A couple of days ago i noticed something off with blahaj.zone. I couldn’t see images posted by users on blahaj, so i thought it was a problem on their side.
Well guess fucking what? After 3 days, it was STILL broken, so i opened it and…
Blocked. They fucking blocked blahaj.zone. Actually beyond parody🤦♂️ Why? What was the point? there’s trans content literally everywhere on lemmy. what’s next, block them all? So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN (protonvpn.com is also blocked in saudi, jfc) just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄
I swear a couple of days ago it worked. This is a mild annoyance (hence the community) but still.
It’s so over guys, MBS said no more 196 😔
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Well its Saudi Arabia after all. It isn’t exactly known for being all that high on the freedom index. I’m sure you realize that though.
From a technical level there are ways to bypass censorship. The thing to keep in mind is that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have any rights for citizens. The law can be enforced arbitrarily and you could just disappear one day. If you are looking for technical information on avoiding censorship I can try to help.
Yeah, but it’s a little weird how they’d go out of their way to ban such a small and obscure website. I didn’t even know the feds knew about lemmy. Besides, it’s been fine for a long time for me.
But this was bound to happen eventually, i guess :/
The thing to keep in mind is that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have any rights for citizens. The law can be enforced arbitrarily and you could just disappear one day
I am well aware of that :( Hopefully i can disappear out of here before they make me.
Stay safe friend.
Without giving away potentially anything dangerous to yourself, in case they are watching. Any idea what place you intend on disappearing too?
I plan on trying to apply for asylum somewhere. There’s a lot of useful information for saudi dissidents on a forum that i won’t mention the name of, but from it my choices are: Canada, Australia, UK, America, France, Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Ireland.
All of these, i’d give a kidney to be in anyway. But if i’ll make this once in a lifetime choice, i might as well choose what’s best for me. A big problem is finance and racism. The western world isn’t friendly to Arabs from what i’ve seen, so i’d probably need to lay low.
I used to want to go to Germany, but this ominous message on the forum made me think twice. They leave it at that, but it’s unsettling to me.
I cant speak for anywhere else, but my home country. There definitely are bad places in the US, there are, however some friendly areas here.
That being said, I hear Sweden is great.
Do you have any technical skills? If you can sell yourself as an asset you are going to do considerably better.
Yes, it’s a WIP for me, but i’m improving my rust and OCaml skills, but they have a struggling job market.
You could also look into trade school. In the US at least there are a lot of people desperate for electricians plumbers and other related jobs.
Haven’t heard of them till now, not necessarily my hobby but i’ll think of it as a backup, thank you.
I didn’t even know the feds knew about lemmy.
Probably just an automated list of blocking then. At least I would assume theres block lists floating around at those levels
So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄
One of the first conversations I was on when I joined was one between Ada, the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin, and some guy in a Middle Eastern country. Apparently his country had blocked lemmy.blahaj.zone at the national network level.
The Threadiverse is federated, so one could view posts from lemmy.blahaj.zone elsewhere, but not images, which did not propagate.
I thought that at some point, lemmy servers had started also storing images posted on other lemmy servers, but upon checking, it looks like they have not. I did run into one – no longer up – that had, according to the description, had apparently been modified to do this, probably to afford its users more privacy and not expose their IP addresses other than to their home instance. In theory, if you could find one that did so, you could make that your home instance and just rely on propagation of images through the network.
EDIT: It sounds from this year-old post like a lemmy instance can at least be configured to cache remote images:
https://futurology.today/post/6440
I suppose it’d be possible to go look and find out exactly what the current situation is.
That’s good to know, thank you. Unfortunately alot of the communities i spend time in have a lot of blahaj users, so i don’t have context of the post sometimes. Better than nothing, though.
Some shitheads started to spam CSAM and it got cached on other instances too. db0 admin created a tool to check every upload via library of hashes of known dangerous images (not images themselves). Since then, most images are stored locally on instances and aren’t cached by others.
That’s not what my tool is doing
If i remember correctly after the downfall of reddit and the mass migration to Lemmy happened, A big issue was CSAM spreading across the Lemmy servers. Wouldn’t surprise me that that is the cause that images are no longer stored across servers.
Image proxy is what I suspect you mean. The problem with that from an instance admin is that on the network level it would them show their instance accessing whatever content their users request which then puts the owner at risk, so I believe most never enabled it. If an owner set up an instance with a particularly strong opsec game though where their outbound connections where routed over a VPN or TOR that could be useful to censored countries. Might make for an interesting project…
That’s not really the problem. The main issue until now is that when you try to proxy all images, what ends up happening is that a lot of popular image hosters start rate limiting your server’s IP, so your users end up just seeing a lot of broken images, and they think you misconfigured your instance. @sunaurus@lemm.ee had to deal with this iirc.
That too I suppose. I seem to recall the feature coming out not too long after all the CSAM issues, so liability for that always stuck in my mind.
Hmm.
IPv6 addresses are a far less-constrained resource than IPv4 addresses.
I wonder if it might be possible to do the requests over IPv6, using a range of addresses, assuming that the image hosting services in question only care about rate of requests from a single address.
EDIT: Also, for OP’s case, all he cares about is propagation of images hosted on other lemmy instances, not image hosting services. Presumably those instances don’t care about other instances serving their pictrs images. I wonder if it’d be possible to have an option to only proxy for pictrs-served images?
Rate limitors from ipv6 tend to take into account the whole subnet which is assigned to your account, so that’s not a way to avoid them
Use Tor if you can, and people outside of these restrictive countries can help by running Snowflake in their regular browser.
That’s a great recommendation, it’s always important to practice bypassing potential censorship as you do not always know what is being hidden from the public.
Love tor, it’s a lifesaver (literally :) ) and thank you for the tip!
Ooooh this is a pretty cool tool, I’ll set up the docker container on my homelab
You can also run a full Tor relay: https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/guard/
There are tutorials on YouTube:
I set up a bridge on my home network. I’ll put the relay on my Hetzner VPS.
Great job!
Installed Snowflake, thanks for the heads-up. Pretty simple way to try to be a little helpful. Was like two clicks.
Lol I’d tread a bit carefully.
KSA likes to chase people and have them “disappeared” for their opinions.
I know a guy they picked up for 3 months and when he finally showed up, his poor mouth was zippered shut.
And he was an international too.
I’d look around for a solid VPN solution anyway. Useful to have in any country.
That’s what i’m afraid of, too. Doing such risky things in the middle of the den of snakes. There isn’t much they can do to a visitors like your friend, but they can do what they please to “threats” and dissidents like me.
Why would you ever visit that shithole of a country?
It’s worth mentioning that Saudi Arabia is where Mecca is. Millions of people have a religious obligation to travel there at some point in their lives.
“Religious obligation” is an oxymoron
Where did you choose to be born?
bro i was born here, you’re right why would i? i didn’t, fuck this shitholeSorry, I didn’t mean to sound so rude. It was just a misunderstanding
My bad; you implied that you were just visiting with your last comment.
Oh, i see how someone could’ve interpreted as such 🤦♂️ I’ll edit it jic, thank you :)
Just click there and tell them it shouldn’t be blocked.
I am sure they’ll listen!
That shit’ll get me on a watchlist, trying to access a website for trans people 😂
But if i ask nicely…
I was joking but, maybe go find the worst bigot you know, and do it from their computer?
You underestimate how bigoted the average Gulf Arab is, I’d need to do it to everyone 😅
The average gulf Arab is a competitive racist. Especially with Jews 😂
Blocked. They fucking geoblocked blahaj.zone.
Geoblocked for whom?
Geo blocking is the wrong term to use. It implies the platform blocked a country.
This is a country blocking a platform.
Oops, i thought they were the same thing.
Ah, OK. That makes more sense. Especially as it seems to be happening in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi arabians.
They must have thought that admin defending a troll was the last straw as well.
It is not realistic to think the saudi government cared that much about this. The way it works is someone send a request to block the site. If there are banned words including “sex” then it will be block. You can request for it to be unblock and say it’s a social media site. They have different rules. Remember reddit is not blocked.
Do I misunderstand how federation works, or should a block like that not do anything unless your home instance is hosted in that particular country? The instances communicate with each other, not directly with the users. It’s similar to viewing blocked content through a VPN.
You understand it correctly. The problem is i can’t see anything other than the text of their posts/comments. Posts with images, i wouldn’t be able to see the image.
Instances have a choice to enable a new Lemmy feature that will proxy all images through the local instance. Whilst your instance may not do that today it may do in the future. Or you could move to an instance that has this enabled. I don’t know how to list instances with it enabled but it should be obvious by the URL used by images when viewed from an instance.
Ah, right. Media is still hosted on its instance. Didn’t consider that. Bummer :/
Yes, but images and other files are hosted on the instance to which the community belongs, so any pictures embedded in posts will not be visible.
Change the title from “they” to “Saudi Arabia”.
Done
I didn’t know Saudi can block fediverse instances
A lot of websites are blocked here.
Porn (60,000 BLOCKED PORN SITES!), alcohol/drug stores, Gay sites (from blogs to forums, anything), anti islam websites like wikiislam, and just non-muslim religious shit in general. we have a lot of banned christian sites. And news sites like middleeasteye.net
VPNs + tor is also banned too.
For some reason, israel.com + idf.il are also blocked. weird considering saudi-israel’s relationship.
Thats even worse then i Live(Which most of the stuff are blocked are Vpns,Porn sites and some lgbtq sites i am pretty sure btw am not in saudi am living in a country bordering it)
Tor isnt blocked hereOh, are you in the UAE or Qatar? Saudi arabia has the most strict censorship in the middle east, i think.
And يا هلا, دحين متأكد في على أقل 4 عرب على ليمي :)
Am living in qatar and am from Syria so it counts am Arab (am literate at the language tho)
Proton works in China if you set the protocol to “stealth” in the setting, maybe that works for Saudi as well?
Proton works in China if you set the protocol to “stealth” in the setting
With or without alternative routing?
Without.
Wait so the “great firewall” doesn’t block Proton VPN IP addresses? That’s interesting.
They don’t blacklist IP addresses generally, though some are certainly blocked. But normally they run deep packet inspections and block traffic that is identified as VPN traffic based on certain header data. That’s what makes the firewall “great” in the first place; many other countries simply block a range of IP addresses, and all it takes is for the VPN provider to switch the IP in their data warehouse. That’s trivial and takes seconds, and many providers rotate their IPs on a regular basis to prevent blocks in the first place.
Because of the deep packet inspection, OpenVPN and wireguard as protocols are entirely useless in China whatsoever, for example. Stealth mode AFAIK is using a modified wireguard protocol that obfuscates certain headers and thereby avoids detection (for now).
It works without stealth here, too. It’s a little slow, tho. granted, i am using the free version.
Ah ok, I’ve got the paid version. If you happen to be or know a student, they offer a 50% discount through studentbeans.com, only $2.50 a month.
Good advice, thank you :)
Weird, so did I.
domains don’t really block for me. I find I have to do each community individually. Annoying really since usually its a domain where for some reason the language preference is not working. anyway I get it was a joke but it made me want to comment as I wish domain blocking did work.
Saudi would take a hacksaw to them if they could
MBS’s wet dream every night.
Because trans content is against god. Or something like that.
What’s 196?
Except in iran, they love 'em!
As for 196, !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
