HN user

sepent

77 karma
Posts5
Comments22
View on HN

I live in Iran and I am lucky enough to have a connected link right now, but this is the last link among the others I lost in the previous hours. I was wondering is there any stable solution like satellite internet or something without direct affiliation with government for people like me, desperate enough to ask questions like this.

I used the same method to see what is the blocking mechanism in Iran. I tried to connect to www.bbc.com which is blocked in Iran.

The DNS injection is obviously in place. But something strange happened when I checked the SNI filtering. The curl command stopped at "TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS alert, Client hello (1)" and never exited when I tried to connect to www.bbc.com but with a --connect-to that is not blocked. Nothing strange until now. If SNI blocking is in place, they probably drop all the remaining packets of the connection. The strange thing is that when I try the opposite test and I connect to www.kernel.org (not blocked in Iran, too!) but with www.bbc.com SNI it still stops at TLS client hello.

First I thought they blocked the IP address, but I was able to connect to 212.58.244.210 (the IP address of www.bbc.com) on port 443 with telnet command. So, is Iran's regime using some other blocking mechanism that I'm not aware of? Or am I doing some kind of mistake?

"HTTPS does not provide meaningful privacy for obtaining packages. As an eavesdropper can usually see which hosts you are contacting, if you connect to your distribution's mirror network it would be fairly obvious that you are downloading updates."

It is a dangerous mistake to decide what kind of privacy people need. Privacy should be absolute and without conditions.

What if you live in Iran? Some Ubuntu packages are already inaccessible due to government's pornography keywords censorship. E.g. I can't download "libjs-hooker" from this http link http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/n/node-hooker... from Iran. What if the government decides to censor the "tor" package?

I never use vim or emacs viper-mode on my machine. But I let other people to use my emacs viper-mode:

  vi()
  {
      emacs -nw --eval '(and (switch-to-buffer "foobar") (setq viper-mode t) (setq viper-inhibit-startup-message t) (setq viper-expert-level 1) (viper-mode))' "$@"
  }

  alias vim=vi
  alias vim.tiny=vi
  alias vim.basic=vi

I just finished reading this book yesterday. I am not an expert in refactoring but the book seems too old, although most advises could be still useful. Anyway, today I found a new book by the author: Brutal Refactoring: More Working Effectively with Legacy Code. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good review of the book on the Internet. But I think it could be more useful.

I did traceroute google.com/mail.google.com. nothing unusual happened:

[1-7 are ISP routers]

8. 78.38.255.89

9. 78.38.245.17

10. 213.248.76.5

11. 80.91.248.94

12. 80.91.253.118

13. 213.155.130.243

14. 213.248.83.94

15. 72.14.238.232

16. 209.85.251.88

17. 209.85.255.234

18. 209.85.255.231

19. 64.233.175.98

I used mtr and the route to google is changing every several seconds, but I thinks it's normal.

All I know is that internet blocking happens in LCT [78.38.255.] or KAMYARAN [78.38.245.].

I can confirm it, too.

My brother works in a company that produces spying software for government. Days ago, he told me he himself has written several programs to spy on yahoo, hotmail and gmail but he thought they couldn't deploy the gmail program because of https. I guess, he should think again.

I am scared. My only hope was SSL and I can't trust that anymore?

Most blogspot bogs are not blocked in Iran. All of them are blocked. And wordpress blogs, too. Facebook, youtube, twitter, BBC, CNN, tinyurl, goo.gl, megaupload and thepiratebay are a few more examples. Moreover, having a satellite dish is against the law, just look at the pictures in this Persian website: http://www.asriran.com/fa/news/176720/%D8%AC%D9%85%D8%B9-%D8... But, in my opinion, these aren't the main problem. The main problem is internet bandwidth limit for home users, i.e. 128 KBit/s. Yeah, that's right: 128 KBit/s. I have a server in the US and bypassing their filtering system is not a problem for most Iranians but how could you watch a video in youtube with a 128 Kbit/s connection?