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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Hey at least Lemmy is becoming popular enough for the authorities to block us.
Can’t have shit in Saudi, not even Lemmy 😤
KSA and China are like low hanging fruit, it doesn’t take much to get blocked there…
Wake me up when OECD countries start blocking us
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 visitor, but they can do what they please to “threats” and dissidents.
Why would you ever visit that shithole of a country?
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 😅
If old white US southerners are casually racist, than the average gulf Arab is a competitive racist. Especially with Jews 😂
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.
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.
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.
Use Tor if you can, and people outside of these restrictive countries can help by running Snowflake in their regular browser.
Love tor, it’s a lifesaver (literally :) ) and thank you for the tip!
Installed Snowflake, thanks for the heads-up. Pretty simple way to try to be a little helpful. Was like two clicks.
geoblocked
“Geoblocking” would mean that it’s blahaj who don’t want saudis on their instance
Damn 😔
yeah that was my bad, sorry
texas will probably block us next.
I wish this was a joke but these days I wouldn’t put it past them. I don’t think it would hold up terribly well since the US doesn’t have any form of advanced censorship.
With the current laws on the books, Texas could probably sue Lemmy instances because they contain pornographic content and they don’t verify users’ identity.
Aren’t most Lemmy instances ran in Europe, anyway? At most they’ll just block them, right?
Sorry to hear that, hopefully it will turn out all right for trans people in the US.
My fuckers blocked catbox.moe, most western news sites and slowed down youtube traffic, but lemmy still flies under radar thankfully. I wish you still have your ways to choose what content you want to consume.
Tor with Snow flakes is probably what you want.
You could even use Tails to avoid leaving a trace.
That sounds worse, what country are you living in? Sorry to hear it. And thanks for the wishes :)
The Motherland, of course. I was born into her teenage phase of 90\00s and now I see her rapidly becoming one young and salty widow (:
Oh dear, hearing anything about russia almost makes me proud to a saudi :).
Through our suffering, we are brothers 😂
“None of us are free until all of us are free”
We see you.
Hell yeah. We a cockroaches in their kitchen, never surrender and always persist whatever they like us or not 😉
How’s life for you besides internet censorship, if you don’t mind me asking. I’m just curious. Good luck out there!
Thank you.
For me, it’s edging on absurdity and feeling like I’m the one who feel like we are going insane, but luckily for me I found my close knit circle of friends who share that feeling and I myself adapted to see everything through some lense of satire. Even though I live in it.
What still hurts tho is how my relatives and people around are so uninformed and hostile to everything ukrainian or just european, even if they talk about relatives there, and then they are just like ‘why they don’t like us’ lol. Yeah, like, no reason. And then they order IKEA-like furniture for their flats because it’s of european quality!
My sanity is saved by my partner, my friends and my still intact trust in people, even if they are dumb af.
I appreciate you sharing and getting to read about your experience. I really wish you, your friends, and loved ones luck. Do your best to get through it and hopefully someday things will change for the better. My fingers and crossed for you.
Same here. Only instead of partner and family, it’s the internet. They’re mad, too. It really makes you feel like you are the only one sane in the whole world, and people on the internet don’t even feel real, like they come from a fantasy. And i get the racism, too :/ But for us it’s towards Jews. Apparently the YAHOOD changed some musical cord to mind control the whole world, according to my old substitute teacher, in a completely unrelated rant.
I constantly feel like i’m at the edge of my sanity, but what could be done? Patience, i guess.
Stay safe, and i hope you can get out happily.
Stay safe out there
Any interest in Briar? I never had a use for it in the US but it is very powerful in the sense that it is designed to be highly resistant to state attacks. It works with or without access to the public internet.
It sucks, but it’s also one positive thing about the Fediverse - if Lemmy was a central platform, it would be completely gone for you now.
Yeah, thank god. I’m more baffled on why fucking saudi arabia would care about a tiny trans-ran instance on a niche software. must’ve been a slow day there, i guess.
youre kidding right. one of the most oppressive shitty, religion-based garbage of a country that subjugates 50% of its population and you wonder why its acting shitty?
I’m more suprised at the fact that they blocked such a small website, but i guess they really leave nothing left behind. I gotta be more careful on lemmy if that’s the case.
And i know KSA is shitty, i really do, but i can’t do shit about it. I’m not suprised they’d block a trans instance, just such a small one.
its what happens when horrible people have money to burn
Only a small percentage of saudi arabia live luxuriously, guess who’s most of them? (Hint: they’re a royal family) meanwhile, i’ve seen homeless people, starved to the bone (literally), without a single piece of clothing, sitting in the sweltering heat.
yep. evil people with way too much money
You are very naive, and should probably be a lot more careful when in Saudi Arabia.
That’s the thing, I thought Lemmy was too niche to be known about by the gov. I was wrong. I should cool it on the anti saud, pro republic stuff, this can get me in serious trouble.
Ye, this shit is no joke if you’re actually inside the Kingdom! Exercise tight OpSec please!
I ought to. Do you know any general tips, or places for me to ask about making my social media presence as secure as possible?
https://libcom.org/article/infosec-101-preventing-doxxing
Other than that, I would suggest always using proxies or VPNs when accessing fediverse services from your location.
Good info, thank you.
Do a search on yourself - try to find out your real identity based on information online, and do it as thoroughly as if you were searching for your worst enemy.
If you can find who you are yourself, chances are they will.
Make sure you don’t have anything “hairy” tied to an email with an email address you’d use for anything uncompromising. E.g. keep the email you use to login on Lemmy and the email you use to login on netflix separate.
Use 2 factor authentication and a password manager. Treat your password leaks seriously and consider any leaked accounts burnt - assume the details you had in there are now known.
Avoid using your real name on anything you can.
Best wishes. Take care my friend!
I was trying to tell my friend why having a picture of himself, and his real name on his instagram account was a bad idea (like using insta in general), if you google his name his account is the first result. The only thing with my real name on it is a github and email. I’m lucky, my name is common and there is a athlete with the same name, which took all the seo
Additional advice from a cybersecurity professional that’s good for you and anyone else reading: under no circumstances should you use SMS 2FA if there’s another option.
Yes, having another app sucks (google/Microsoft have pretty universal apps if they’re supported) but it’s trivially easy for an even slightly well funded and motivated attacker to redirect your texts/phone calls so it’s well worth the pain.
Hope this helps!
Be more careful, and best of luck to you.
I’m a way that’s a downside too, it’s now easier for shit regimes to block content they disagree with, without blocking the larger services. Less people will be disrupted by it, so less people will care. See: blocking Facebook,YouTube or WhatsApp vs. blocking a single activist site.
Federated content gets around that though.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Thank god for VPNs though.
Saudi would take a hacksaw to them if they could
MBS’s wet dream every night.
Sometimes these blocks only happen at the DNS level. Consider switching to cloudflare (https://1.1.1.1/)
Same thing on cloudflare. That’s a full national ban, alright. Unfortunately there’s no way to bypass without a VPN, and VPNs are quite slow for me.
Have you tried DNS over HTTPS?
What’s your OS? I don’t know a ton about Saudi Arabia censorship but I would start by eliminating any state provided certificate since that’s how one would man in the middle https.
Honestly Tor is probably the best option. Tor can effectively bypass censorship and can even spoof traffic to hide the fact that you are using Tor.
The other option is OpenVPN on port 443
I use it as my default. My OS is windows 11. Saudi censorship is directly from the ISP, unless you’re using a VPN or a proxy, no way around it. I tolerate using VPNs and tor, but it’s still frustrating. Hence, the post on mildlyinfuriating :)
I would boot from a Tails USB instead of installing everything to your main OS
As someone from a jurisdiction with some of the most sophisticated VPN blocking technologies (Russia), consider hosting your own VPN - it can be as easy as firing up a VPS anywhere and inserting one string, like with Outline for example.
Be really careful since you could easily be arrested for bypassing censorship.
Ideally you want to have a very little evidence against you. Spending money abroad to bypass censorship is highly suspicion behavior. Financial transactions are heavily tracked plus the state can see that you are connecting to one single IP all the time.
The best option would be to use Tor with snowflakes. I like many others in countries with low censorship run the extension to help people in places like Russia. You can download Tails to a USB so that it is hard to trace and doesn’t leave behind to much evidence. The thing to keep in mind is that Tails in itself is highly suspicious. I would spend time reading stuff from the BBC and non Russian Wikipedia.
Sorry that your country is slowly turning into China.
Thanks for the advice (And my condolences for being in russia, too 😔). I’ve been thinking of setting up a VPN on my router, but the performance be too costly. We’ll see how it goes, i guess.
My condolences.
They fucking geoblocked blahaj.zone.
I suppose THEY is Saudi Arabia.
How can you be surprised about that? Saudi Arabia is a Sharia law country. An absolute shit stain of a country in many more ways than this.
You can get a death penalty for posting something against Sharia Law on any site. Actively using Lemmy could be enough to see you in jail.MBS said no more 196
???
The last line was a joke. Anyways yes it is about Saudi Arabia, and I’m no stranger to how shitty they are. I’m surprised that such a niche forum could be targeted, websites about trans stuff get banned all the time.
I knew this’d happen eventually, I just didn’t know when.
I’m surprised that such a niche forum could be targeted,
If you can find it, authorities can too. Sounds like you are far from careful enough, considering where you are.
I bet there’s some user from there, not a stranger to reddit and it’s alternatives, that happened to stumble upon it and report it.
Or the government uses web indexes to find sites that include LGBTQ+ content and blocks them automatically.
Saudi admins aren’t stupud, but they won’t like to work that hard I believe. Reports is how it’s usualy triggered in nations like these.
Saudi Arabia is shit, but anyone who uses the term Sharia law is a dolt.
Why? it’s an actual term. شريعة
Law law? That’s what it means.
Law is قانون. Sharia is شريعة. One is just law, the other is religious law.
Thanks for the clarification. ✌️ I’m the dolt.
I’m guessing it might be thought of like when people say ‘ATM machine’. If Sharia where to be translated as ‘religious law’ then it would stand to reason that Sharia law could be translated as ‘religious law law’.
Just some speculation on it though, I don’t speak a bit of any language in the region.
I do, in arabic we just say “sharia” but in english we say “sharia law”. You are correct that just saying “sharia” is grammatically correct, but i don’t really think it matters too much. In arabic, sharia is seen as distinct from law, but in english, it is seen a type of law, that’s why [i think] people say “sharia law” instead of just sharia.
So something similar to some of the Catholic practices about meat during lent, not a true law, but a rule dictated by the church. It just happens that if the church and state are functionally one entity, as is my impression for a lot of countries in that region, then it may as well be considered law.
Fairly accurate?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
