We’re one day away from the the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian revolution that ended with the collapse of the royal regime. Iran is reportedly blocking Web sites on the eve of the revolution in an assumed attempt to stifle any potential unrest.
The Next Web is reporting that Web sites using the “https” protocol are being blocked. Those include banks, Yahoo, Gmail, Google and any other site that relies on Google’s API.
The reports state that the blocks are widespread and began taking effect earlier this week. They covered the capital, Tehran, as well as Shiraz, Bushehr and Isfahan.
It’s assumed that the blocks will continue until Esfand – the 12th month of the Iranian calendar that begins at the end of February and ends in March.
A report on Hacker News seems to confirm the blocks:
I’m writing this to report the serious troubles we have regarding accessing Internet in Iran at the moment. Since Thursday Iranian government has shutted down the https protocol which has caused almost all google services (gmail, and google.com itself) to become inaccessible. Almost all websites that reply on Google APIs (like wolfram alpha) won’t work.
Accessing to any website that replies on https (just imaging how many websites use this protocol, from Arch Wiki to bank websites). Also accessing many proxies is also impossible. There are almost no official reports on this and with many websites and my email accounts restricted I can just confirm this based on my own and friends experience.
It would appear that Anonymous has also confirmed the blocks. They are now in the process of setting up proxies so that Iranian citizens can access the Internet.
Iran is filtering the internet more intensely as of the last 48 hours. SSL/TLS is censored on many ISPs but not all.
?HELP? Set up Tor + obfsproxy and help users in Iran reach the Internet: https://t.co/ULvqQPHD
None of this is officially confirmed and tomorrow might be yield interesting results from Iran. We’ll keep you updated if anything goes down.