Iran's government has forced Google SafeSearch for the whole country | Hacker News Reader

Iran's government has forced Google SafeSearch for the whole country

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33 pointssolarist9 comments

They did this with the option to disable SSL a few years ago. Google provided an IP that would offer a non-SSL frontend for search that admins to redirect to using DNS, the idea being that schools and local networks could maintain whatever blocking or logging needed. Iran used its gateway filtering to redirect all DNS requests in the country. Google ended up stepping in some way to cut them off.

I don't get why Google would go out of their way to make censorship easier. They're way too big for there to be any risk of schools, etc. just blocking them wholesale.

Regardless of the threat of blocking, it's generally not popular to allow children to surf porn in the classroom, e.g. through the copious amounts that will appear in a Google Image Search.

Lol imagine Google detects a whole country as a child. (I'm Persian, too. There are ways to bypass it but I'm scared to tell it publicly. They may patch it.)

I mean it’s obviously fucked and I’d never be the engineer to do it…but whenever I see these massive undertakings of technological censorship, I must admit my first thought is always “damn, imagine the massive logistical challenge that would be”. I mean censoring an entire people, and dealing with all the ways people are getting around your solution, its messed up but I mean holy blue team/devops/netdev/infra challenge Batman.

In this case, it's not really challenging. If I understood the post correctly, they simply map domains to the google-provided IP that forces safe search. That's like several lines of DNS-server config, though you need to do it in each internet service provider.

Apologies if I misunderstood, but in this case wouldn't the workaround be equally as simple? For example one could manually set the dns resolvers of one's own device to 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4

yeah, they probably capture all DNS packets (or packets with answers?) and modify them. That is more effort than a couple of lines in DNS server config.

I haven't thought of it because I assumed Iran already has something like this in place && I didn't consider it as a part of effort of enforcing safe search (though it is)

I’m OK-ish with OK-ish with this. Most of the things safesearch filters are illegal in Iran, and of limited civic value.

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