[smnrchrds]

Government has tried blocking all anti-censorship technologies, so normal PPTP and L2TP VPN services will not work. VPN vendors now offer their own software which I assume uses non-conventional ports and settings to circumvent it. But VPNs are not the only solution. Most people use software like Psiphon or Freegate to access the internet. I don't know about general population, but everyone I know uses some kind of anti-censorship solution.

Facebook is censored in Iran, yet it is very popular. If you want to roughly estimate how many people circumvent censorship on a daily basis, just find out how many Iranians actively use Facebook. I guess it would be possible to find a number with Graph Search.

[gtirloni]

Here in Brazil we have many laws that have not "caught on", that means nobody follows them and the government doesn't care to enforce it. Of course that is bad, but sometimes these laws are very stupid and that's why it is the way it is.

In Iran with the censorship, could the same thing be happening? Someone created it, the government sees some uses for it, an organization was tasked with enforcing it but since there are a lot of ways to circumvent it and everybody knows how, that might show this organization does not actively care enough to update it's filter. That is, it's there because someone someday had the stupid idea of creating a big firewall, but there is less and less support to actually make it real and effective?

Would I be right in assuming this much?

[smnrchrds]

The situation is quite different in Iran. Traditionally the government had control over all media. Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance reviews all books before publishing and may remove the parts it doesn't like or prevent books from being published altogether. Same for newspapers and magazines, except they don't review them before publishing, but if they find something offensive they close the newspaper. The only entity allowed to operate TV or radio channels is Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting(IRIB) which is part of the government, etc.

When internet became popular, the government monopoly got threatened. Since then they did everything in their power to restrict the use of internet. First they passed regulations that forced private ISPs to buy their bandwidth through a government organization and deployed a censorship software (rumored to be Chinese) on all of it, so blocking is national not per ISP. The they passed a law restricting home users to 128 kbps (yes, kilobits per second not even kilobytes). Then they criminalized providing anti-censorship solutions (but not using them, although it is debated). In some occasions (like after 2009 election), they make the internet so slow it is virtually impossible to use. HTTPS traffic is always slower than HTTP and occasionally completely blocked.

It is all about maintaining power to control the narrative. As I said, it hasn't worked as well as they have expected. Now they are building something called National Internet. They say they don't plan to block access to the internet but I am not so hopeful.

It has been a decade-long battle between government and freedom of information and speech. Most people who are affected aren't dissidents, but simply people who want to update their Facebook status.

It is sad because we are a fairly developed country. There is no war or famine, our healthcare system is good, we have powerful industries, good universities, big cities with good public transportation and interstate highways, etc.

The problem is that over the years since the Islamic Revolution our nation has become more liberal in general while the government remains rigidly conservative. It will be a long answer to describe where we are and how we got here, but I think this short comment is enough to answer your question.

[ultramancool]

Yeah, typically the trick here is to run OpenVPN on port 443/TCP (HTTPS, which almost no one bothers to examine), you can also stunnel it if by some chance they're doing deep packet inspection and blocking OpenVPN connections.

[lispsil]

AirVPN has obfsproxy, or you can rent a cheap vpn that takes bitcoins, check the bitcoin wiki, and set up obfsproxy yourself. It camoflauges traffic to look like regular http to bypass censorship.

Pretty sure most coursera vids and materials are ripped and avail via torrent too. If not could wholesale rip the site and mirror it free on yandex cloud. Russia laughs at US petty sanctions