Hacker News Reader

I moved out of Iran about 10 years ago, but when I was there you couldn't purchase internet plans faster than 128kbps unless you had a legitimate reason such as being a reporter, business, etc. There was, however, no special license needed for any computing equipment. I purchased very cheap VPS and other resources without even having to submit any personal info.

Nowadays, the limit is gone and there is faster internet access but the issue of filtering still exists. When a service doesn't work in Iran it's either due to sanctions, the government blocking access to some domain/ip, or a combination of both. The user is left wondering which one it is and how they can get around it

> is there some sort of special license or permission required to get access to computing resources

Mostly not. Censorship works by elimination, not by requiring initial permission. The main exception is internet access to blocked services. Government supporters get access to services that are otherwise blocked to the public.

> They claimed to believe that it was blocked because of US sanctions and denied that the government blocked any websites

The government and their supporters are bad liers. By bad, I mean they don't even try to make it convincing. The president told a foreign journalist that covering is optional in Iran. That is while their "morality police" has killed a woman and the whole country is burning in riots. This is while that same journalist is wearing scarf to be allowed to talk to the president, in US!

> They claimed to believe that it was blocked because of US sanctions and denied that the government blocked any websites.

This narrative is probably helped by the fact that half the internet is being blocked on the US side because of sanctions - i.e. the entirety of Google Cloud.

> Is this a narrative they are pushing on state media there?

I don't believe so. In general, assholes who get their money from the government, create their own fake news which is even faker than what is published in the state media. Which makes sense, as the state media optimizes for everyone watching it, not just the bootlickers.

> regular VPN protocols

Naive, Hysteria, Trojan, VLESS, etc. seem to work. Of course, foreign servers are, at times like this, only accessible in datacenters, which means the protocol would be irrelevant.

Using Tor Browser should be very simple, if they know how to operate a web browser they should be able to use Tor Browser. They literally start the program, there is a window that asks if they want to use a direct connection or bridge. They click bridge, enter a bridge and are connected like a normal browser.

You don't actually need the license for computing resources in China, it's "only" necessary when you're hosting public-facing web pages specifically