Technology @lemmy.world Lojcs @lemm.ee 2mo ago

Turkish government just blocked access to YouTube after a terrorist attack - but the Vivaldi browser on my desktop still connects?

It also connects to discord, supposed to be blocked since more than a week. No other device or browser I have connects to YouTube, they all get ERR_SOCKET_NOT_CONNECTED, and only a fresh Vivaldi profile on the same pc also connects to Discord, everything else get ERR_CONNECTION_RESET.

I've tried disabling all extensions, it still connects. Checked its IP address and DNS server and they're the same as other devices/browsers. Any idea what could be going on?

Cross posted from https://lemm.ee/post/45606568 to reach as many people before they unblock it and the chance to investigate is gone

24m edit: Discord just started working on some other chromium browsers including on another device.

80m edit: Another chromium browser just also connected. After deleting browser data it stopped

edit 3: found that if I add this to the servers section of a Network Persistent State file associated with a chromium browser profile (while the browser is closed), it can connect to youtube. Can't explain why. (anonymization says https://www.youtube.com in base64):
{"alternative_service":[{"advertised_alpns":["h3"],"expiration":"13376788973168704","port":443,"protocol_str":"quic"}],"anonymization":["GAAAABMAAABodHRwczovL3lvdXR1YmUuY29tAA==",false],"server":"https://www.youtube.com","supports_spdy":true}

Edit 4: The block is over

8 comments

There's an unusual report spike on downdetector.web.tr pretty recently on multiple sites.

I am also affected by this, BTK shows no actions taken on their end according to these sites. My guess is that either a throttling is being done by the government silently; or it's a genuine issue from a cloud server provider.

If you want to access these sites, would reccomend ProtonVPN until this issue gets resolved.
- As this kind of thing happens after every public crisis and it stopped working on different networks at different times (vodafone was fine for a while in the beginning), I think it's safe to say it's intentional.
  
  And as I explained, the weird part is that my browser's fine despite not using a vpn. No slowdown (on youtube at least) at all
Are all browsers configured to use the same dns servers, all on dot\doh? Have you verified they are consistently not blocking those servers? Are they all configured to not revert to default servers on failed attempts? Perhaps there is longer lasting dns caches in some of your software. What about proxy settings?

I'm just throwing stuff on the wall here.
- All on dot/doh, all us cloudflare servers. Specific ips of the servers were different. I could reach Lemmy, google, ecosia just fine so I don't think the servers were blocked.
  
  I haven't turned off fallback but judging by how I was getting a connection reset instead of the block notice when discord didn't work I think fallback must be auto disbled with encrypted dns.
  
  I do wonder if local cache had an effect, I didn't know how to check that though. No proxy that I know of.
  
  I did find the file and the part of the file that was different in Vivaldi and copying that to other browsers did make them work. I should've tried that with other social media sites too but I was too sleepy and now the temp blocks are gone. Can't find information about network persistent state file on the internet, so I'm stumped for now
Vivaldi has TLS active by default at some point for new installs. If new profiles also have that then that's what is happening.

The browser is not using the ISP's or the computer's DNS settings. So DNS blocking/redirecting won't work on it.
- As I said, all my browsers are using the same dns server. This isn't a dns block
  
  It doesn't really matter what kind of block it is. Vivaldi comes with TLS (Transport Layer Security overlay), but it is not necessarily turned on if its an old install. If a fresh profile has it turned on, then all traffic leaving the browser are encrypted and cannot be tampered with. you can check if it is turned on--
  
  go to Vivaldi://flags

8 comments