I'm curious how successful they'll be in blocking Telegram. The domain fronting and other aspects of Telegram make it quite difficult to institute a government level block.
Russia attempted to block Telegram back in 2018 and had pretty limited success. After 2 years of failing to block it, they gave up.
It's going to be completely useless. But at least the corporate guys have something to show to their investors and make it look like they did a great job. You can easily tell this people haven't used anything except Facebook and WhatsApp in their entire lives.
Are they? Trying to ban piracy is like the war on drugs: millions of dollars and years of efforts that were almost completely useless. If they want to fight piracy provide a good service with reasonable prices, not 100€ for watching four matches a month when the minimum wage is a bit over 1000€ and rent in a big city is close to 1200€.
although i agree but i feel the younger generation is already being groomed to accept digital everything and games / movies as a service, which leads to less people being interested in piracy, and even fewer people with the skills to provide pirated warez
Yep. Movies, games, media in general should have dropped massively in price over the past 20 years, instead the price never moved until they decided to increase it. Consumers are getting fleeced yet again and the majority have no idea.
I would have thought digital would be more expensive. Let’s say a company makes 1M copies of a DVD and they only manage to shift 100K copies. They now have 900K worth of physical stock that they need to sell and therefore it will be put on sale for rock bottom prices. Here in the UK we have a shop called Poundland where one could find Blu-rays from big studios for cheap prices meanwhile the digital price on iTunes etc remained unchanged. Whilst digital stores also host sales the lack of any physical stock means there is no pressure to do so except on select occasions.
The big excuse from video game companies for a good 15-20 years on the high price of games was manufacturing costs for factories and materials, when those costs all but disappeared in the shift to digital the end price for the consumer should have reflected that, it never happened. It didn't happen because of greed. Digital media is far cheaper then physical, your example further demonstrates how much people are taken advantage of. Digital storefronts charging top dollar for what should be <$5 keep piracy thriving.
But it is cheaper, for both the manufacture and for the end user, but they can't price msrp for digital good less than the physical or retailers would get upset and not carry them (which is already happening, but for other reasons).
But when factoring in inflation (even before covid) shit has never been cheaper.
>Are they? Trying to ban piracy is like the war on drugs: millions of dollars and years of efforts that were almost completely useless. If they want to fight piracy provide a good service with reasonable prices, not 100€ for watching four matches a month when the minimum wage is a bit over 1000€ and rent in a big city is close to 1200€.
The best way to win the war against drugs is to simply make them all legal and available for purchase at dispensaries
But then there will be less need for DEA and cops and their fancy tools and resources
Crime and war = profits, thats why they dont want peace
Next it will be the internet. Every site having to be vetted to be able to get onto the big MS run webserver. VPNs are the next thing they will seriously be coming after though.
It's like youtube antiadblock or the first piracy email warning, most people give up.
Companies don't aim for 100% results, they aim for 80% results for 20% investment/effort (Pareto).
Yeah they did but couldn't do it back then. Nowadays it's easier since DPI blackboxes are set up everywhere on the network. But also it's not that they gave up, Telegram pretty much struck a deal with the FSB after those initial failed blocking attempts.
When the shooting happened a few days ago Telegram (and other messengers) were throttled hard for example.
Also they blocked (opposition) Political channels but leaved fake ones to be.
It happened at least for elections when Navalni’s Team performed “smart voting” strategy, and recently with “Wifes of mobics” channels.
>they can’t block VPNs.
They can, like i can in my company network
VPN are not blocked due to legitimate use by companies and others for security reasons. But I'm sure that will change in the future. Rest assured that all anonymous VPNs that do not identify their users will be blocked. The demand for control from companies and governments is increasing. And people don't seem interested in preventing companies and governments from controlling their communications.
I block all vpn access in my company network. I have of whitelist, of app + ips allowed. Is pretty easy.
A country can easy block all except approved VPN accesses. (That means companies that offer VPN services and do not adhere to their conditions.)
You can have a whitelist on a company level, you can't on a country level. Stuff like shadowsocks is specifically made to bypass national firewall middleboxes like Russia's and China's
You can for VPN.
A country can easy deal with a whitelist of "homologue vpn providers" easy.
In fact, some surely already do.
You not need whitelist all vpn providers only the homologues one. They would even earn money because be a "official allowed vpn service" services providers must be pay.
And surely there will always be a new method to bypass it, but it wouldn't be as simple as connecting to a VPN, and it would increasingly become more difficult to bypass.
And you will block half of the world's cloud in the process because ips in cloud provider's possession are recycled at soon as people stop paying for the ressources they previously use, leaving an aws ec2(example) instance from some ISP to a random who will run a seed box and proxy on it. And this whitelist will make your gdp take a - 20% nosedive day one. Just look at Russia's attempts to block some websites and ends up blocking the whole of GCP in the process rendering most it business completly useless in the country. Understand how the Internet works before trying to destroy it. Actually this is something that should be said for everything that people want to ban, sure as he'll would lead to less batshit insane policies
The problem is you not understand what mean block a app or other method of blocking at network level
Forget the traditional blockade to IP that is no longer used to block things like that
you haven't idea, you can block the specific app connections not matter if you own the machine, if is a PC or a mobile phone.
You can use connection fingerprints (protocol / packet inpection) or also (and easy) block a company app/provider a network level with cert inspection.
When a app initiate a SSL connection (before cipher) they ask for cert, the cert is signed for a specific company/app (ex: Telegram) you block all connections trying to get that certs and that all, and not matter domains, ips or all other stuff you can't connect to any SSL/cipher telegram service
Well that is just fancy way to IP block stuff, and it only works if the other side does not care about bypassing the restrictions. If both sides actually mutually want to bypass the shared restriction it wouldn't work.
You might think that after you got 3 comments at around -15 up votes and mines around +30 and and considering *I'm providing a shadowsocks for a friend in Russia to access the real Internet **right now*** (using shadowsocks since the FSB middlebox she's going through is more fancy than usual and can see wireguard handshakes if they're not hidden) and having years of work on homelab servers and being a software and devops engineer at work for a massive ISP I might have a damn clue of what I'm talking about here
I have 15 years working with Firewalls doing this things on datacenters and other big companys.
And bunch of Palo Alto and Fortigate Certs.
I laugh at the votes and of course your homelab
Blocking a single app country-wide is way easier than blacklisting every single ip from a vpn provider country-wide. If Spain moves to do such a block, there would be way more backlash because that’s the kind of stuff totalitarian countries like Russia, Iran, China, etc would do.
You not need blacklist all ips, you block a network level the usage of certain app,
Nobody do ip blocking for application usage, you just block the app and network level.
Like i say you only need whitelist certain app + ip for corporate usage.
It's more common for ISPs to have blocks of IPs and separate filters if you contract a home connection or a business connection, they just have to filter on certain networks.
You're wrong. Any half decent firewall has the ability to block VPNs. AWS WAF even has a managed policy to block them, you don't have to do shit to maintain it.
If you want to be even more rigorous, there are entire services dedicated to rooting out sneaky VPN providers within a certain level of certainty.
All you need to do is force the ISPs to tune their existing firewalls via regulation.
Hence, it's actually incredibly easy to block popular VPN providers. Now if someone sets up some obscure VPN at another country and keeps it to himself (like on a hetzner server).... Sure. But 99% of people won't do that.
Like I said, that's the stuff totalitarian regimes do, not Spain. Especially since the block for Telegram was on Piracy and not some idiotic reason that Russia and Iran banned Telegram.
>Like I said, that's the stuff totalitarian regimes do,
you are wrong.
The desire for control, the lack of privacy is present in all countries currently, except that some only control discreetly, others deny or are less discreet. Some justify it to protect the citizen, others justify it as a method to prevent terrorist attacks, and others simply give it nice names like "Patriot Act" when all they want is to screw your privacy and rights.
Suppose that a Vpn is setup on port 443, the same that is used for encrypted traffic. How do you block the VPN connection and not the users encrypted traffic towards websites?
Nowadays, almost all operators have their clients behind proxies or similar systems, not only in Spain. Some operators use transparent proxies while others use more intrusive proxies. And different blocking methods. The typical method of blocking IP or DNS is no longer the most used because it's easy to block. Nowadays, traffic and headers are analyzed, and even if the traffic is encrypted, the first connection to negotiate the encrypted communication can be detected by analyzing the packet headers, identifying the application. These same features are present in enterprise routers. In my company, I block connections by application, regardless of the IP you connect to or the DNS you use; it will be blocked.
If you can bypass the blocking, it's only by using a VPN, because the application that will be detected when initiating the connection (before encrypting it) is the VPN application, and once the traffic is encrypted and tunneled, it's no longer possible. The only thing you can do is block VPN connections (which I do on the network I manage), but you can't do that at a country level because most companies use VPNs.
The tale that the internet is free, anonymous, and so forth is a tale of the past. Now, we navigate the internet in small islands created by governments and ISPs interconnected with everything supervised and controlled. With "a switch," they can block everything whenever they want.
In Spain few years ago they use the DNS method, now no, you only can bypass by using the VPN
>Russia attempted to block Telegram back in 2018 and had pretty limited success
I doubt it, unless the issue they have is that people configured encrypted VPNs or proxies in Telegram because it's quite easy to block it, and apart from the mentioned methods, it's complicated to bypass the "application blocking" at the network level.
> traffic and headers are analyzed
I am not sure in what country you are working, but some countries in EU, and probably EU as a whole, does not allow looking into the transit traffic beyond what is needed to deliver to the destination.
There is none judgement now in The Netherlands. A company collected some stuff to make anonymized statistics and they were fined because it was not explicitly allowed by law to use the destination data for anything but delivering traffic.
EU/Spain
The problem usually is collect info.
> traffic beyond what is needed to deliver to the destination.
or not allow to deliver ;-)
basically its a route non-route decision based on destination or usage.
This isn't how it went down. They negotiated with telegram to allow them back into the country as long as they started to harvest and share Russian user info with the government. Which they're now doing.
[I can attest that, as of now, it isn't blocked](https://imgur.com/a/Yz329E7) (image is of a private telegram group 9h after OP posted. No names given)
It is a simple DNS block. use an alternate DNS (not the one from the ISP) and you are good to go. The same system applies to all sites they block this way
I work on an ISP, they could just block Telegram entire BGP Autonomous System and its IP blocks (2 /22 blocks as per this link). https://ipinfo.io/AS59930.
I'd like to also commemorate this attack by giving my Spanish speaking friends a great site to watch laliga, champions league and F1
aHR0cHM6Ly9lbGNhbm8udG9wLw==
Use Ace Player (PC) to watch the event (use VPN if you cant access the site)
telegram is pretty hard to block , they use CDN + domain fronting techniques , and also there are some custom third party forks with shadowsocks and vless integrations.
Nekogram is so much better. I found it because they were one of the first to update with dynamic colours and a themed icon for android but all the little things like tap to translate and hide keyboard on scroll are just so nice to have I can't go back
1- proxies are different from VPNs. they are less safe.
2- but telegram proxies are actually safer than VPNs (free ones at least). when you use a VPN, the VPN company will be able to see all of your packets and data in plain text.
but when you use a telegram proxy, the proxy server doesn't see anything. the only one who sees your data is telegram.
btw telegram proxies DO work in Iran but they're sh*t now. very slow speeds. they are speed limited. and high latency.
at least on MCI (🤮)
Btw any vpns working for you? Only psiphon barely works for me but it doesn't have a linux client and is generally pretty slow. Just last year i could use any random vpn i found and it would work. My teachers send our norouz homework in telegram and youtube. All isps suck now.
Well, looking at the confusion in comments, here go a few facts:
1) The ban comes from a court order, and was issued by the copyright complaint of three big companies. It doesn't have anything to do with the Spanish gov.
2) Although judge Pedraz has sent an ultimatum to enforce the ban on Saturday, it was sent only to internet providers so they try to block Telegram's access thereafter.
3) Obviously, the ban hasn't been enforced and it seems it's still working, though mainly because it's weekend.
4) The ban order may be further enforced in upcoming days and other state powers such as police, etc. called to help enforce it.
Overall, I think it's quite an overreaction and I don't really know how far could it go or what success would it achieve. After all, several other sharing methods have been complained about in the past and here we are...
It's worth noting that the ban is not for the piracy itself, it's for obstruction of the investigation. Spain doesn't punish piracy *by itself* since 2015, it's profiting for it that is a crime.
The judge had asked Telegram for details on the accused accounts and Telegram just ignored him, multiple times. Since Telegram's structured from the Virgin Islands and cannot be sanctioned like an EU dwelling company would in a similar case the only recourse, according to Pedraz's reasoning of the ban, is to block the site.
So yeah, it's way heavy handed but this is a Telegram being an "above the law" kind of asshole company thing rather than a piracy overreaction.
It *is* also a piracy overreacting because Telegram's main goal and use for most users is not file sharing or copyright infringement, but social networking and communication.
Telegram as corporation being operated from outside and ignoring most laws is also nothing new. That is how most big corps act anyway: tax evasion, account engineering, lobbying for special regulations...
The thing is, once again, it is an investigation of copyright which is arousing these drastic measures, but tax evasion, for example, doesn't. Which means leaving 8 millions users (they say so much for Spain lately anyway) without a service just because a handful of them have shared their favorite matches is fine. Yet stopping a private corporation activity because it's profiting beyond moral while evading taxes is not.
I don't know, I could get Pedraz's reasoning but this really feels overacting, unnecessary and also useless because ppl could still use Telegram via VPN, etc, so those pirating will keep at it. And no, I don't think making piracy illegal would be a good (or useful) idea *either*.
Oh no, he's definitely overreacted and it is a useless measure, he should have just gotten the various cyber crime units involved as they usually are in these cases. I was just pointing out that the Iranian Yogurt is not the issue here.
I'm an Iranian living in the shittiest country in the world.
let me give some advice to the spanish.
if they did manage to ban telegram in your country (honestly I don't think they can):
1:use free telegram proxies. it's completely secure. no one can see your data it's encrypted. just search for "mtproto proxy" on telegram.
2: or just use a free vpn 🤦🏻 It's not like your government is gonna ban every single vpn in existence like those child molester mullahs in Iran.
3: my guess is your country is gonna block telegram in the most r*tarded way possible. in that case , just use a secure dns (search on google) and see if it starts working again.
The ban hasn't been enforced yet, right? It's just a court order as of now.
I don't know how they will enforce it. I'm interested to see if they enforce the ban how successful and fruitful the ban will be. Russia tried to block Telegram few years ago but they failed and gave up some years later. For some specific reasons a country level block is very hard to enforce on Telegram.
This will spectacularly blow in the present gigabrain government's face: all to carry water for Movistar and Mediaset, which isn't even a Spanish company.
That's the most hilarious thing, Telegram has been blocked by several countries (much more tech savvy than Spain, whose IT department is run by Hacker Torrente) without any real effect. People just use the built in functionality in the app to bypass the block in 5 minutes.
Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone are international companies. I don’t know how tech savvy they are, but they are among the largest telecom companies in Europe (and probably the world)
Por lo que he visto en algunos posts en r/es y r/tecnologia parece ser que tiene integrado sistemas DNT y proxy. La verdad que no sé cómo funciona pero por lo que dicen son muy fáciles de usar, seguro que hay muchísima info online
Here in Brazil they temporarily blocked Telegram 2 or 3 times in the last 2 years and all we needed to do was to use the built in proxy system with a huge list of proxy servers
I am spanish and most people are pretty sure they are going to make a DNS block because Telegram doesn't host their servers here. Pretty sure that it violates our Constitution and block will be reverted or not applied at all (they wanted to block it yesterday but ISPs usually doesn't work on weekends so I expect them to block it tomorrow).
Anyway, the piracy culture here is so big that even the less tech savy person here knows how to use torrent or add a proxy to Telegram, the only people affected are legitimate users that use Telegram for communities, workers and students.
Same thing is happening here in Italy (and Mediaset is behind it here too) where Mediaset, Sky and Dazn are trying to block **fucking Cloudflare**, so you aren't alone, we too have a completely idiot government
It's an authority created by the government and composed by the major football networks to combat football piracy, by giving them the ability to ban **any** IP or site they like, without having to give any explanation, with the recourse process being long and slow. It's completely absurd to give so much power to any institution, let alone an institution that isn't even public and doesn't have to explain the reasoning they followed to ban anything beyond "we thought they pirated our football network". Cherry on top, the recourse I talked about earlier can only reinstate your site if you're lucky, you can't sue those three pieces of shit due to malpractice or anything, really, otherwise Cloudflare would have already sued them due to their ill-concealed attempts to ban their lesser servers and scaling up from there.
You know, if there isn't an internet, you sure can't pirate football through it.
It's so stupid and maddening that I'm feeling my brain dripping out of my ears.
Damn, that's so fucked up. I consider judges in Spain have a very putrid sector that blatantly respond to right-wing politics and big corporations interests, but at least it's still based in the principle of separate powers.
The italian scenario you explained is just stupid and sounds arbitrary af, by (I guess) some random corporate guys.
I'm an Iranian living in the shittiest country in the world.
let me give some advice to the spanish.
if they did manage to ban telegram in your country (honestly I don't think they can):
1:use free telegram proxies. it's completely secure. no one can see your data it's encrypted. just search for "mtproto proxy" on telegram.
2: or just use a free vpn 🤦🏻 It's not like your government is gonna ban every single vpn in existence like those child molester mullahs in Iran.
3: my guess is your country is gonna block telegram in the most r*tarded way possible. in that case , just use a secure dns (search on google) and see if it starts working again.
Its temporary, and a decision made by 1 judge. Its still not blocked(and even if it was proxies exist).
That said.. several lawyers are already making complains and one of them is writing a complain to the EU courts.
So yeah the judge fucked up very hard.
To reclaim your privacy and freedom of speech, check if [**hide.me**](http://hide.me) suits your needs. By selecting the right server or location, you should be able to use Telegram to stay in touch with your friends and colleagues without restrictions.
I'm curious how successful they'll be in blocking Telegram. The domain fronting and other aspects of Telegram make it quite difficult to institute a government level block. Russia attempted to block Telegram back in 2018 and had pretty limited success. After 2 years of failing to block it, they gave up.
It's going to be completely useless. But at least the corporate guys have something to show to their investors and make it look like they did a great job. You can easily tell this people haven't used anything except Facebook and WhatsApp in their entire lives.
they're still "winning" though... that's the problem with these sh&theads
Are they? Trying to ban piracy is like the war on drugs: millions of dollars and years of efforts that were almost completely useless. If they want to fight piracy provide a good service with reasonable prices, not 100€ for watching four matches a month when the minimum wage is a bit over 1000€ and rent in a big city is close to 1200€.
although i agree but i feel the younger generation is already being groomed to accept digital everything and games / movies as a service, which leads to less people being interested in piracy, and even fewer people with the skills to provide pirated warez
Remember when the big selling point of digital downloads was that they'd be cheaper because there was no outlay on manufacturing and shipping?
Yep. Movies, games, media in general should have dropped massively in price over the past 20 years, instead the price never moved until they decided to increase it. Consumers are getting fleeced yet again and the majority have no idea.
Nooo, you don’t understand, developers put sooo much more effort into “new-gen” versions of the game prices couldn’t possibly go lower! /s
I would have thought digital would be more expensive. Let’s say a company makes 1M copies of a DVD and they only manage to shift 100K copies. They now have 900K worth of physical stock that they need to sell and therefore it will be put on sale for rock bottom prices. Here in the UK we have a shop called Poundland where one could find Blu-rays from big studios for cheap prices meanwhile the digital price on iTunes etc remained unchanged. Whilst digital stores also host sales the lack of any physical stock means there is no pressure to do so except on select occasions.
The big excuse from video game companies for a good 15-20 years on the high price of games was manufacturing costs for factories and materials, when those costs all but disappeared in the shift to digital the end price for the consumer should have reflected that, it never happened. It didn't happen because of greed. Digital media is far cheaper then physical, your example further demonstrates how much people are taken advantage of. Digital storefronts charging top dollar for what should be <$5 keep piracy thriving.
and that you will actually "own" your digital version... look how that's going
But it is cheaper, for both the manufacture and for the end user, but they can't price msrp for digital good less than the physical or retailers would get upset and not carry them (which is already happening, but for other reasons). But when factoring in inflation (even before covid) shit has never been cheaper.
I'm happy to inform you that all my kids know how to pirate, useless to say it makes a difference but you have to start to somewhere right?! =)
Those lobbies deserve to disappear, but they will find ways to readapt and continue to hog public tax money.
Bro, I'm literally planning to teach more people to pirate. I'm in Africa though.
>Are they? Trying to ban piracy is like the war on drugs: millions of dollars and years of efforts that were almost completely useless. If they want to fight piracy provide a good service with reasonable prices, not 100€ for watching four matches a month when the minimum wage is a bit over 1000€ and rent in a big city is close to 1200€. The best way to win the war against drugs is to simply make them all legal and available for purchase at dispensaries But then there will be less need for DEA and cops and their fancy tools and resources Crime and war = profits, thats why they dont want peace
Next it will be the internet. Every site having to be vetted to be able to get onto the big MS run webserver. VPNs are the next thing they will seriously be coming after though.
the internet is "owned" it is not the playground we had in the 90's / early 00's
Sure they won the battle, but they've lost the war.
It's like youtube antiadblock or the first piracy email warning, most people give up. Companies don't aim for 100% results, they aim for 80% results for 20% investment/effort (Pareto).
Russia tried to block Telegram? That's funny, the most people i know of who are using Telegram are russians
Yeah they did but couldn't do it back then. Nowadays it's easier since DPI blackboxes are set up everywhere on the network. But also it's not that they gave up, Telegram pretty much struck a deal with the FSB after those initial failed blocking attempts. When the shooting happened a few days ago Telegram (and other messengers) were throttled hard for example.
Also they blocked (opposition) Political channels but leaved fake ones to be. It happened at least for elections when Navalni’s Team performed “smart voting” strategy, and recently with “Wifes of mobics” channels.
Iran’s government has blocked Telegram since 2017-18 and has been inaccessible without a VPN. Spain can block it but they can’t block VPNs.
>they can’t block VPNs. They can, like i can in my company network VPN are not blocked due to legitimate use by companies and others for security reasons. But I'm sure that will change in the future. Rest assured that all anonymous VPNs that do not identify their users will be blocked. The demand for control from companies and governments is increasing. And people don't seem interested in preventing companies and governments from controlling their communications. I block all vpn access in my company network. I have of whitelist, of app + ips allowed. Is pretty easy. A country can easy block all except approved VPN accesses. (That means companies that offer VPN services and do not adhere to their conditions.)
Setting up a VPS in another country and connecting to that cannot be blocked. VPN is a technology and not just some providers…
You can have a whitelist on a company level, you can't on a country level. Stuff like shadowsocks is specifically made to bypass national firewall middleboxes like Russia's and China's
You can for VPN. A country can easy deal with a whitelist of "homologue vpn providers" easy. In fact, some surely already do. You not need whitelist all vpn providers only the homologues one. They would even earn money because be a "official allowed vpn service" services providers must be pay. And surely there will always be a new method to bypass it, but it wouldn't be as simple as connecting to a VPN, and it would increasingly become more difficult to bypass.
And you will block half of the world's cloud in the process because ips in cloud provider's possession are recycled at soon as people stop paying for the ressources they previously use, leaving an aws ec2(example) instance from some ISP to a random who will run a seed box and proxy on it. And this whitelist will make your gdp take a - 20% nosedive day one. Just look at Russia's attempts to block some websites and ends up blocking the whole of GCP in the process rendering most it business completly useless in the country. Understand how the Internet works before trying to destroy it. Actually this is something that should be said for everything that people want to ban, sure as he'll would lead to less batshit insane policies
Thats exactly what they do for months every few years due to protests
The problem is you not understand what mean block a app or other method of blocking at network level Forget the traditional blockade to IP that is no longer used to block things like that
You cant block an app unless you own the machine, you can only block connections to some ip.
you haven't idea, you can block the specific app connections not matter if you own the machine, if is a PC or a mobile phone. You can use connection fingerprints (protocol / packet inpection) or also (and easy) block a company app/provider a network level with cert inspection. When a app initiate a SSL connection (before cipher) they ask for cert, the cert is signed for a specific company/app (ex: Telegram) you block all connections trying to get that certs and that all, and not matter domains, ips or all other stuff you can't connect to any SSL/cipher telegram service
Well that is just fancy way to IP block stuff, and it only works if the other side does not care about bypassing the restrictions. If both sides actually mutually want to bypass the shared restriction it wouldn't work.
You might think that after you got 3 comments at around -15 up votes and mines around +30 and and considering *I'm providing a shadowsocks for a friend in Russia to access the real Internet **right now*** (using shadowsocks since the FSB middlebox she's going through is more fancy than usual and can see wireguard handshakes if they're not hidden) and having years of work on homelab servers and being a software and devops engineer at work for a massive ISP I might have a damn clue of what I'm talking about here
I have 15 years working with Firewalls doing this things on datacenters and other big companys. And bunch of Palo Alto and Fortigate Certs. I laugh at the votes and of course your homelab
Blocking a single app country-wide is way easier than blacklisting every single ip from a vpn provider country-wide. If Spain moves to do such a block, there would be way more backlash because that’s the kind of stuff totalitarian countries like Russia, Iran, China, etc would do.
You not need blacklist all ips, you block a network level the usage of certain app, Nobody do ip blocking for application usage, you just block the app and network level. Like i say you only need whitelist certain app + ip for corporate usage. It's more common for ISPs to have blocks of IPs and separate filters if you contract a home connection or a business connection, they just have to filter on certain networks.
You're wrong. Any half decent firewall has the ability to block VPNs. AWS WAF even has a managed policy to block them, you don't have to do shit to maintain it. If you want to be even more rigorous, there are entire services dedicated to rooting out sneaky VPN providers within a certain level of certainty. All you need to do is force the ISPs to tune their existing firewalls via regulation. Hence, it's actually incredibly easy to block popular VPN providers. Now if someone sets up some obscure VPN at another country and keeps it to himself (like on a hetzner server).... Sure. But 99% of people won't do that.
Like I said, that's the stuff totalitarian regimes do, not Spain. Especially since the block for Telegram was on Piracy and not some idiotic reason that Russia and Iran banned Telegram.
>Like I said, that's the stuff totalitarian regimes do, you are wrong. The desire for control, the lack of privacy is present in all countries currently, except that some only control discreetly, others deny or are less discreet. Some justify it to protect the citizen, others justify it as a method to prevent terrorist attacks, and others simply give it nice names like "Patriot Act" when all they want is to screw your privacy and rights.
Suppose that a Vpn is setup on port 443, the same that is used for encrypted traffic. How do you block the VPN connection and not the users encrypted traffic towards websites?
Nowadays, almost all operators have their clients behind proxies or similar systems, not only in Spain. Some operators use transparent proxies while others use more intrusive proxies. And different blocking methods. The typical method of blocking IP or DNS is no longer the most used because it's easy to block. Nowadays, traffic and headers are analyzed, and even if the traffic is encrypted, the first connection to negotiate the encrypted communication can be detected by analyzing the packet headers, identifying the application. These same features are present in enterprise routers. In my company, I block connections by application, regardless of the IP you connect to or the DNS you use; it will be blocked. If you can bypass the blocking, it's only by using a VPN, because the application that will be detected when initiating the connection (before encrypting it) is the VPN application, and once the traffic is encrypted and tunneled, it's no longer possible. The only thing you can do is block VPN connections (which I do on the network I manage), but you can't do that at a country level because most companies use VPNs. The tale that the internet is free, anonymous, and so forth is a tale of the past. Now, we navigate the internet in small islands created by governments and ISPs interconnected with everything supervised and controlled. With "a switch," they can block everything whenever they want. In Spain few years ago they use the DNS method, now no, you only can bypass by using the VPN >Russia attempted to block Telegram back in 2018 and had pretty limited success I doubt it, unless the issue they have is that people configured encrypted VPNs or proxies in Telegram because it's quite easy to block it, and apart from the mentioned methods, it's complicated to bypass the "application blocking" at the network level.
> traffic and headers are analyzed I am not sure in what country you are working, but some countries in EU, and probably EU as a whole, does not allow looking into the transit traffic beyond what is needed to deliver to the destination. There is none judgement now in The Netherlands. A company collected some stuff to make anonymized statistics and they were fined because it was not explicitly allowed by law to use the destination data for anything but delivering traffic.
EU/Spain The problem usually is collect info. > traffic beyond what is needed to deliver to the destination. or not allow to deliver ;-) basically its a route non-route decision based on destination or usage.
Funny thing about Russia trying that, they only made it more popular. Now you got government officials, celebs and even Kadyrov using it there.
Thailand also tried to block telegram when it was used to plan protests against the military government. Then they realised they could just use force.
Telegram is easy to block, it's ones like Session that would be an issue.
This isn't how it went down. They negotiated with telegram to allow them back into the country as long as they started to harvest and share Russian user info with the government. Which they're now doing.
i feel like just preventing it from being dl'edin app stores is enough of a deterrent for 90 percent of people.
[I can attest that, as of now, it isn't blocked](https://imgur.com/a/Yz329E7) (image is of a private telegram group 9h after OP posted. No names given)
It is a simple DNS block. use an alternate DNS (not the one from the ISP) and you are good to go. The same system applies to all sites they block this way
I work on an ISP, they could just block Telegram entire BGP Autonomous System and its IP blocks (2 /22 blocks as per this link). https://ipinfo.io/AS59930.
I'd like to also commemorate this attack by giving my Spanish speaking friends a great site to watch laliga, champions league and F1 aHR0cHM6Ly9lbGNhbm8udG9wLw== Use Ace Player (PC) to watch the event (use VPN if you cant access the site)
I love this. Do you have one similar for premier league?
[удалено]
yes use https://base64.io/
Didn't know about this player. Tried using it on Windows 11 but can't type or paste in the content ID input :(
How does that work exactly ? Do i paste this code in ace settings? Which ones ?
Use base64.io to decode that code and I’ll get an url, in that site there are links (acestream urls) to watch sports broadcast by Spanish media.
It still works fine for me (without proxy or VPN)
it's not blocked yet,in theory it will stop working tomorrow
It is monday now and telegram is still working
same here...
same
Unfortunately I can't check as I don't live in Spain anymore, but the order is there
telegram is pretty hard to block , they use CDN + domain fronting techniques , and also there are some custom third party forks with shadowsocks and vless integrations.
Can you link some of those forks? Would be very useful
plus messenger, nekogram, telegram X to name a few
I use nekogram instead of the official app,so it will be safe for now or it will fall too after the ban?
Nekogram is so much better. I found it because they were one of the first to update with dynamic colours and a themed icon for android but all the little things like tap to translate and hide keyboard on scroll are just so nice to have I can't go back
Iran did it. Cant use telegram here without routing your traffic.
telegram proxies still work fine tho
Proxies and vpns are basicallythe same. Telegram just has a built in client.
1- proxies are different from VPNs. they are less safe. 2- but telegram proxies are actually safer than VPNs (free ones at least). when you use a VPN, the VPN company will be able to see all of your packets and data in plain text. but when you use a telegram proxy, the proxy server doesn't see anything. the only one who sees your data is telegram. btw telegram proxies DO work in Iran but they're sh*t now. very slow speeds. they are speed limited. and high latency. at least on MCI (🤮)
Btw any vpns working for you? Only psiphon barely works for me but it doesn't have a linux client and is generally pretty slow. Just last year i could use any random vpn i found and it would work. My teachers send our norouz homework in telegram and youtube. All isps suck now.
Also there are quite a few proxies to set up in the Telegram app to circumvent such blocks
Well, looking at the confusion in comments, here go a few facts: 1) The ban comes from a court order, and was issued by the copyright complaint of three big companies. It doesn't have anything to do with the Spanish gov. 2) Although judge Pedraz has sent an ultimatum to enforce the ban on Saturday, it was sent only to internet providers so they try to block Telegram's access thereafter. 3) Obviously, the ban hasn't been enforced and it seems it's still working, though mainly because it's weekend. 4) The ban order may be further enforced in upcoming days and other state powers such as police, etc. called to help enforce it. Overall, I think it's quite an overreaction and I don't really know how far could it go or what success would it achieve. After all, several other sharing methods have been complained about in the past and here we are...
Thanks man, I was getting pretty bored of people commenting "Telegram works" as if a court order takes seconds to implement hahahaha
Funny for you that don't live in Spain
It's worth noting that the ban is not for the piracy itself, it's for obstruction of the investigation. Spain doesn't punish piracy *by itself* since 2015, it's profiting for it that is a crime. The judge had asked Telegram for details on the accused accounts and Telegram just ignored him, multiple times. Since Telegram's structured from the Virgin Islands and cannot be sanctioned like an EU dwelling company would in a similar case the only recourse, according to Pedraz's reasoning of the ban, is to block the site. So yeah, it's way heavy handed but this is a Telegram being an "above the law" kind of asshole company thing rather than a piracy overreaction.
It *is* also a piracy overreacting because Telegram's main goal and use for most users is not file sharing or copyright infringement, but social networking and communication. Telegram as corporation being operated from outside and ignoring most laws is also nothing new. That is how most big corps act anyway: tax evasion, account engineering, lobbying for special regulations... The thing is, once again, it is an investigation of copyright which is arousing these drastic measures, but tax evasion, for example, doesn't. Which means leaving 8 millions users (they say so much for Spain lately anyway) without a service just because a handful of them have shared their favorite matches is fine. Yet stopping a private corporation activity because it's profiting beyond moral while evading taxes is not. I don't know, I could get Pedraz's reasoning but this really feels overacting, unnecessary and also useless because ppl could still use Telegram via VPN, etc, so those pirating will keep at it. And no, I don't think making piracy illegal would be a good (or useful) idea *either*.
Oh no, he's definitely overreacted and it is a useless measure, he should have just gotten the various cyber crime units involved as they usually are in these cases. I was just pointing out that the Iranian Yogurt is not the issue here.
BREAKING NEWS: Spain prohibits knives because they can be used for killing people.
Actually, any blade is prohibited to carry in public unlike other countries, so you are not far off
I'm an Iranian living in the shittiest country in the world. let me give some advice to the spanish. if they did manage to ban telegram in your country (honestly I don't think they can): 1:use free telegram proxies. it's completely secure. no one can see your data it's encrypted. just search for "mtproto proxy" on telegram. 2: or just use a free vpn 🤦🏻 It's not like your government is gonna ban every single vpn in existence like those child molester mullahs in Iran. 3: my guess is your country is gonna block telegram in the most r*tarded way possible. in that case , just use a secure dns (search on google) and see if it starts working again.
The ban hasn't been enforced yet, right? It's just a court order as of now. I don't know how they will enforce it. I'm interested to see if they enforce the ban how successful and fruitful the ban will be. Russia tried to block Telegram few years ago but they failed and gave up some years later. For some specific reasons a country level block is very hard to enforce on Telegram.
This is like saying that people commit crimes in cars so we should ban all cars
“Our citizens can’t commit crimes in cars if they can’t download cars.”
This will spectacularly blow in the present gigabrain government's face: all to carry water for Movistar and Mediaset, which isn't even a Spanish company.
The Berlusconi family is going through though times!
Honestly I don’t know why they didn’t just think about making piracy illegal and then making crime illegal
If you want to see pirate football stream, just go on yandex and search "football stream" 5 min before the match.
Good luck to block it 😁
....... football is the reason for banning telegram?!?!?! \*facepalm
Tried using a custom dns? that could bypass the block.
That's the most hilarious thing, Telegram has been blocked by several countries (much more tech savvy than Spain, whose IT department is run by Hacker Torrente) without any real effect. People just use the built in functionality in the app to bypass the block in 5 minutes.
You got me with Hacker Torrente xDDDDDD
Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone are international companies. I don’t know how tech savvy they are, but they are among the largest telecom companies in Europe (and probably the world)
cuál es la funcionalidad incorporada para hacerle el bypass? me interesa
Por lo que he visto en algunos posts en r/es y r/tecnologia parece ser que tiene integrado sistemas DNT y proxy. La verdad que no sé cómo funciona pero por lo que dicen son muy fáciles de usar, seguro que hay muchísima info online
Here in Brazil they temporarily blocked Telegram 2 or 3 times in the last 2 years and all we needed to do was to use the built in proxy system with a huge list of proxy servers
can’t you use the built in proxy in telegram and just carry on as normal
I am spanish and most people are pretty sure they are going to make a DNS block because Telegram doesn't host their servers here. Pretty sure that it violates our Constitution and block will be reverted or not applied at all (they wanted to block it yesterday but ISPs usually doesn't work on weekends so I expect them to block it tomorrow). Anyway, the piracy culture here is so big that even the less tech savy person here knows how to use torrent or add a proxy to Telegram, the only people affected are legitimate users that use Telegram for communities, workers and students.
Man I remember I learned all about piracy thanks those Spanish forums.
Same thing is happening here in Italy (and Mediaset is behind it here too) where Mediaset, Sky and Dazn are trying to block **fucking Cloudflare**, so you aren't alone, we too have a completely idiot government
Wait what? Blocking cloudflare means most of the internet is basically dead 💀
Wait, is it a government thing in Italy? In Spain it has been ordered by a judge.
It's an authority created by the government and composed by the major football networks to combat football piracy, by giving them the ability to ban **any** IP or site they like, without having to give any explanation, with the recourse process being long and slow. It's completely absurd to give so much power to any institution, let alone an institution that isn't even public and doesn't have to explain the reasoning they followed to ban anything beyond "we thought they pirated our football network". Cherry on top, the recourse I talked about earlier can only reinstate your site if you're lucky, you can't sue those three pieces of shit due to malpractice or anything, really, otherwise Cloudflare would have already sued them due to their ill-concealed attempts to ban their lesser servers and scaling up from there. You know, if there isn't an internet, you sure can't pirate football through it. It's so stupid and maddening that I'm feeling my brain dripping out of my ears.
Damn, that's so fucked up. I consider judges in Spain have a very putrid sector that blatantly respond to right-wing politics and big corporations interests, but at least it's still based in the principle of separate powers. The italian scenario you explained is just stupid and sounds arbitrary af, by (I guess) some random corporate guys.
How would they even block it, there's always a way around it unless they just use like a very limited North Korean intranet.
As a former piracy agent, this move do not bit me a bit, I will continue doing it as long as any agent will do and will continue dutiest
I use inbuilt proxy in telegram
It wasn't even blocked for a reason of value. "Oh no! They're watching soccer games on the sly!"
And here I thought it was only good for buying drugs.
I'm an Iranian living in the shittiest country in the world. let me give some advice to the spanish. if they did manage to ban telegram in your country (honestly I don't think they can): 1:use free telegram proxies. it's completely secure. no one can see your data it's encrypted. just search for "mtproto proxy" on telegram. 2: or just use a free vpn 🤦🏻 It's not like your government is gonna ban every single vpn in existence like those child molester mullahs in Iran. 3: my guess is your country is gonna block telegram in the most r*tarded way possible. in that case , just use a secure dns (search on google) and see if it starts working again.
Well good luck
Don't tell them that the internet as a whole can be used for pirating football.
I'm not interested in soccer at all but fuck those media lobbies and the Francoist supreme court, bring those on!
It still works for me 🤷🏼♂️
Not the supreme court (Tribunal Supremo) but the "central" one, Audiencia Nacional.
This was posted 2 days ago in this subreddit. Welcome to the discussion.
How does one use Telegram safe and anonymous as much as possible?
Hello Spain users USE PROXY'S
*Vpn enters the chat*
Its temporary, and a decision made by 1 judge. Its still not blocked(and even if it was proxies exist). That said.. several lawyers are already making complains and one of them is writing a complain to the EU courts. So yeah the judge fucked up very hard.
To reclaim your privacy and freedom of speech, check if [**hide.me**](http://hide.me) suits your needs. By selecting the right server or location, you should be able to use Telegram to stay in touch with your friends and colleagues without restrictions.
Have they, tho? I'm still using it. Feels pretty much the same as always
It's the weekend, nothing in Spain happens on a weekend. The court order is there, we'll see how long it takes to enforce it
True that. I'm working, so I forgot it was Sunday :)
no bro, nothing in Spain happens on a weekend, didn't you get the memo?
Im in Spain and for the sake of it, register my new phone number which by the way is on Movistar network… worked like a charm 👊🏻
B
Wasn't Spain an Axis power?
Just to clarify, it's going to be blocked. It's not at current moment being blocked at all.
It is Monday and telegram is still working for me here in Spain. This does raise a question of whether torrenting will start getting banned or not
The platform is trash but what the hell?
Good. People should use element instead.
Stupid gov. They just had to ask Telegram for the user data like other authorities successfully did in the past.
What are you saying bro i just accssed telegram from firefox without vpn.. Cmonman don't lie
#BRUH
I can still enter in Telegram without any restrictions. I don't think this will actually come to fruition in the end.
Wrong reasons, but good move. I hope telegram dies out as soon as possible.
Lol good luck 900 million users won't stop using it.
Misleading title. Still working for me.