[liberationtech] Many VPNs and Psiphon are currently blocked in Iran right now

[Nathan of Guardian]

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On 02/21/2014 09:54 PM, Nima Fatemi wrote:
> Nariman Gharib:
>>> so if anybody can help me to tell me which these tools in below
>>> are safe it would be great.
> I've double checked that Tor works just fine in Iran. This is for
> both vanilla (normal Tor Browser Bundle) and Pluggable Transports
> Bundle (including but not limited to obfsproxy).
> 
> Android users can use Orbot to access Tor network.
> 
> I believe we have the necessary tools, what we certainly need here
> is to educate ppl on how to use it safely.

Yes, my question is why Nariman didn't have Orbot on his list in the
first place? Perhaps people don't consider Tor to be a VPN, or don't
know it is available on Android?

- From the Tor metrics site (and as Nima said), there seems to be about
25,000 active Tor sessions per day from Iran, via direct access (not
using a bridge):
https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay-country&start=2013-11-24&end=2014-02-22&country=ir&events=off#userstats-relay-country

We receive many emails each day from users in Iran, and it is
definitely working for a good number of them. I know that with Google
Play Store, Iranian users can search for Orbot, but when they try to
download it, it is blocked with a 403 Forbidden error by a filter on
the Iranian side. We do however offer direct downloads of our software
(see the support link below)

Maybe we need to create a version of this tutorial that can be
published in Farsi on a site people visit?

https://guardianproject.info/howto/browsefreely/

We've also recently created a simple support message that could be
sent out, to help people debug issues they might be having access
downloads, configuring the software and so on:

https://dev.guardianproject.info/projects/support/wiki/Orbot_Auto_Response

As for the other solutions, the only one that looks trustworthy is
Shadowsocks, though it is just a SOCK5 proxy system, which means it is
limited to the amount of proxy server IPs you can setup and host.

+n



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