Ever since Qods Day, we are having difficulties with internet connections, mostly because the proxy services are either unstable or not working at all. I can’t say if this is affecting everyone, but people I’ve checked with are all complaining. The two better options we had were VPN and TOR, simply because we know how they work and they are better for not leaving footprints. VPN connections are still iffy, slow and they drop frequently. TOR has been crippled. It seems like the government has finally blocked the public relays and connections are reset while reaching them from here. We have tried to use private bridges in order to bypass the filtering, but it is a trying battle. The bridges we receive from the TOR network are either already blocked, or are quickly identified. In the past ten days I have not managed to connect through the bridges more than twice or three times, and that was early last week. Perhaps something more sinister is at work, although it’s hard to say what since https connections are fine.
Freegate, another service used commonly in Iran has limited its shareware service to certain sites claiming that their traffic levels have risen dramatically recently. I know it’s shareware but an attempt to connect to Google – for heaven’s sake – returns this:
Ultrasurf is accessible but dodgy most of the time as well. It was down for most people I checked with for the better half of Saturday. At normal times, when connections are established they drop incessantly which may be due to high traffic as many have no choice but to switch to Ultrasurf. Some days are better than others. While surfing I find myself constantly refreshing and cursing.
Other than this, normal surfing is fine; we just can’t get to a few million blocked websites. All this was to say posting here is a pain, and will probably be erratic until I find something stable.
Tags: internet, internet filtering