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 😔
Hey at least Lemmy is becoming popular enough for the authorities to block 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.
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
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.
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 government also thretens people who use vpn with jail and heavy fines
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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.
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.
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
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.
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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geoblocked
“Geoblocking” would mean that it’s blahaj who don’t want saudis on their instance
Damn 😔
yeah that was my bad, sorry
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:
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.
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 🤮
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 :)
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
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.
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
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.
texas will probably block us next.
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.
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.
yep. evil people with way too much money
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?
https://libcom.org/article/infosec-101-preventing-doxxing
Other than that, I would suggest always using proxies or VPNs when accessing fediverse services from your location.
Good info, thank you.
Do a search on yourself - try to find out your real identity based on information online, and do it as thoroughly as if you were searching for your worst enemy.
If you can find who you are yourself, chances are they will.
Make sure you don’t have anything “hairy” tied to an email with an email address you’d use for anything uncompromising. E.g. keep the email you use to login on Lemmy and the email you use to login on netflix separate.
Use 2 factor authentication and a password manager. Treat your password leaks seriously and consider any leaked accounts burnt - assume the details you had in there are now known.
Avoid using your real name on anything you can.
Best wishes. Take care my friend!
Additional advice from a cybersecurity professional that’s good for you and anyone else reading: under no circumstances should you use SMS 2FA if there’s another option.
Yes, having another app sucks (google/Microsoft have pretty universal apps if they’re supported) but it’s trivially easy for an even slightly well funded and motivated attacker to redirect your texts/phone calls so it’s well worth the pain.
Hope this helps!
I was trying to tell my friend why having a picture of himself, and his real name on his instagram account was a bad idea (like using insta in general), if you google his name his account is the first result. The only thing with my real name on it is a github and email. I’m lucky, my name is common and there is a athlete with the same name, which took all the seo
Not posting on Lemmy about how you disagree with their censorship of a Lemmy instance might be a good first step.
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…
There’s a few I’ve spoken to in the German speaking communities, but they live in Germany, so idk that that’s relevant to 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 👍
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
Saudi would take a hacksaw to them if they could
MBS’s wet dream every night.
They fucking geoblocked blahaj.zone.
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.MBS said no more 196
???
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.
I’m surprised that such a niche forum could be targeted,
If you can find it, authorities can too. Sounds like you are far from careful enough, considering where you are.
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.
Self-awareness is awesome.
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.
I do, in arabic we just say “sharia” but in english we say “sharia law”. You are correct that just saying “sharia” is grammatically correct, but i don’t really think it matters too much. In arabic, sharia is seen as distinct from law, but in english, it is seen a type of law, that’s why [i think] people say “sharia law” instead of just sharia.
So something similar to some of the Catholic practices about meat during lent, not a true law, but a rule dictated by the church. It just happens that if the church and state are functionally one entity, as is my impression for a lot of countries in that region, then it may as well be considered law.
Fairly accurate?
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.
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.
