A couple of days ago i noticed something off with blahaj.zone. I couldn’t see images posted by users on blahaj, so i thought it was a problem on their side.

Well guess fucking what? After 3 days, it was STILL broken, so i opened it and…

Blocked. They fucking blocked blahaj.zone. Actually beyond parody🤦‍♂️ Why? What was the point? there’s trans content literally everywhere on lemmy. what’s next, block them all? So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN (protonvpn.com is also blocked in saudi, jfc) just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄

I swear a couple of days ago it worked. This is a mild annoyance (hence the community) but still.

It’s so over guys, MBS said no more 196 😔

  • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    I quickly threw together a script to check which other Fediverse instances are blocked in Saudi Arabia by using Globalping. I know it’s horrible, but it works so far. Will share the results once it’s finished running. I’ll probably also rewrite the script later.

    I got the list of instances from lemmy.world: curl -s https://lemmy.world/instances | rg -o 'href="([^"]+)"' | rg -o 'https?://[^"]+' > instances.txt

    #!/usr/bin/env fish

set INSTANCES "./instances.txt"
set OUTPUT_FILE "./output.txt"
set COUNTRY "saudi arabia"

for instance in (cat $INSTANCES)
  if globalping http $instance from $COUNTRY --method GET --limit 3 | rg 'Blocked URL' 2&>1
    echo "Blocked: $instance" >> blocked.txt
  end
end

    I’m running tail -f blocked.txt in another terminal to monitor the results in real time.

    (Yeah I know the script sucks. Don’t judge me, I use fish and prefer its syntax over bash. I also use ripgrep, because I like it.)

    • fxomt@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      I can run it for you if you want. I’ll post the results here

      It’ll be faster for me since I’m in the country itself

      • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        EDIT: This won’t work. You can “ping” blahaj successfully, but only because it redirects to a gov page, and not an error. I’ll have to revise the script because of that.

        Globalping has an HTTP method, which I use in the script:

        globalping http $instance from $COUNTRY

        I then use ripgrep to check if the HTTP response contains the string “Blocked URL”, as you can see in the script:

        | rg 'Blocked URL'

        The if condition uses the exit code from ripgrep to add $instance from the for loop to the blocked.txt file.

        • fxomt@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          0·
          3 days ago

          Ah, it works for me now. I just ran it with ping instead of globalping, since i had no need to run it with that. And the script didn’t work after i did that, i’m not great at shell-scripting.

          I made a modification that prints the status, but it’s painfully slow to check each site.