Blocking websites in Iran is no news to people knowing about the situation, government itself sets up a list of websites to be blocked, mainly some political sites and pornography sites as well, but this has been taken to the extreme of late, specially when some ISP’s take it upon themselves to block sites and keywords out of their own accord. For example, my ISP, Azadnet, blocks keywords “Hot”,”French”,”Anime” and even “Golden” I absolutely have no idea about some of them, the blocked keywords are too many to list.
But this becomes even crazier when it has been about a month where SSL ports have faced a blacklist/whitelist system, and not from the usual way of government forcing ISP’s to block sites, but from the government provided internet, which currently, is the only legal way of getting internet access for ISP’s. As far as I have researched it, SSL for .net and .org and the rest of the sites is open, but for .com, a whitelist system has been put in place, in other words, any SSL connection leading to a .com site, is blocked, except for Google,Yahoo,Twitter and some services, some widely used sites such as wordpress have not been as lucky to be whitelisted. The main reason is probably the motive to block any SSL proxy services, which are quite effective and difficult to find.
But then again, the use of web proxies that haven’t been blocked yet, as well as other proxy services as well as VPN services have been on the rise, almost universal, to the point that you can find no-one that doesn’t use one of them sometimes, and pretty normal uses as well.
