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Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

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Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#151

Post by RocketMan9999 »

My comment will certainly be dead, but I'll try replying anyway.

> the government has cut off or severely limited residential and especially mobile broadband access to the internet

How limited is the Internet access? As long as the network didn't go straight to "whitelist" mode, there may be ways to gain access to the blocked sites. Since you mentioned machines in data centers can still access the outside world, I guess it's still working in "blacklist" mode - only the sites they blocked are inaccessible.

As the rumor goes, Iran imported the censoring tech and equipment from PRC, so anything that works in China will most probably work in Iran.

V2ray and Vmess work in China because they disguise their protocols AND servers as normal web stuff. I wouldn't recommend Shadowsocks because the Chinese Great Firewall can now partially recognize it. If all things failed, HTTP proxies over TLS with legit Let's Encrypt certificates and client certificate authentication may be much more viable.

The Chinese guys also have tons of free proxies & VPN providers that are updated regularly stockpiled on GitHub, but most are documented in ambiguous language, such as these (I have no affiliation with any of them):

https://github.com/bannedbook/fanqiang https://github.com/Alvin9999/new-pac https://github.com/freefq/free https://github.com/anaer/Sub

My suggestion would be,

1. Search for such repositories on GitHub. The keyword you want to use is "翻墙", or go straight to the links listed above. You'll need to research their documents, or

2. Create an Issue stating your situation and that you need help.

I believe the owners of those repos may have the ability AND willingness to help you out.

And the communication part.... I used Matrix in China with the server placed abroad, and it worked very well, because it's working on top of HTTPS. Again, anything that seems normal web stuff have a higher chance of getting pass the censorship.

Be safe out there.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#152

Post by danenania »

nurettin wrote: post #148
aliqot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because an opinion by itself doesn't add much to the discussion This is a misunderstanding in how downvotes work here.

We don't talk about down votes on hn "because it is boring" to dang. And because there is an incentive to downvote something which is downvoted. Lighter color indicates downvoted content. It shows reputation. As reputation precedes, people will downvote lighter colored text until someone asks why below it. In which case they will reconsider.

There are also a lot of HNers (myself included) who will upvote any comments they see that they think are unfairly downvoted, whether they agree or disagree with the comment. It creates a pretty good balancing effect. The end result is that comments that stay downvoted after having a decent number of eyeballs on them seem to usually deserve it.

A possible exception are hyper-contentious issues (Israel/Palestine for example), where the upvote/downvote count is just a reflection of which tribe has greater numbers on HN.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#153

Post by danenania »

computerfriend wrote: post #88
jimbob45 wrote: post #26

For what was supposed to be a spontaneous protest, this all seems incredibly well-coordinated. Certainly wouldn’t be the first time a foreign government used riots to influence government policy. Even further, Khamenei may not last the year and such riots could heavily influence the selection of his successor, offering a strong motive to any country looking to engage in such espionage.

So glad we can both appreciate how well organised mass protests can be when everyone works together. If you're going to insinuate something else, I'd suggest you get some actual evidence first. Just saying "colour revolution" or whatever is intellectually lazy, as well as being dishonest and dismissive about people who are risking their lives and liberty.

It's also lazy because every spy agency is drawn to unrest in a rival country like a moth to a flame. Regardless of how pure a movement is, it will quickly attract foreign interest and influence as it grows. So this is ultimately just an easy way to dismiss any challenge to the status quo.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#154

Post by its_bbq »

joschkadev wrote: post #111

I have an idea, however I am inexperienced in networking or Opsec. Would it be possible to setup a VPN inside Iran and for me to connect to this VPN, using my connection as a gateway?

Outline (getoitline.org) is this in reverse: you set up a Shadowsocks proxy outside Iran and distribute access to it inside Iran

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#155

Post by rany_ »

RocketMan9999 wrote: post #151

My comment will certainly be dead, but I'll try replying anyway. > the government has cut off or severely limited residential and especially mobile broadband access to the internet How limited is the Internet access? As long as the network didn't go straight to "whitelist" mode, there may be ways to gain access to the blocked sites. Since you mentioned machines in data centers can still access the outside world, I gu…

> I used Matrix in China with the server placed abroad, and it worked very well, because it's working on top of HTTPS.

Are the popular Matrix homeservers banned?

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#156

Post by mariojv »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #127
mariojv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could individuals run a public internet gateway that doesn't keep logs with something similar to mosh but running the equivalent of an SSH tunnel? Think a SOCKS proxy on one end, but running as a public web application/forward proxy on the other end. The ISP would still be able to see any traffic to the gateway, but if you had enough links outside of government monitored net infrastructure to the gateway (hard lines…

You are not dealing with a state that will say "teehee, we have no proof of the data that's going through, oh well!". Anyone found operating one of these gateways will just end up being beaten with a wrench, and traffic logged further on. Considering this, it's overall safer to not go through a central gateway, and to have as many possible connections going through. Hell, even PCs stored in weird places, in governmen…

Good point. I wish I could delete or edit my comment but I can't. Thanks for the reply.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#157

Post by bo1024 »

remram wrote: post #73
bo1024 wrote: post #56

Can people use a steganography app to communicate via innocuous images? 1. Take a picture. 2. Use app to insert message into picture, encrypt with passphrase. 3. SMS picture to friend or upload to Iranian equivalent of imgur (if any is up). 4. Friend loads picture into app and types passphrase to get message. I'm not sure what a good choice of app would be, but something good must exist?

The point is that phone service and access to the outside internet is blocked. You can't get images out any more than you can get text out, so putting text in images does not help.

I thought the main goal was to help Iranians communicate with each other.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#158

Post by bo1024 »

fareesh wrote: post #139
mariojv wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any good open source or publicly usable steganography software with reasonable UX? Page 1 of Google shows this thing called OpenStego. I've heard of steganography but have no idea what tools are reputable in this space.

Does steganography break when Social media sites reprocess images? I.e. do you need to access the underlying raw bytes?

Great point, probably most approaches break if the site is doing that.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#159

Post by bouncycastle »

mschuster91 wrote: post #138
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 80's, I remember that people were protesting without internet and mobile phones, with very successful results. Back then, the governments didn't have that either. Pigs on the streets with barely working (or understandable) radios, outdated huge paper maps, and if they were lucky a barely working chopper for a bit of aerial surveillance. The only tools were water cannons, batons, tear gas that didn't wor…

Yup, the other side of the coin is even darker. To add to the list - the recent trend to phase out cash in favor of electronic payments.

Protesters can just have their accounts frozen, and/or deposits confiscated, as we seen in recent examples.

(Those young kids who use their latest Apple watch to pay for coffee in the morning just because it's "convenient" really do not understand what they are sleepwalking into...)

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