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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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. @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
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.
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.I tested this manually and it works as intended. The script could use some optimizations though. And if you intend on running the current version, you need to lower the limit of the globalping command from 3 to 1, otherwise you will run out of credits before all 8100 instances are checked. I will rewrite this to use a globalping auth token though.
Btw I also removed the
https://part from the instance list. Just opened it up in Vim, selected everything using V-Block mode and deleted it. I don’t know if that makes a difference, but I’m not sure if the Globalping command can take URLs, or if it only works with domains.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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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
Change the title from “they” to “Saudi Arabia”.
Done
They must have thought that admin defending a troll was the last straw as well.
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 😂
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.
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.
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 :)
Is it weird this makes me proud to be a blahaj user?
Like when a transphobic government starts hating, you know you’re doing something right.
I guess MBS didn’t like 196 😔
he doesn’t want citizens of the Kingdom to see how few upvotes his memes were getting
I bet he didn’t even post before leaving
MBS doesn’t rule 🤮
Dude was like
“Small community of queer people. Not on my watch”
what if innocent Saudis Arabians had no choice but to turn transgay on Lemmy??
When I was on blahaj zone, a pair of thigh highs and HRT appeared in front of me. The woke mind virus almost made me trans…
Thankfully, our benefactor, Lord and savior MBS protected us from 196, and those woke, non binary, trans, gay he-she-theys 🤮🤮🤮. God bless MBS and Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦 🇸🇦 🇸🇦 🦅 🦅 🦅
Ngl, I can actually imagine saying that. Not doing that of course, because he already did so 😂
Hey at least Lemmy is becoming popular enough for the authorities to block us.
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 😤
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.
Sure, but anyone can just spin up a new instance that federates with the large instances. For example, my instance is literally just me using it.
Also, if that were to happen, Lemmy could be modified to restrict it so that only admins could see that list.
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
If I were in Saudi Arabia I’d be using a VPN anyways.
Also, if I were in Saudi Arabia, I’d be trying to leave Saudi Arabia
the government also thretens people who use vpn with jail and heavy fines
Easier said than done. At least, for the second one.
What are the obstacles in the way of leaving?
Who’s giving you asylum exactly for “I’m from Saudi Arabia”? A refugee camp in North Africa if you’re lucky?
Believe it or not, it’s possible. If you’re gay, trans, atheist or a whistleblower you are eligible for asylum. But you’re right that just being born in Saudi isn’t a free ticket to Berlin.
The trick is actually presenting yourself and getting them to believe you though I’d bet.
I know a Saudi in the United States that got asylum because they are gay.
If I may ask, how was their experience applying for asylum? And what do they think of the US as a place to live?
I think they chose to request asylum in the US. They are part of the gay community here. They only provided a short, funny version of their asylum experience, claiming they told whoever that they are very gay, and we’re granted asylum.
Thanks, it seemed easy for them being a discriminated minority, hopefully I will have the same experience. Not gay, but other undisclosed stuff that makes me a minority in danger.
The next four years will likely make things more and more difficult for anyone trying to immigrate to the US, asylum or otherwise.
Getting citizenship is hard, (even asylum is turned down often). You need a stable job in that country, and above average skills to prove your worth. If not, you’ll be deported back.
You also need to stay in that country for [upto] 10 years.
And you have to leave everything behind, your culture, your family, and your friends. It would be too dangerous to go back. And they might not even accept you, immigration is brutal.
Even after you become a citizen, many 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 harass, spy on, and even kill dissidents. There was a scandal with twitter, where the Sauds bought up large amounts of stocks, then ordered 3,000 Saudi dissident’s private info. Even in other countries you aren’t safe.
And money. You need money. A shit ton of it.
Just my 2 cents but it’s better to be seen as an immigrant in the wide world than to be seen as a threat to the kingdom in SA. Most middle eastern immigrants in the US do very well as long as they respect the social fabric they integrate into.
True, but it’s still annoying how it’s a lose lose situation for me anyway. I’d rather be seen as abnormal than killed.
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Also, if I were in Saudi Arabia, I’d be trying to leave Saudi Arabia
Probably not, as long as you are not openly queer, you wont see any reason to leave co sidering the ridiculous amounts of perks you get, its not a 3rd world country or a backwater nation, it is a rich monarchial regime.
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Rich… But only to the royals/businessmen.
Most of us live normally if not a little worse off than the average westerners.
The only perk I have at all is healthcare. The west is basically better at everything other than that.
If you are a native regardless of royalty, dont you still get a lots of benefits and stuff like welfare? This all based on hearsay, the few whom i personally know that immigrated to work there have said so
Welfare such as healthcare, education, and shelter? Besides shelter (they claim they provide for the homeless, they lie) healthcare & education is free. I can’t complain about the healthcare, but i definitely can about the education: It’s so bad, it doesn’t even matter. Beatings are still practiced in schools, the textbooks are filled with propaganda of all kind, they are completely unsanitary and unfit for a healthy environment. They don’t even get school-paid lunches for the children.
And for shelter, i’ve seen homeless people completely naked, only covered by a blanket, sitting in the blistering heat, starved to the bone. It’s BS like everything else.
If i have to give away good healthcare for just not living in Saudi, i’d pay it twosome.
but i definitely can about the education: It’s so bad, it doesn’t even matter. Beatings are still practiced in schools, the textbooks are filled with propaganda of all kind, they are completely unsanitary and unfit for a healthy environment.
So basically like every other south asian school prior to 2015
And for shelter, i’ve seen homeless people completely naked, only covered by a blanket, sitting in the blistering heat, starved to the bone. It’s BS like everything else.
I know most countries try to hide their homeless population(even the goody-two-shoes countries like japan) butThis is the first time i have heard of this, how exactly do you become homeless in a welfare state? Its an easy process in a capitalist society but barring political dissenters (who are likely to be executed outright) what must go wrong that you find yourself on the streets.
Also i dont know if its okay to ask but are you a native or there due to circumstances (like a child of first generation immigrants or your parents are working in the country and you just happened to be there)
We’re a western asian country, but i’d say we have the opposite problem of other asian countries; they work too hard, we neglect our children. India is the worst of both worlds lmao
Homelessness is a problem here, unfortunately. We don’t have homeless shelters [at least in my city].
Here’s some news articles about homelessness: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200130-saudi-making-10000-saudis-homeless/
https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/saudi-arabia-women-girls-shelters-where-abused
https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/saudi/83000-homeless-children-roam-saudi-streets---study-1.171725
And I am a native. My family has been here for centuries, since the ottomans ruled the hijaz.
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Would those perks be extended to most people, or only to a certain subset of people (ie straight, male, religious)? Like, would a bisexual, atheist woman receive the same perks? I get the impression that a lot of people still wouldn’t feel accepted there.
I’m genuinely curious. Your comment prompted me to do a little research. I found that Saudi Arabia has been making strides toward women’s equality in the past few years. It’s doing a lot better than it had been even just six years ago! At the same time, this thread exists, so… I’m skeptical that Saudi Arabia would have enough benefits to outweigh the restrictions that someone like myself would have to live with.
The perks are mostly applicable if you are a native or a naturalized citizen, of course royalty are treated like royalty(if you are working there with sizeable qualifications in a government owned company you can expect more perks than say a skilless construction labor) and nobody is testing how religious you are, this isnt NK where you have to constantly look over your shoulder and count if you have publicly glorified the supreme leader or not, You can be atheist without declaring yourself as such, woman had less rights, but MBS is trying to soften his kingdoms image and its striving towards equality, internet censorship is easily circumventable.
This is all based on what people(who work and immigrated) whom i personally know have told me, but i dont know about closeted or openly queer people.
Faux-liberalisation, don’t believe MBS’s lies. It’s better under him, but he’s still a dog.
Even straight arab males don’t get the best treatment here, but it is the highest amount of priviledge a citizen can get (better than being a lesbian, atheist pakistani woman. Basically guaranteed death). You’d need to be a millionaire or a saudi royal to get the stereotypical gulf priviledge.
Thank you. As I said, I was skeptical. I’m pretty sure I’d hate living there.
I mean, tonight I’ll be going out to dinner with both my boyfriend and my girlfriend, as well as all my coworkers. Everybody knows my lifestyle - I can be open in public, with my two favorite people, and know I’m safe and accepted.
I can’t imagine a single perk the Saudi government can give me that would be better than that.
You can’t imagine, because there isn’t :/ Only healthcare is probably better than most countries here for free, but i’d rather be in debt than lose my life or at best, live like a slave.
Have a good date, btw :D
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