p3x.deSaudi Arabia blocked blahaj.zone
fxomt@lemm.ee
edited
lemm.ee/pictrs/image/d59d8680-37b7-4f97-ade6-46…
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 😔
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.
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?
Be more careful, and best of luck to you.
I guess watch out for shit that can get you doxxed since there are probably like 3 Saudi Arabians tops in the thread side of the Fediverse.
There are only two Arabs I know of here, and none of them are Saudi. Must be a lurker..
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.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Thank god for VPNs though.
Federated content gets around that though.
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.
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.
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
"Geoblocking" would mean that it's blahaj who don't want saudis on their instance
Damn 😔
yeah that was my bad, sorry
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.
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npg3cBJusnA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgxUsdxl0ak
I set up a bridge on my home network. I'll put the relay on my Hetzner VPS.
Great job!
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.
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?
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 :)
Where did you choose to be born?
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
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.
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.
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-06-07_-Lemmy_Release_v0.19.4-_Image_Proxying_and_Federation_improvements
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
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
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.
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!
“None of us are free until all of us are free”
We see you.
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 :) )
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
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it's been an hour
thanks 👍
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.
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
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 :/
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.
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.
Probably just an automated list of blocking then. At least I would assume theres block lists floating around at those levels
Saudi would take a hacksaw to them if they could
MBS's wet dream every night.
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
Easier said than done. At least, for the second one.
What are the obstacles in the way of leaving?
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.
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.
The next four years will likely make things more and more difficult for anyone trying to immigrate to the US, asylum or otherwise.
If I may ask, how was their experience applying for asylum? And what do they think of the US as a place to live?
the government also thretens people who use vpn with jail and heavy fines
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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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
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.
So basically like every other south asian school prior to 2015
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)
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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 😂
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 😔
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 😂
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 🤮
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?
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.
lmao what??? how would you even know about that?
Sorry to hear that, hopefully it will turn out all right for trans people in the US.
The book bans are currently practice before they start banning more resources such as Wikipedia.
They can never fully ban knowledge, no matter how hard they try :)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, i've heard of it. But the only instance i know with it is lemmy.ml and, well. It's lemmy.ml. Besides, i like lemm.ee, if i have to use a VPN for it, i guess i have to.
But thank you for the advice!
Ah, right. Media is still hosted on its instance. Didn't consider that. Bummer :/
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 here
Oh, 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)
same vibe as queer.af
Why would someone use an Afghanistan TLD for that, given it's illegal to be LGBTQ there.
Why? Because "queer af" is funny as a domain, and people sometimes don't realize that tlds can be under certain jurisdictions
It also wasn't a problem until governments changed
also the majority of people don't know TLDs are country based
This makes me feel old
Old.af
lmao, what's with islamists and gay sites??
The Qur'an?
It's not like they really care about it anyway.
I also don't remember a verse in the quran mentioning hacking a man then dissolving his corpse in acid, must be in surat al-baqarah...
Proton works in China if you set the protocol to "stealth" in the setting, maybe that works for Saudi as well?
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 :)
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 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.
They must have thought that admin defending a troll was the last straw as well.
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.
???
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.
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.
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). Some are beheaded, others are crucified.
Edit: 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?!
I forgot to mention, marital rape doesn't count, it's legal :/
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for your compassionate answer and don't worry, I am aware of Tor and by extension Tails/Whonix/Qubes. Massive kudos for bridging! It really makes the difference - Tor access was pretty poor at times.
Also, as things stand, using a VPN is not illegal inside Russia, despite all the pressure - there goes the suspicion that the government itself uses VPNs heavily, and there are several records of local governments actually adding VPNs to official purchases (lol).
As for payments, some of the VPSes accept anonymous crypto like Monero, and some of the foreign ones accept ruble payments, although this is obviously more reckless.
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.
Change the title from "they" to "Saudi Arabia".
Done
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.
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