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 😔
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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
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.
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. @[email protected] 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:
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 :)
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.
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)
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.
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 😂
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.
Saudi would take a hacksaw to them if they could
MBS’s wet dream every night.
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.
Ah, OK. That makes more sense. Especially as it seems to be happening in Saudi Arabia.
Oops, i thought they were the same thing.
Saudi arabians.
I blocked blahaj.zone voluntarily. Same as the tankie-zone.
There is a difference between state censorship and preference. One is good, the other is a symptom of corruption.
I can see that. How about not living in a country with laws like that? It is always easy to complain, but what is it that you have done so far?
hateful lmao “have you considered the obvious?”
my condolences fxomt, earmuff at dbzero doesn’t think you’re trying hard enough from their cozy armchair
And how would you even remotely know, what I have been through. Again, it is easy to complain.
I’m trying, hopefully one day i can.
Getting citizenship (particularly in the EU, and any country for that matter) is insanely hard, and that’s just the citizenship (even asylum is turned down often). You need a stable job in that country, a place to live, and above average skills to prove your worth. And you have to leave everything behind, including your family since it would be dangerous to go back. Can’t forget people will never truly accept you as your own, and see you as an immigrant, never as a citizen.
And Saudi Arabia is well known to spy and even harm dissidents, even if outside the country.
not lemmy.blahaj.zone?
If they really blocked
lemmy.blahaj.zone, they’re not going to see your comment, but everyone else will, so we can make fun of them without them knowing it.hmm interesting
Pro tip: Don’t “click here”!
man that page is so fucking annoying, everything i try to open anything it’s just blocked. All sites critical of islam/saudi/sauds, and alcohol/porn/and anything that they hate. Even tor and vpns are blocked, i need to use a mirror to get them, which may not always be safe (atleast for the VPN, tor has trusted mirrors)
ngl i think of running a vpn on my router, literally just not to see that fucking page anymore (and security too, ofc :) )
I’m not aware of how exactly blocking works there, but if it’s similar to China and Russia, consider subscribing to a VPN provider that supports stealth proxies (e.g. Shadowsocks or VLESS); that’s harder to block.
dw, proton works just fine for me :) though i have to jump through hoops to get it installed, since they blocked the official website too, but i just use a package manager to get it for me as a proxy
I’ll have to check out stealth proxies out though, thank you! :D
Use Tor snowflakes. They are very resistant to censorship and many of us in the western world run the extension so that you can get access to accurate information.
Just as a heads-up: What you just wrote is an admission of a crime in SA. Everything you post on the fediverse is public. And you now know they’re aware of Lemmy.
I hope you are absolutely sure whatever you’re using to hide your identity is bomb-proof, and that you’ve never posted any identifying info under this account or any other one with the same username.Edit: I found enough info about you in 10 minutes to dox you if I had access to SA government resources (birthday, -year, and -country, area in SA you currently live in, and very niche knowledge which at your age is likely what you’re currently studying at a SA university). Be more careful, Tor doesn’t do shit if you dox yourself.
In turkey, you don’t even need to bein the government to have access! They give out their private databases for confidential citizen data out like it’s Christmas and they’re a charity for orphaned kids with leukemia!
Simply put, never reveal anything if you’re a Turk, I can be doxxed from revealing where I even lived or which day my birthday is
So, I actually lie! I lie about my real name, where I’m born and my age and birth date
deleted by creator
it’s been an hour
thanks 👍
