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Iran Blocks 'Illegal' VPNs, Google, and Yahoo
First time accepted submitter voul writes "Iran is at it again. Taking a page from China's playbook, Iran has moved to cut off illegal VPNs. 'Quite aware of the censorship they face, many Iranians use proxy servers over virtual private networks to circumvent government restrictions and mask their activities,' CNET reports. 'However, officials now say they have blocked use of the "illegal" tool.' Slashgear reports that users are 'unable to access social networks like Facebook and Twitter, or use services like Skype to make phone calls. Along with the blocking of the VPNs, the Iranian government have also blocked access to Google and Yahoo.'"
So, we are going to handle the physical sanctions and the Iranian government is going to handle the internet sanctions. Sounds like a great plan!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Soon as MPAA realizes everyone went VPN to escape six strikes, they'll want a similar law here in the US
Of course all corporate VPNs will be exempt as long as they're willing to report any "suspicious" activity
Let's see them try to block SSH and have a functioning internet.
The Tehran Chronicle article about this mentions recent bans on Facebook and Twitter, then has links to them both after the article...
...and nothing of value was lost. (Unless you happen to live there, that is.)
What was lost was a nation of people that could contribute their creativity to the rest of the internet. We have lost quite a lot.
You fail at history.
You can run a VPN server at your home. Those governments can only block so many IP addresses and they have the big VPN providers in their crosshairs. If you and another few thousand of you can spare few gigabytes per month from your bandwidth cap and somehow find a way to reach out to those people and direct them to use *your* VPN service (free of charge of course), you can safely say that you have done your part.
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The more I know people, the more I love animals
the largest "tool" that was blocked is Tor.
Tor has thousands of exit nodes, and all were blocked, they don't have to block specific ports they use deep packet inspection to identify if it's a proxy request or direct request and can deny all which is why at the moment Tor don't work from Iran
One problem with this: Iran has a history of doing Deep Packet inspection and dropping all encrypted connections (or at least, non-whitelisted encrypted connections). For now, obfsproxy gets around this. Running a simple VPN will not.
[O]f the three search engines only Google will actually use SSL, even if you go to http://google.com/ the form is submitted over https. The other two not only won't do that, they will *downgrade* you to http even if you explicitly navigate to https://yahoo.com/ or https://bing.com/. Iranians can easily use DPI to spy on Yahoo and Bing users, only Google presents a problem. So I'm not surprised Bing didn't get blocked, it's not clear to me why Yahoo did.
https://duckduckgo.com/ and https://ixquick.com/ both support SSL/TLS. The latter allows viewing searched content through their embedded HTTPS proxy service.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
It's illegal to use a VPN that the government can't decrypt and monitor the traffic on. And they're not just wanting access "in case they need it", they run software 24/7 that flags "items of interest" for human review. If they find you're breaking any laws, as defined by their legal system (clerics and thousand year old books), or doing anything that threatens their control over their sheep (not the hoofed variety) then they lock you up or behead you or whatever they feel is appropriate.
Considering the broadness of their laws, the harshness of their penalties, and the almost complete lack of legal protection the average (non wealthy) citizen has over there, it's basically dangerous to use the internet over there, for any reason. A week of monitoring you, regardless of what you were trying to do or not do, and they are likely to have enough dirt to hang you (literally) if they feel like it. It's a scary place to live.
Web search for some goat milk recipes. Click a link. Wow look at that, the banner ad on that page is showing titties! Your computer has just downloaded porn, which is illegal to possess. That's all it takes over there to lock you up. I can't imagine how you'd go about actually using the internet over there without setting yourself up. It's a shame really, all these controlling countries (be they religious or just plain dictators like NK) are forced to create an environment of stagnation to maintain their control, and they care more for that then the future of their country. Quite sad for the people. I look at it and it's like being in the supermarket and watching some mother just scream at her kids, treating them like crap, and wishing you could do something about it, but you can't. Depressing to watch.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Indeed. The slashdot crowd is one of the only voices of reason keeping the warmongerers at bay. The CIA would love to stage another coup, but slashdot is always there, with simpsons quotes and star wars references, to shut them down.
http://nos.nl/artikel/483130-ahmadinejad-onder-vuur-om-knuffel.html
For those unfortunate enough not to be Dutch, the article claims Ahmadinejad is under attack from the religious leadership for hugging/comforting the wife of Chavez. In Islam, touching women is forbidden, unlike say goats. Not even the president, acting in an world with many cultures escapes this. There are of course many rules which only apply to the ruled but some dictatorships manage to suppress everyone, except those who like the suppression.
NK is rather famous for going after even Generals who don't show the right amount of grieve. There are systems where even the holiest are not immune to the system.
This is not saying these systems are nice but to understand them, you need to understand that the idea of the evil overlord at the top controlling all is best left to the movies. Most of these systems have become self perpetuting, it is the system that rules the people, not people. Of course, the system is people in the end but what I mean is that those doing the dictating are just as much dictated as the rest. That is why these systems endure for so long. Because if one leader should falter, the system simply replaces him or pulls him back in line. Dictators change, the system endures. And it isn't creepy guys meeting in secret, it is grannies who spy on their neighbors and are first in line at the stonings. That is why the west has been unable to "liberate" Iraq or Afghanistan. Because they shot the "leaders" who are just puppets of the systems and left the grannies who tell their grandsons they will go to heaven and stone their granddaughters for not obeying their grandmothers little empires, alone.
Want to fix the world? Kill the people behind the curtains watching and reporting.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Funny, I was under the impression that a large majority of Slashdot participants were in favor of unfettered communications and against censorship, especially when it comes to the Internet. There is a story category named "Your Rights Online." Should it be renamed to "Your Rights Online Unless You Live In A Country The US Considers Bad, In Which Case We'll Pretend Everything Is OK"?
Censorship should be criticized, whoever does it and wherever it is done, period.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Not just history, but current events. A combination of a bloody, eight-year war with Iraq and policies that encouraged large families have lead to a glut of young people; something like 2/3 of the population is ~30. That generation is not particularly religious (particularly not by the standards that most Americans use to hypocritically stereotype the Middle East), is very pro-Western and anti-isolationism, well-educated, and very aware of the world. The policies of the country, however, are dominated by a small, ultra-conservative minority of old assholes. Decades of turmoil and common sense drive smart, young people out of the country rather than driving them to stay and launch some sort of up-rising that may result in an even worse regime. They watched the "Arab Spring" and took away the lesson that the arabs didn't really improve their situation. Those that see the sanctions as the fault of their government's stubbornness want out, those that see them as the fault of the imperialist West don't; everyone agrees that the sanctions hit ordinary Iranians the hardest.
When you see sweeping generalizations about intolerance, religious fundamentalism, and insane foreign policy, just remember that the Bush administration arrested and tortured people in secret prisons with no trials. Does that mean that all ~300,000,000 Americans supported that policy? Should the world now treat all Americans like paranoid war-mongers that embrace pre-emptive war and a police state? Was Bush v Gore definitive evidence that Americans can't hold fair elections? If you answered yes, then feel free to un-hypocritically pass the same sort of judgements against the entire population of another country with crazy political leaders. Otherwise, put yourself in the shoes of a 28-year-old with an advanced degree that is fluent in English and that has to use an "illegal" VPN to exercise your curiosity of the outside world--would contribute to society by risking everything to join a violent rebellion or by trying to get out and establish a career and citizenship in the West?
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Want to fix the world? Kill the people behind the curtains watching and reporting.
Hmmm...Pol Pot did as you suggest, so did Mao. When you attack the ideological infrastructure of the regime you are trying to overthrow, as you are suggesting, you leave a vacuum that has to be filled. If you can replace that ideological infrastructure with one more commensurate with your own, fine -- but you have to get your own in place and then protect it so that some other ideologue can't displace you by attacking you in the same way, which is where Pol Pot and Mao failed. The lesson to be learned from their failures? Control the sources of information about competing ideologies. Whacking ideological opponents was a viable strategy, back when suppressing competing ideas was merely a matter of killing the brains where those ideas resided. Technology (starting with writing, then the printing press, then radio and TV, and then the net) allowed ideas to slip from brain to brain faster than the regime could kill off the contaminated brains. Pol Pot killed teachers and parents (by the millions) and successfully inserted his own ideology into a new generation, but failed to keep competing ideologies out, resulting in his ultimate loss of control. Mao made the same mistake at first, but realized (too late, perhaps, but he did try to correct course) that keeping opposing ideologies out was impossible when you had over a billion vulnerable brains to protect. His course correction resulted in complete state control of information, culminating in the Great Firewall of China, which at least delayed the onset of ideological rot, which in theory would give time for the regime to devise a way to innoculate all those vulnerable brains. Iran is doing the exact same thing by clamping down on the sources of ideological rot. It remains to be seen whether or not regimes like Iran and North Korea can delay it long enough to survive, but I kinda doubt it, though ideologues in the US seem to have found a way that might work -- make it easier for your subjects to get the information you want them to have while simultaneously attacking the sources of information that oppose your ideology. Rupert Murdoch may be a multi-billionaire capitalist running dog in Mao's eyes, but he is Mao's spiritual heir none-the-less.