As you probably have heard, there have been widespread protests going on inside Iran for the past week or so following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police.

Following the protests, the government has cut off or severely limited residential and especially mobile broadband access to the internet and people can only access websites and services hosted inside Iran. This has made connecting to VPNs with servers outside Iran, and Tor close to impossible. That being said, the servers inside Iranian data centers still have access to the outside world.

The government has also blocked Instagram and WhatsApp (the main channels of communication used by people inside Iran), and alternatives such as Telegram, Signal, etc are also blocked, halting communications to a crawl. People have to either call each other via GSM or send SMSs (which by the way is being monitored and messages containing keywords related to the protests don't even get delivered). As you can imagine, it's preventing people from coordinating the protests and strikes, and with the sattelite TVs being also heavily jammed, the only source of information accessible to most people is the government-led local TV channels which are distributing regime propaganda 24/7 and trying to scare people into submission.

We (a group of tech people inside Iran) have started using the servers inside Iranian data centers gain access to the Internet, and are setting up VPN servers and Tor bridges and giving the information to people we know. It's not scalable, and it's risky for us (the servers inside Iran can be traced back to us), but that's the only way we could think of to help. The technical details are published here:

https://github.com/InternetForIran/InternetForIran

We need help on multiple fronts:

- Please review and contribute to our repository on GitHub linked above. We need to improve the security and make deployment easier.

- The methods for setting up Tor bridges described in the repository were working up until 2 days ago, but have mostly stopped working and we haven't figured out why yet, maybe you can help?

- We have reports that V2Ray VMess and ShadowSocks are working inside Iran even at times when most other tools and protocols don't. We haven't been able to reliably deploy and test this (there are many configuration options and it's not clear which methods are working). Please create an issue or send a PR if you know how it works and how to deploy it.

- If you are an Iranian expat: Get a server inside Iran and set this up for your family and friends and get them back online.

- If you are an entrepreneur or work at a tech startup inside Iran: Your company already has servers inside Iran. Talk with your team, set up VPN servers and Tor bridges and share them with other employees and ask them to help get their family and friends online.

Edit: Formatting.

user:	its_bbq
created:	October 23, 2021
karma:	183