[liberationtech] Iranian are bypass the Twitter censorship and sanction by their mobile phones

[John Adams]

This series of posts conflicts about three different problems. It's
hard to tell what you're having an issue with: Government censorship,
lack of SMS, or 2-factor in the places.

>From what I know:

1. If any censorship of Twitter is going on, it's Iran, and not
Twitter that is censoring the communications. If the telcos are
blocking messages from Twitter's SMS source, it's the telcos.

2. It's possible Twitter doesn't have a business relationship with any
SMS carriers in the country, so that can break phone verification. You
can still download the client on ios or android and use the code
generation in the client to verify a device, if Twitter is reachable
across the Internet from Iran.

3. Who blocked this "Trick" of modifying the page with +98? The page
is completely in SSL, so if that change isn't working anymore then
most likely,  Twitter modified the page.

4. "I wonder if there's a way to get Twitter to remove the restriction
for users based in Iran." --  This is a problem that the Iranian
government needs to solve, not Twitter.

It's easier to figure out how to fix these things when you're clear in
the way that you express the problem.

-j


On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 9:44 AM, Griffin Boyce <griffin at cryptolab.net> wrote:
>   I wonder if Twitter restricts accounts to one per phone number. Phone
> verification is readily bypassed with something like twilio, but only the
> *most* advanced users would be able to pull this off.  It would be worth
> setting up an app to allow Iranian users to bypass it semi-automatically,
> but spambots and abusers would *decimate* it.
>
>   I wonder if there's a way to get Twitter to remove the restriction for
> users based in Iran. There's not really a good reason for it in the first
> place =/
>
> ~Griffin
>
> Nariman Gharib wrote:
>>
>> no it doesn't. they blocked this 'trick' and also many Iranian users
>> can't register to Twitter anymore because it require phone
>> verification on sign-up page.
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 5:11 PM, Kate Krauss <katie at critpath.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Does this still work?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Katie
>>>
>>> On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 5:34 PM, Nariman Gharib
>>> <nariman.gh at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>> Basically as you knew Iran is not on the country list of Twitter.
>>>> I've reached to Twitter and they know about this issue.
>>>>
>>>> Iranians are gets very active on Twitter after 2009 Pres.Election
>>>> till now and the numbers of the users all of the time are growing.
>>>> It's sad we see Twitter hasn't Iran on the list while Google and
>>>> other networks are supporting Iran's telephone numbers for give
>>>> the users the option to enable the 2step verification.
>>>>
>>>> so today I wrote an article on my blog and teach iranians how they
>>>> can active their twitter telephone number(SMS service and active
>>>> their 2step verification) from inside iran.
>>>> https://twitter.com/ListenToUs/status/497374522426015744 [1]
>>>>
>>>> how: actually when you are going to submit a number of twitter
>>>> website, with Inspect element on chrome you can add +98 on the
>>>> form and write your in the telephone number field and twitter will
>>>> send you a text message and everything is going to successful.
>>>>
>>>> and many iranians are now have twitter verification on their
>>>> phones and some of them like this man:
>>>> https://twitter.com/ziarlarimi/status/497484191613726720 [2]
>>>> texting from IRAN without using any circumvention tools.
>>>>
>>>> I hope twitter will decide to add Iran to the 'INTERFACE' of the
>>>> website,because on the backend everything is fine.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>> Nariman
>
>
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