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Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

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Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#101

Post by eknoes »

pSYoniK wrote: post #83

Signal is setting up proxies so users in Iran using Signal could update their proxy settings in the app to bypass the block for that at least. Not sure to what extent things are being blocked, but if you can get connections to SOME outside services, this might help people to organize means of communication. The proxies are also setup by people outside of Iran and it doesn't really matter if someone in Iran leaks a pr…

I set up several proxies, and only sent their addresses per mail. A Problem is that we have no idea which contact is trustful and which not, so in the end our proxies were blocked after a really short amount of time. Does anyone has successfully deployed such a proxy and it has actually been used without being blocked? Is there any best practice / experience?

I am furthermore searching for a method to check whether it works from inside Iran or not. Was trying a VPN from Cyberghost, but with that it is possible to visit blocked sites, I did not previously know that data centers in Iran have unblocked access. With that I could check myself whether it works and could detect after which contact we were blocked.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#102

Post by peppermint_tea »

system2 wrote: post #100
peppermint_tea wrote: post #96

I spun a c3.large for the cause and email the person. any gotchas I should worry about? (the aws calculator gives me 76.65$ USD / month) I want to help but I am by no mean rich... don't want a crazy AWS bill...

Wouldn't something like DigitalOcean or Linode help? They are far more cheaper and you don't get weird random invoices from them.

yes, I will change provider... paying for egress data on something that is meant for outbound connections is a bad idea...

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#103

Post by eyelidlessness »

bouncycastle wrote: post #65

Back in the 80's, I remember that people were protesting without internet and mobile phones, with very successful results. They bought down the iron curtain after all. The most sophisticated technology they used was the printing press, for printing and distributing fliers, newspapers and censored books. Underground groups were organized in cells too, without phones, email or apps. Right now, it seems like those who u…

Back in the 80s, the number of people who had been and were killed organizing this way had a lot of zeroes at the end of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a low tech approach to security where it makes sense, but it’s not a panacea. And it’s not like this evolving movement wasn’t organizing the same way at the same time, we’ve learned more from them than the inverse.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#104

Post by alberto_ol »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #67
unity1001 wrote: post #64

Funny how the women's rights situation in Iran became bad enough to prompt large scale protests within two weeks of Iran joining SCO. Not two months earlier. Not two months later. Just within weeks.

SCO? The country code for Scotland? The Santa Cruz Operation? What's SCO in this context? My (30 seconds of) searching turned up nothing plausible.

try to search "iran join sco"

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#106

Post by peppermint_tea »

system2 wrote: post #100
peppermint_tea wrote: post #96

I spun a c3.large for the cause and email the person. any gotchas I should worry about? (the aws calculator gives me 76.65$ USD / month) I want to help but I am by no mean rich... don't want a crazy AWS bill...

Wouldn't something like DigitalOcean or Linode help? They are far more cheaper and you don't get weird random invoices from them.

just spun 2 cx21 servers with hetzner (20TB bandwidth + 1€ per extra TB)

thanks!

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#107

Post by Gasp0de »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #93

Just curious, is there some sort of special license or permission required to get access to computing resources like these in Iran, like there is with the Chinese website license number thing? I have thought about trying to run a VPN server on my EC2 web server for my friends in Iran but not sure if regular VPN protocols are even allowed through. I don't think they know what Tor is much less how to set it up with a c…

Using Tor Browser should be very simple, if they know how to operate a web browser they should be able to use Tor Browser. They literally start the program, there is a window that asks if they want to use a direct connection or bridge. They click bridge, enter a bridge and are connected like a normal browser.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#108

Post by jillesvangurp »

giantrobot wrote: post #87
m3kw9 wrote: post #75

What happened to starlink?

Terminals have to get in-country and there needs to be usable ground stations in the same cell as the terminal. Good luck getting a terminal to Tehran where the police are apparently gleefully destroying satellite dishes. Even if you got an intact terminal there's no ground station nearby. StarLink has been given special dispensation to operate in Iran. This is not the same as air dropping a warehouse worth of termin…

Too early for this but obviously Starlink's recently announced plans to start offering connectivity to phones in very remote areas would also work wonders for people in countries like Iran. The scale would be an issue obviously. But maybe combined with e.g. mesh networking, it would enable people to bypass government controls.

IMHO, this is the biggest threat to police states like Iran, North Korea, etc. in years. They are very dependent on controlling access to information and breaking through that threatens their power and they have treated the internet as an existential threat by raising firewalls and imposing very strict controls and limitations. However, phones are a weakness. At least so far.

Information is basically a weapon that can be used to influence large amounts of people. The Russians just used propaganda to sell their own population on a war that they wanted to start. That didn't just happen overnight; the propaganda started years ago. That would have been impossible without strict controls on media and freedom of press. Iran, Russia, North Korea, China, and a few other countries are at this point very dependent on controlling access to information. It's a strategic weakness that is exploitable. Break through the information blocks and things start changing.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#109

Post by tsujamin »

alex_young wrote: post #94
LinuxBender wrote: post #5

the servers inside Iranian data centers still have access to the outside world. Knowing that, the simplest and easiest solution that would avoid detection is to SSH tunnel into that datacenter and SSH-ProxyForward out of that datacenter into Amazon AWS via SSH and use that SSH proxy chain as a SOCKS proxy for browsers. Make sure the browser is using the SOCKS proxy (SSH) for its DNS. Many sites will make your friends…

This is a good recommendation. Using Tor sounds good in theory, but it's too far easy to identify all of the Tor connections and identify the residences connected to them. I would suggest using SSH tunnels on whatever port a given server normally communicates on. If this is 443, connections should just look like normal web browsing on an ISP level. If the server is used to transmit other data over TLS using that port…

> If this is 443, connections should just look like normal web browsing on an ISP level

Except that it doesn't look like TLS - depending on what the traffic inspection capabilities look like I imagine someone speaking SSH on port 443 is pretty incriminating :/

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#110

Post by alex_duf »

LinuxBender wrote: post #5

the servers inside Iranian data centers still have access to the outside world. Knowing that, the simplest and easiest solution that would avoid detection is to SSH tunnel into that datacenter and SSH-ProxyForward out of that datacenter into Amazon AWS via SSH and use that SSH proxy chain as a SOCKS proxy for browsers. Make sure the browser is using the SOCKS proxy (SSH) for its DNS. Many sites will make your friends…

Would traffic shaping still enable to guess this is a browser usage rather than a typical ssh?
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