Censorship in Iran

Interesting:

Censorship comes along with traces of governments ALWAYS!

In many contries allover the world, governments tend to block their citizens to access some certain domains/ips across the internet. Some say “It’s there to keep culture and moral healthy!”. They block pornographies and so. Even in US we can find certain domains which are blocked and cannot be accessed like those which contain CP or wild anti-humanism contents.

But in Iran (and most other countries) that’s not the case!

They block many things. We cannot visit medias like BBC, FoxNews, VOA, social-medias like Twitter, Facebook, messangers like Telegram, WeChat, Kik, SnapChat, services like YouTube, you may not believe, but even some subdomains of sourceforge!

Why? Because it is how the totalitarian government can live. Though they sell VPNs and proxies, they spy on their people and they eliminate unwanted elements of the society way easily. You may never find out what happened to your friend who you just visited few days ago!

The filtering/cyber censorship, is a really profitable industry! For both, the government AND non-governmental companies, as they get paid much more than a typical IT company here!

Sometimes you see they place heavy filtering on some services, e.g Telegram, to promote their own service! Sometimes they say fancy things about a service like “It is Israelian!”. I mean, so what? Haven’t you used Israelian weapons during war vs. Iraq (1980-1988)? It wasn’t a thing then, but now it is!

Sometimes they break SSL/TLS! I recently saw similar thing, Kazakhstan intercepting HTTPS Traffic, officially MITM their citizens!

Ok, what is affecting me, as a dev? You know, their systems are not perfect. Sometimes you come up with losing access to some must-have services, like GitHub! Why? Because the filtering program has droped the connections to GitHub because of accident/misconfigs! Sometimes you come up with totally broken SSL handshakes! Sometimes SSL handshakes can take long forever and break at the end! Sometimes CloudFlare resists to serve due to broken TCP packets!