not matter, just that it is done.
- nashashmi 4y agoThe main instigator has been Iranian Masih Alinejad, who is given FBI protection and occasionally works with high level US govt.
- haskellandchill 4y agosometimes US involvement in regime change works out, look at Ukraine. or not ha. the point could be made in the opposite, but I prefer the view of "winter on fire" to that of "ukraine on fire".
- pessimizer 4y agoThat's still enough to be just as angry about. Because the state wanted to lecture a woman on the morality of covering up her hair, she died in a "training center" instead of in bed. Her last moments were of being humiliated for being insufficiently modest.
- rodolphoarruda 4y agoOppressive governments must be thankful to all BigTechs able to consolidate userbase and services around a handful of apps. It makes it really easy to switch things on/off when needed. The original purpose of the Internet as being a resilient p2p network for the people has been completely defeated in some nations.
- Abekkus 4y agoBuilding a resilient p2p service on the internet doesn't just require not using big name SaaS, it means building that service to not need the WebCAs or even DNS, two core services that are anything but p2p. I honestly don't know of any applications that require neither.
- planede 4y agoJami and Tox should mostly qualify, I believe. The hard part is bootstrapping the discovery network, I don't know if there is a true p2p way for that.
- ugjka 4y agoYou have to make a connection to something to get anywhere, that's how the net works
- marcosdumay 4y agoYou can distribute DNS data over any transport, p2p or not. Ans with DNSSEC, you can trust the contents you get from any transport. Are you concerned with countries forcefully removing entries? Because there are a lot of other country TLDs where you can add your entries if you want.
- tptacek 4y agoVirtually everyone relies on ISP DNS servers, which can trivially bypass DNSSEC (DNSSEC collapses down to a single bit in the header on the last hop from server to stub resolver). If all you're trying to do is resist DNS censorship, you can get almost everything you need from using an out-of-country name and DoH, which is universally available, very much unlike DNSSEC.
- aljgz 4y agoIranian software engineer here, AMA
- Balgair 4y agoHow are the protests going where you are? How are the sanctions impacting you as a SWE? Why HN? How was your summer, do anything fun?
- aljgz 4y agoI'm no longer living in Iran for a few years, so this is based on my close friends' observations, not mine. People are doing their best and the riots are intensifying. But the riot police is using warfare to scatter them and when it does not work, they fire directly into the crowd, killing and wounding many. People have no way to fight back. Sanctions are a serious problem for a SWE who lives in Iran. It's almost impossible to work for a foreign company. 40+ years of 40%+ inflation has hurt the economy so bad that more and more people are going down the Maslow's hierarchy. Lots of internet services (youtube, facebook, twitter, telegram, to name a few) are blocked by the government. Many others block requests from Iran because of sanctions. You cannot download java from the official source, you can guess the rest. Any paid service is out of question, as the country is shut off from international money transfer. Even after migrating to a western country, I still cannot work for any of the big American companies, until I become a PR of this new country. While I was working in another country, banks were afraid of opening an account for me and eventually gave me an account with no internet banking and no credit card. I've been checking out HN for many years. It's the only remaining social network of like minded people, that has managed to stay clean of what infects others. When I was in Iran (and while it's just a few years ago, things were much better at that time), I would go hiking, camping, biking, played tennis, much like what I do now.
- boeingUH60 4y ago>While I was working in another country, banks were afraid of opening an account for me and eventually gave me an account with no internet banking and no credit card. This is something that gets to me about sanctions. It seems they prevent everyday citizens just wanting to work and live from doing so, while the government elites still get to enjoy themselves because they can easily find ways to circumvent it. What's then the point?
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoFortunately Telegram is still up. People are using MTProxy to use Telegram even on blocked internet and it's made it possible for people to organize protests and spread information quickly.
- stereoradonc 4y agoThree cheers for Telegram!
- pentae 4y agoHere I am wondering why a censorship proof meshnet version of WhatsApp or Telegram has not reached wide popularity in these countries yet.. is it because these governments dictate they be blocked from the app store? Another reason why we need sideloading ..
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 99_00 4y agoIranian government is especially horrible. Also, restricting information and frees speech is something that western governments routinely do. Sometimes to skew election result in favor of the ruling regime. Supporters of the regime see it as stopping 'misinformation'. I'm not sure if they actually believe that or if it is just convenient cover for unethical and immoral conduct.
- questiondev 4y agogotta do communications over radio, if only cell phones had that access during an emergency situation. i know that would need more power and a bigger antenna to have a radio broadcast mesh network. i know there are issues with that but it’s better than no communication to the outside world especially during a crisis situation, people really should have the freedom to communicate.
- norwalkbear 4y agoYikes it feels like arab spring again. I wonder if this will be Afghanistan, where things westernize for a decade then goes even more the other way than it was initially.
- sph 4y ago> it feels like arab spring again Hopefully not, because the Arab Spring didn't do much in the long term, just the US & allies profited from it by getting rid of Ghaddafi, while the whole of northern Africa isn't faring much better today than before that flash in the pan. I just hope this civilian revolution actually tears down the Iranian religious dictatorship for good. And hopefully in my lifetime I can experience seeing the Saudi scumbags getting the boot as well. Wouldn't that be great.
- shadytrees 4y agoIn case you, like me, needed more context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mahsa_Amini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mahsa_Amini
- pooriran2 4y ago
- yieldcrv 4y agoannual occurrence for one reason or another there interesting that it works might as well make it a national holiday for the purge
- michaelwww 4y agoI'd be surprised if by now Iranians hadn't figured out alternate means of communication.
- LinuxBender 4y agoCan people in Iran SSH out to other countries? If so the folks familiar with SSH could use something like sshchat or devzat [1] see demo info, not my project This does not persist chat, but that may be a net positive in a surveillance state. ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b 2048 -N "" -C "devzat" -f ~/.ssh/.id_devzat ssh -i ~/.ssh/.id_devzat some-name@devzat.hackclub.com If DNS is blocked then edit ~/.ssh/config and append: Host devzat devzat.hackclub.com Hostname 150.136.142.44 Port 22 # Port 443 User some_name IdentityFile ~/.ssh/.id_devzat LogLevel VERBOSE [1] - https://github.com/quackduck/devzat https://github.com/quackduck/devzat
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoThey're using Telegram now with MTProxy.
- joshxyz 4y agoWhat are the odds someone makes iranstagram.com lol Edit: i've just read the article. disheartening series of events. my country philippines has flaws but damn i can still say i'm lucky in a lot of ways.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago.com is probably not the right TLD for the iranstagram product.
- dc-programmer 4y agoAm I paranoid to to think Iran has the CA signing key for any TLD you can register with there?
- joshxyz 4y agodon't leave us hanging, tell us the right one! HAHA
- dejj 4y agoWhich mesh networking app works on iOs? Bridgefy was never able to find my Android device and vice-versa.
- 7373737373 4y agoDoes anything like Briar/Bridgefy exist for Linux? Something that relays messages/packets through a pure P2P meshnet using any connection available (ethernet, wifi, bluetooth), without any intermediate, special purpose routing hardware?
- egberts1 4y agoso that’s what that strange USB plug poking out of a brick wall is for: transference of “ideas”.
- nashashmi 4y agoDidn't Obama give social media special status to serve in sanctioned countries
- nashashmi 4y agoThis was about a previous title where it was saying facebook whatsapp instagram refusing access to Iranians even outside the country. The title is corrected now.
- lagadu 4y agoWouldn't this be proof that Meta is dealing with the Iranian government directly and thus violating US sanctions against Iran?
- rippercushions 4y agoDo we have any proof it's Meta doing this, as opposed to the Iranian government blocking Whatsapp within its borders?
- John23832 4y agoIt's done at an application level?
- solarist 4y agohttps://twitter.com/roozbehp/status/1572841090910388225?s=46&t=DyojB950vZEuOEDfqRs3UA https://twitter.com/roozbehp/status/1572841090910388225?s=46... | As a former WhatsApp engineer, I don't think WhatsApp even has any mechanism to do such a thing. It's probably an unintended artifact of its infrastructure that the Iranian government has exploited, and knowing the WhatsApp team, they are probably already working on a fix.
- shadowgovt 4y agoPossibly. Sanctions law is a hot mess of sometimes contradictory exceptions. In this case, the exceptions regarding "informational materials" may apply. https://www.lawfareblog.com/did-twitter-violate-us-sanctions-law https://www.lawfareblog.com/did-twitter-violate-us-sanctions...
- lupire 4y agoThe Berman Amendment protects transferring information to/from Iran. Blocking information seems quite the opposite.
- eqvinox 4y ago(As much as I dislike Meta —) applying foreign laws to foreign users isn't "dealing" with the Iranian government. "Dealing" in the legal sense generally requires a two-way exchange. If Iran unidirectionally imposes a regulation, that's not a deal; Meta has made no decision to enter into it. (Reference/entry point for legal aspects about this: contracts are also invalid if they're purely unidirectional. If I remember correctly there's a LegalEagle YT video about this, but you can probably dig this up elsewhere too.)
- synergy20 4y agowell it's disgusting, but, why twitter did not become part of it this time? that's a little surprise to me. the social network's censorship is unbelievable.
- jaimex2 4y agoThey need all the human users they can get while the Musk ordeal is going on.
- bpodgursky 4y agoGoogle pulling out of China instead of catering to censorship was a principled move, but fairly obviously did not lead to more freedom of speech in China. It helped kickstart a domestic, government-obedient tech industry. I don't know what the right move here is. Nobody who thinks there's an obvious right answer is worth listening to.
- desindol 4y agoIt's a bit of a pickle if someone really finds the right answer and you don't listen to it isn't it?
- bpodgursky 4y agoI have no problem with people talking through the tradeoffs and listening. There's tautologically a least-worst option we should find. But if the answer is trite snark that summarizes evil vs obvious good, they haven't done that work, and I won't listen, no.
- surfpel 4y agoCulture moves both ways. I would rather American companies not get so comfortable with blatant censorship. While we do still have some degree of censorship (and a whole lot pf privacy violation), it’s still generally seen as a taboo and not as a moral or necessary thing. Once the social standards change however, the goalpost moves and it becomes harder to maintain the same freedoms we had before.
- norwalkbear 4y agoAmerica is divided more than, Iran maybe a glimpse into our immediate future.
- bpodgursky 4y agoShould American companies pull out of Germany instead of banning Nazi propaganda? The UK instead of removing court-ordered offensive speech? I mean, maybe, but since the US has the least-restricted speech of basically any nation, you are de-facto asking for a nationally partitioned internet. That's a big change.
- crabshot 4y agoThis highlights the problem of communications metadata still being available to an outside observer or manipulator. A messaging network where source and destination identifiers can't be linked to real-world identifying information, such as phone numbers, would have been resistant to such censorship.
- upofadown 4y agoIf they can't target some particular group then they just shut down the whole thing. This more highlights the problem of systems with a single point of control.
- zaik 4y agoMultiple providers who federate would still not be enough. With some effort one could block every XMPP server, Jami (or Tor) node out there. You would need something like Briar which does mesh networking via Bluetooth.
- pessimizer 4y agoWith "some effort" you can block anything. Encryption is better than open, federated and encrypted is better than centralized and encrypted, federation over a mesh network is better than just federation.
- andrewinardeer 4y agoI think this may be implemented at the government level: https://twitter.com/KianSharifi/status/1572885353551339521?t=1XjRH4IgyIogA2k7WSmENQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/KianSharifi/status/1572885353551339521?t...
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- rippercushions 4y agoI'm a little surprised Whatsapp even works (worked) in Iran, given the US sanctions against the country.
- toast0 4y agoCommunications software and services are generally exempt from those sorts of sanctions.
- sleepyhead 4y agoPerhaps it is because the sanctions are financial and WhatsApp does not charge users?
- andrewinardeer 4y agoThe US government can issue licences to operate in Iran. Perhaps Meta secured one? GitHub has: https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-github-is-fully-available-in-iran/ https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...
- javajosh 4y agoIran seems to think Whatsapp & Instagram are destabilizing such that turning them off can help quell domestic unrest. A couple of takeaways. First, holy shit. Communications software is powerful enough to put fear in the hearts of political rulers! Second, insofar as sanctions are designed as punitive measures against a government who's actions our government doesn't support, it makes no sense to restrict their access to goods and services their government finds disruptive. In fact, we'd probably want to give them extra.
- codedokode 4y ago> Communications software is powerful enough to put fear in the hearts of political rulers! Of course it is. No government wants people to get falseful information from unapproved sources.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago> Communications software is powerful enough to put fear in the hearts of political rulers! Yes. Encryption software can also defeat courts, judges, governments, militaries.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- adolph 4y agoInteresting contrast to Arab Spring. I wonder if blockage has to do with Iran govt or US Intel agencies. My assumption is that the latter is more influential. If Iran is inducing the blockage, the spies agree for some reason.
- solarist 4y agoI’ve seen many tweets from people in Germany, USA, Turkey etc. that they can’t access their WhatsApp account. Seems to be both Iranian government and Meta. Edit: can be a compromised CDN. See https://twitter.com/roozbehp/status/1572841090910388225?s=46&t=DyojB950vZEuOEDfqRs3UA https://twitter.com/roozbehp/status/1572841090910388225?s=46... Edit 2: Videos are being removed too https://twitter.com/youranonstory/status/1572747450368290816?s=46&t=DyojB950vZEuOEDfqRs3UA https://twitter.com/youranonstory/status/1572747450368290816... Edit 3: from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/protests-internet-disruption-ir/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/protests-internet-disruption-ir/
- pooriran2 4y ago
- dang 4y ago(I've moved your comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937709 to the merged thread because it's a good comment and I don't want it to get stuck where no one will see it.)
- solarist 4y agoThanks!
- mrtksn 4y agoI’m in Turkey currently and my father works in Moscow as an expat, yesterday we were not able to do video calls on Whatsapp and assumed it’s the Russians blocking it because the error message that Whatsapp gave was something like the operator of the person you call doesn’t support video calls. Tried Wi-Fi and mobile internet, the result was the same. Voice calls and text worked just fine.
- lloeki 4y ago> Edit: can be a compromised CDN I don't see mention of a CDN in the link or the conversation around it, the closest being "artifact of its infrastructure". Was it the correct link? I'm not seeing how a CDN exploit would result in Instagram replying with "your post has been removed". That said I'm only inferring how Meta uses its CDNs (e.g storing static user posted video/image assets)
- n-i-m-a 4y agoI'm an Iranian living in Italy and have an Italian phone/WhatsApp number. Couldn't call anyone or receive WhatsApp calls to/from Iranian and non-Iranian numbers yesterday afternoon when the internet blocking started in Iran. It was like all numbers somehow in touch with Iranian contacts were blocked from completing calls. As soon as either side of the call would answer, the call would end with a message like you are connected via a network that has blocked WhatsApp or something similar.
- wyldfire 4y agoI have friends here in the US who use WhatsApp and they are originally from Iran. I wonder, if it's been many years since they lived in Iran if they're still considered "Iranian" for the purposes of this blockage?
- joshuaissac 4y agoI noticed this issue last night while trying to call WhatsApp numbers in India from the UK (no Iranian numbers involved). I got the same error message: "Couldn't place call because your device is connected to a Wi-Fi network that prevents WhatsApp calls. Connect to a different network or turn Wi-Fi off." I wonder if that was collateral damage from the Iranian block.
- pooriran2 4y ago
- lupire 4y agoHow is it possible for two non-Iranians (in a geographic/telecom sense, not ethnic sense) to lose the connection on WhatsApp due to Iranian government? Surely the blocklist isn't implemented inside Facebook, it must be based on cellphone carrier. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937782 links to claims that the Iranian government hacked WhatsApp or one of its networking providers.
- timcavel 4y ago
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- baybal2 4y ago
- theGnuMe 4y agoStarlink iPhones can’t come soon enough.
- sriram_malhar 4y agoI'm sure repressive governments will make it illegal to use phones that can connect to Starlink. Satellite phones are banned in India, for example. You will be arrested for a lot longer for owning a satellite phone than if you owned a gun illegally.
- WHATDOESIT 4y agoLet's see the governments try to ban iPhone. What a nice revolution trigger.
- 5pComb 4y agoThey already tried: https://www.globaltradealert.org/intervention/80877/import-ban/iran-the-government-bans-the-import-of-smart-phones-worth-more-than-300-euros https://www.globaltradealert.org/intervention/80877/import-b... From the same site: Iran smartphone imports (sept 2021 - sept 2022) 1 Samsung 48% 2 Xiaomi 28% 3 Nokia 12% 4 Apple 6%
- WHATDOESIT 4y agoGood thing other manufacturers are going to copy the feature soon.
- Melatonic 4y agoTmobile is actually the one that will be partnering with Starlink. Apple is partnering with GlobalStar which actually really sucks (currently) and will have pretty much the worst satellite network for at least a few years. If they really got their shit together and started launching satellites ASAP they could probably improve a lot in a year or two. Also GlobalStar only covers the continental US and a little farther...... Depending on how strict they are you might be able to smuggle in a Garmin inReach and connect to Iridium now (or an actual Iridium or Inmarsat satellite phone or modem)
- baybal2 4y ago
- edsimpson 4y agoJust a reminder that Signal supports both censorship circumvention and independently hosted proxies (e.g. Search Twitter, etc. for proxy links using the #IRanASignalProxy hashtag.) https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360056052052-Proxy-Support https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360056052052-Pr...
- suoduandao2 4y agoI believe Telegram is the private messaging app of choice within Iran.
- edsimpson 4y agoIran has blocked Telegram in 2017 and 2018. Presumably they could be doing that as well soon which is why I was highlighting some Signal features to help. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_in_Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_in_Iran
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoIt's blocked but it's still working with MTProxies. VPNs aren't working in Iran (a friend told me) and he's surprised Telegram is the only app that's working fine.
- yorwba 4y agoDoes Signal support signup without a phone number yet? Otherwise Iranian telcos could easily eat Signal's SMSs to block signups.
- the_svd_doctor 4y agoSigning up is a one time thing though.
- ReptileMan 4y agoLet's hope the prosters are successful this time.
- steve76 4y ago
- duxup 4y ago-crosses fingers…. again-
- throwayyy479087 4y agoUnfortunately, they won’t be. China has been exporting some really amazing surveillance tools to Iran, NK, Russia that make revolutions basically impossible now. When was the last successful overthrow of a despot in a middle income country? Euromaiden 2014?
- ailef 4y agoEuromaidan 2014 overthrew a democratically elected president.
- throwaway894345 4y agoIt's not clear that he was "democratically elected"--there were many allegations of election fraud and voter intimidation. Moreover, he wasn't "overthrown", parliament voted to remove him (because he ordered the police to shoot protesters en masse). The courts also convicted him of treason, and he was even disavowed by his own party.
- ailef 4y agoAllegations? I thought one had to provide evidence in order to invalidate election results. It's funny how allegations are enough when it's useful to one's own side, but hard evidence is needed for the rest. > "Yesterday's vote was an impressive display of democratic elections," said João Soares, the president of the OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly and Special Coordinator for OSCE short- term observers. It seems election were pretty democratic unless you can provide some evidence to the contrary. Also, parliament voted his removal without reaching the needed majority, according to Ukraine's own constitution, so the removal itself was unconstitutional.
- timcavel 4y ago
- scandox 4y agoSlight OT: When I was in Monaco recently the Monaco Telecom network prevented me making or receiving WhatsApp calls. I could message, but no calling. Presumably therefore it is something that the network provider can interfere with effectively.
- codedokode 4y agoCould it be that WhatsApp has a mechanism for ISP and telcos to block calls to prevent unnecessary competition? Like Apple has one to prevent using Apple's VPN?
- inglor 4y agoIt's not hard nor does it require WhatsApp's cooperation. It's fairly easy to figure out something is an (even encrypted) video call (for example by the consistency of throughput of "wanting to upload") and certainly pretty easy to use a simple algorithm to deduce what that traffic looks like. Hiding video traffic with other traffic is hard since it's easy to assume "long persistent video-like upload with consistent throughput over something like srtp" is video and get a few false positives and no false negatives.
- rippercushions 4y agoYes, Dubai in particular is notorious for this. https://www.cloudwards.net/whatsapp-ban-in-dubai/ https://www.cloudwards.net/whatsapp-ban-in-dubai/
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
- javajosh 4y agoDoes anyone know how this works in Iran? All the way from the decision making to the question of: who do you call? What commands do they execute? I would naively start with physical ingress points and add routing rules that stop traffic to service IP blocks (obtained by examining DNS records). Depending on how DNS is deployed (like, is there a national law to only use government run name servers?) you could freeze DNS records from updating. That would be MY back-of-the-envelope approach to doing internet censorship in a totalitarian dictatorship. But I'm not convinced it's the best way.
- martinald 4y agoI imagine SNI too - which is in cleartext. There is encrypted SNI but I don't know how far that is along in terms of deployment. But really for a company like FB you could just blackhole their entire IP range(s) and/or AS (AS32934?) which would take everything offline very quickly.
- LinuxBender 4y agoCloudflare supports ESNI. AFAIK none of the mainstream browsers support ESNI by default. I believe the latest build of Firefox [1] may have an option in about:config to enable it. One could check if a website supports ESNI with [2] ESNICheck. Support for ESNI is still subject to change. [3] [1] - https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypt-that-sni-firefox-edition/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypt-that-sni-firefox-edition... [2] - https://esnicheck.com/ https://esnicheck.com/ [3] - https://serverfault.com/questions/976377/how-can-i-set-up-encrypted-sni-on-my-own-servers https://serverfault.com/questions/976377/how-can-i-set-up-en...
- XorNot 4y agoESNI is useless. Nobody cares that it's secret - they care that they don't know what you're doing. It removes plausible deniability, which means no more domain fronting bypasses. It's not enough to be "secure", you need to be able to hide in plain sight.