Bitcoin Forum

As Inflation Rages In Iran, Bitcoin Software Not Available
by Jon Matonis


 - http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/10/09/as-inflation-rages-in-iran-bitcoin-software-not-available

Shit. This is serious. I can't imagine an embargo like this. To be unable to download open-source software? In this days and age, unacceptable.

Is there a simple way to download Bitcoin behind great firewalls? Chinese hackers could help Iranians in this issue.

On a related note:

I think the clients still RUN, right? Otherwise THAT is a major issue.

So it's just a question of using TOR, torrents or a simple MIRROR site to get A client.

For Iranians that should be like a given - you think porn is unblocked in that country? Hell being blocked there is like a seal of approval.

I suspect the developers have no option but to block access to avoid serious legal problems in the United States where the lead developer is based. The same would occur is many other countries for example Canada. I actually support the developers doing this for this very reason. That been said what is to prevent someone in a jurisdiction that does not have sanctions on Iran from downloading the software and then making it available via a server or bit-torrent? In the latter case for example on TPB.

I suspect the developers don't give a fuck as they've been ignoring my questions about this very issue since 1.3a.

There are sites which are more embargo-compliant and others that are less compliant and the bitcoin project also uses Italian (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page) domains or others that would not have any legal issues linking to open source for Iranians.

Actually if the USA wouldn't be scared of Bitcoin, it could use it as a weapon against Iran alongside its USD to destabilize the IRR.

Can Iranians use the Blockchain.info wallet or is that site blocked?

At least instawallet is not blocked now. You can search an Iranian proxy to learn more about the funny internet for Iranians.

This censorship is disgusting and what's even more disgusting is that it's led by US. Where is the famous american "freedom"? So much dictatorship.

I think the 'famousness' of American freedom is more for internal consumption.

Dictatorship or scared off their pants Americans?

Dictatorship is so much easier when it's 99% self-policed.  ChillingEffects!

This is why we should practice fear inoculation: http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-thoughts#fear-inoculation

Well, I imagine Matonis is a little conflicted at this point, given that he is sitting on the board of The Bitcoin Foundation alongside the chief dev who has blocked Iranians from downloading the software .... seems like there might be a case for a hidden service on Tor mirroring bitcoin "official" repo.

The developers don't have a choice. Bitcoin uses strong cryptography, which, for reasons which don't really make sense, is legally classified as a military weapon under the Wassenaar Arrangement, and therefore illegal to export to "certain" countries. Simply making the source code available for download worldwide is legally equivilant to selling bombs to Iran. As fucked up as the law is, it must be obeyed if you want to avoid being jailed for arms trafficking.

:) lol

don't overestimate this. western propaganda is probably exaggerate the inflation and the biggest censoring mechanism is still behind our ears.

If this is a concern why not simply download the source code and binaries and put them on a server not affected by this issue. This is after all the whole point of Free Software / Open Source software. The developers do care which is why the software was released under a Free Libre Open Source software license.

Adam Kokesh had some great coverage here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyQaZKi42zw

The bitcoin devs aren't really involved here, other than their choice of sourceforge for hosting. Sourceforge is blocking Iran and other sanctioned countries to minimize any legal risks with the US government. I'm willing to host a mirror of bitcoin.org+binaries in Iceland, if only there was some easy way to mirror the site. wget -u is a crappy way to do a mirror. rsync would be great.

This is not true. Open source, free software does not fall under the US munitions export controls. Otherwise, tools like openssl, tor, openssh, linux distributions, etc would not be available outside the US. See https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/01/07/2010-32803/publicly-available-mass-market-encryption-software-and-other-specified-publicly-available-encryption for the public restatement of that fact. This fact has been true since 1996. See John Gilmore's fights and wins in the US courts here, http://www.toad.com/gnu/export/export.html.

My understanding was that SourceForge is claiming that the specific OFAC sanctions against Iran would take precedence over the munitions export controls which were indeed relaxed for non-sanctioned countries. It just hasn't been challenged yet.

They can claim whatever they want as their excuse. They are wrong, but it's their choice if they don't want to do it.

+1

In thinking broader about this, bitcoin.org is hosted on github servers. They are a US company and may also look at the embargoed countries and decide the citizens of an 'axis of evil' country cannot download bitcoin. It seems clear there needs to be a mirroring plan for bitcoin.org and binaries run by volunteers, in case of stupidity. This would also work well if someone forced the .org people to take down bitcoin.org.

Are you both suggesting that the core bitcoin development group (who are listed at bitcoin.org) remove the checkbox that blocks SourceForge downloads to sanctioned countries?

Yes. And generally, allow bitcoin.org to be mirrored, or the binaries served up by non-sourceforge hosts (mirrors and bittorrent).

It is MIT licensed, anybody can mirror it anywhere they like. You don't need anybody's permission, just do it!

Correct. You could make it easier to mirror it though. Right now httrack and pulling the binaries is my solution.

setting up an rsyncd with the recent bitcoin binaries + valid signatures is a great idea. i'm sure, there are plenty of admins who would want to mirror it and a dedicated mirror index html page should list all of them.

just like the wikileaks fallback pages when their DNS entries were removed.

Step 1: Done. Hourly pulls of website git (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.github.com.git) from github. See http://btcmirror.is/

Step 2: In progress. Replace sf.net links with local copies of all binaries and related sha(1|256)sum files plus signatures.

Step 3: In progress. Replace googleapi.com and googlecode.com script links with local copies of the files.

Step 4: Serving bitcoin website and binaries out of Iceland. Setup rsyncd for mirroring.

Step 5: There is no step 5.

Step 6: Thank you, teamhugs!

Sounds like this needs to be mirrored to a hidden service...  ::)

There is some scepticism on reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/11tqrk/bitcoinorg_mirrored_iranians_and_internet_pariahs/):

- someone needs to check the hashes to make sure nothing was altered (to ease the paranoid)
- does the mirrored site still link to sourceforge? If so Iranians would still be prohibited from downloading right?

I'm doing this for three reasons:

0. Iceland rocks and http://immi.is looks a reality. Go freedom.
1. The world should be able to download their bits as desired without letting some scared corporate lawyers dictate yes or no.
2. I want to host a complete copy of the bitcoin site with binaries on a piratebox with no internet access. I already can do this with Tor, because they put everything locally and provide a quick and easy rsync share. The tor site mirror is roughly 6 GB, which includes all binaries for all operating systems, and fits easily on a 16GB usb drive.

However, any smart person will not trust me. You should check the binaries, the hashes, and everything I've done to mirror the site.

Right now, I have not had time to patch the site to remove the reliance on sf.net and googlecode/googleapis. When I do figure out the patches, I intend to publish my git repo so others can clone/pull and check it out. I don't use github or other social networking technologies like it (facebook, twitter, sourceforge, etc).

As a temporary workaround, http://files.btcmirror.is/ now exists.

Please verify if the files are correct or not.

A fine workaround ... from my timewarp ftp was the web, not the workaround :)

You could I suppose to be ultra-thorough also post the signed hashes of source and pre-built binaries files put up on github by the other devs (so as not to centralise trust on gavin's sig.) ... e.g.

https://github.com/bitcoin/gitian.sigs (https://github.com/bitcoin/gitian.sigs)

https://github.com/bitcoin/gitian.sigs/blob/master/0.7.1/sipa/bitcoin-build.assert (https://github.com/bitcoin/gitian.sigs/blob/master/0.7.1/sipa/bitcoin-build.assert)