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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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 :)
Well its Saudi Arabia after all. It isn’t exactly known for being all that high on the freedom index.
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 :/
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 play 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.
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.
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
Hey at least Lemmy is becoming popular enough for the authorities to block us.
The good thing about Lemmy is that due to its distributed and federated nature, it can’t be fully blocked. You can just use a different instance and see all the same content (assuming instancea that don’t block the other instances).
Couldnt you just copy the list of instances lemmy.world or a similarly large instance federates with (its in the footer), or grab a the list of Lemmy instances from e.g fedidb.org to block?
I feel that would block most of the network, and doubt there would be much value left in joining whatever unconnected instances left.
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
Can’t have shit in Saudi, not even Lemmy 😤
Blocked. They fucking geoblocked blahaj.zone.
Geoblocked for whom?
Saudi arabians.
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.
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 😂
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 😂
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.
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.
Same here. Only instead of partner and family, it’s the internet. They’re mad, too. It really feels 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.
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.
“None of us are free until all of us are free”
We see you.
Saudi would take a hacksaw to them if they could
MBS’s wet dream every night.
You should still be able to see the blåhaj content on your Lemmy instance. If not it’s time to switch instances.
I know, but now i’d have to turn on a vpn to understand the post and see the image. I still think it’s better than completely being isolated from them, but it’s still a nuisance :/
You can sign up on a Lemmy instance that runs the full image proxy.
Is there some list where you can see which instances have this feature?
Ah, damn. Didn’t think of the images.
I quickly threw together a script to check which other Fediverse instances are blocked in Saudi Arabia by using Globalping. I know it’s horrible, but it works so far. Will share the results once it’s finished running. I’ll probably also rewrite the script later.
I got the list of instances from lemmy.world:
curl -s https://lemmy.world/instances | rg -o 'href="([^"]+)"' | rg -o 'https?://[^"]+' > instances.txt#!/usr/bin/env fish set INSTANCES "./instances.txt" set OUTPUT_FILE "./output.txt" set COUNTRY "saudi arabia" for instance in (cat $INSTANCES) if globalping http $instance from $COUNTRY --method GET --limit 3 | rg 'Blocked URL' 2&>1 echo "Blocked: $instance" >> blocked.txt end endI’m running
tail -f blocked.txtin another terminal to monitor the results in real time.(Yeah I know the script sucks. Don’t judge me, I use fish and prefer its syntax over bash. I also use ripgrep, because I like it.)
I can run it for you if you want. I’ll post the results here
It’ll be faster for me since I’m in the country itself
EDIT: This won’t work. You can “ping” blahaj successfully, but only because it redirects to a gov page, and not an error. I’ll have to revise the script because of that.
Globalping has an HTTP method, which I use in the script:
globalping http $instance from $COUNTRYI then use ripgrep to check if the HTTP response contains the string “Blocked URL”, as you can see in the script:
| rg 'Blocked URL'The if condition uses the exit code from ripgrep to add
$instancefrom theforloop to theblocked.txtfile.Ah, it works for me now. I just ran it with ping instead of globalping, since i had no need to run it with that. And the script didn’t work after i did that, i’m not great at shell-scripting.
I made a modification that prints the status, but it’s painfully slow to check each site.
What do you use now? Curl? wget?
Globalping, just as you wrote it with the limit being 1
That should work.
I started working on a rewritten version in Rust that uses the REST API instead of the CLI tool. Once it’s done, it should be a lot faster, since it can make multiple requests simultaneously. I also plan to use this for other stuff in other countries.
texas will probably block us next.
The book bans are currently practice before they start banning more resources such as Wikipedia.
Sorry to hear that, hopefully it will turn out all right for trans people in the US.
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?
Dunno, they’d probably have a hard time suing European instances, but they can’t outright block, as that would be unconstitutional. U.S. states have recently been using lawsuits to get around constitutionality. I.e. Texas also has a “bounty” law, where if you know a woman went out of state to get an abortion, you can report it, and the state will sue them and give you $10,000. I think another state has a similar law for if you see a trans person using a restroom that doesn’t match the genitalia they were born with.
you see a trans person using a restroom that doesn’t match the genitalia
lmao what??? how would you even know about that?
Hmm. Looks like that was in Texas too. https://truthout.org/articles/a-city-in-texas-just-put-10000-bounties-on-trans-people-using-the-bathroom/, and they’re going to pass quite a few more bounty laws yhis year: https://prismreports.org/2025/01/08/bounty-laws-texas-trans-rights-abortion/
They must have thought that admin defending a troll was the last straw as well.
Change the title from “they” to “Saudi Arabia”.
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.
My condolences.
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 :)
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.
geoblocked
“Geoblocking” would mean that it’s blahaj who don’t want saudis on their instance
Damn 😔
yeah that was my bad, sorry
Please don’t use so many swear words, as they might execute you.
I’m not sure if this is a joke or not, but don’t worry, there’s no law against it, and it’s normal.
I’m sorry, I should have used “/s”. It was a dark sarcastic joke, because in that region people can get the death sentence for vague things like sorcery, witchcraft and also (from the perspective of my region) totaly harmless things like homosexuality.
Ohhh, sorry 🤦♂️ But yes, we take “witchcraft” very seriously here for some reason. (Also with gay people, but at least gay people are real)
Who’s deciding whether someone is sufficiently pious or not?
Apologies, I forgot to mention some points:
They don’t have to be pious, I misremembered it. They must all be male, and they can only testify for non rape cases. Rape has different jurisdictions, but you are still severely punished by not being able to prove you were raped.
Rape jurisdiction is a blur in the Sharia, but they accept pregnancies, bruises and word of mouth as proof. However the problem is whether they accept it or not.
PS: all of that doesn’t include marital rape, it’s legal here.
Thanks for the info!!!
here’s another fun fact, did you know you can get stoned to death for adultery, even if you’re straight? Even if you’re raped, you need 4 pious people as witnesses. If you cannot find them, you will be punished
Ain’t religious government so fun?!
