Egypt blocks BBC and Alhurra

Internet censorship all around the world Egypt
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From OONI:
Egypt blocks BBC and Alhurra: Expanding media censorship amid political unrest

Last weekend, protests erupted in Egypt in response to corruption allegations against President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi’s government.

Protests have been rare since President Sisi took power in 2014, but amid policies of economic austerity and recent corruption allegations, hundreds of Egyptians took to the streets. It was subsequently reported that BBC News and the US-funded Alhurra news website were amongst blocked services. The head of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Media Regulation reportedly stated that the BBC and other news websites may have been blocked because of their “inaccurate” coverage of the protests.

As part of a crackdown on protests (more of which are expected tomorrow, 27th September 2019), Egyptian security forces reportedly arrested at least 59 demonstrators (the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights reported that hundreds of individuals linked to the protests have been arrested over the last week).

Unfortunately, media censorship is pervasive in Egypt, as documented through our previous studies. Thanks to ongoing OONI Probe testing in Egypt, we were able to check measurements on the testing of bbc.com and alhurra.com. We also corroborated OONI findings with manual curl tests performed in Egypt on Telecom Egypt (AS8452) with the help of our local partners.

In this report, we share OONI network measurement data from the testing of bbc.com and alhurra.com, and explain how the blocking was implemented on a technical level. We also share some recommendations on what these website owners can do to improve the resilience of their sites to internet censorship.

Detection seems to be based on SNI.

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what’s the state of modern protocols/software like xray/SS/trojan/hysteria, in a working state?? or is it bloked just like wireguard, openVPN?

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I don’t know, how bad is the censorship situation where you live, but from what I just quickly looked up on reddit, shadowsocks will probably work fine. And sophisticated protocols that mask connection as https (cloak, trojan and VLESS-XTLS-Reality, which is both most modern and easy enough to set up) should definitely work. Assuming you mask as connection to unblocked site.

It should be noted, however, that there is a possibility of your VPS’s ip be already banned, because censors may have previously detected circumvention tools in that subnet.

But I hope it won’t be that bad :slight_smile:

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already have an xray VPS setup can’t get it to work somehow

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Are you going for https-like proxy protocols? It may be that only port 443 is being blocked. I have encountered this in russia on some oracle cloud nl servers. Have you tried SS?
upd: Also, this question may be silly, but have you opened the necessary ports everywhere they should be opened? Like, for example, on oracle cloud servers ports should be opened both in server os-level firewall and hypervisor(?)-infrastructure level in admin webconsole.

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setup shadowsocks, tried it, didn’t work, let a friend try it (not in egypt, same configuration), it worked…
motherfuckers blocked SS too
tried using cloak, so far not working in both countries, maybe i’m messing something up, but the output shows no error…

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Try ss2022

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i used shadowsocks-rust port on VPS because it’s the one still maintained

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nevermind everyone i forgot to open a port for it -_- , noob mistake it works