An Internet filter is software that restricts or controls the content an Internet user is capable to access, especially when utilized to restrict material delivered over the Internet via the Web, Email, or other means. Content-control software determines what content will be available or be blocked.
Iran's telecommunications industry is almost entirely state-owned, dominated by the Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI). Fixed-line penetration in 2004 was relatively well-developed by regional standards, standing at 22 lines per 100 people, higher than Egypt with 14 and Saudi Arabia with 15, although behind the UAE with 27. Iran had more than 1 mobile phone per inhabitant by 2012.
Computer and network surveillance is the monitoring of computer activity and data stored locally on a computer or data being transferred over computer networks such as the Internet. This monitoring is often carried out covertly and may be completed by governments, corporations, criminal organizations, or individuals. It may or may not be legal and may or may not require authorization from a court or other independent government agencies. Computer and network surveillance programs are widespread today and almost all Internet traffic can be monitored.
In Internet activism, hacktivism, or hactivism, is the use of computer-based techniques such as hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote a political agenda or social change. With roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to free speech, human rights, or freedom of information movements.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep packet inspection is often used for baselining application behavior, analyzing network usage, troubleshooting network performance, ensuring that data is in the correct format, checking for malicious code, eavesdropping, and internet censorship, among other purposes. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these for normal operation, but use of the second header is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection despite this definition.
Hacktivismo is an offshoot of Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), whose beliefs include access to information as a basic human right. It was founded in 1999.
Xcitium, formerly known as Comodo Security Solutions, Inc., is a cybersecurity company headquartered in Bloomfield, New Jersey.
Psiphon is a free and open-source Internet censorship circumvention tool that uses a combination of secure communication and obfuscation technologies, such as a VPN, SSH, and a Web proxy. Psiphon is a centrally managed and geographically diverse network of thousands of proxy servers, using a performance-oriented, single- and multi-hop routing architecture.
Freegate is a software application developed by Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) that enables internet users from mainland China, South Korea, North Korea, Syria, Vietnam, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom among others, to view websites blocked by their governments. The program takes advantage of a range of proxy servers called Dynaweb. This allows users to bypass Internet firewalls that block web sites by using DIT's Peer-to-peer (P2P)-like proxy network system. FreeGate's anti-censorship capability is further enhanced by a new, unique encryption and compression algorithm in the versions of 6.33 and above. Dynamic Internet Technology estimates Freegate had 200,000 users in 2004. The maintainer and CEO of DIT is Bill Xia.
An anonymizer or an anonymous proxy is a tool that attempts to make activity on the Internet untraceable. It is a proxy server computer that acts as an intermediary and privacy shield between a client computer and the rest of the Internet. It accesses the Internet on the user's behalf, protecting personal information of the user by hiding the client computer's identifying information. Anonymous proxy is the opposite of transparent proxy, which sends user information in the connection request header.
Iran is notable for the degree of internet censorship by its government. Iran was the second place in the world for internet censorship in 2022 after repeatedly shutting off the internet in parts of country and blocking access to social media platforms to curb protests sparking from of Mahsa Amini’s death, a new poll has showed. The country now targets Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in order to completely cut off the people from access to outside media. Several popular social media platforms and instant messaging applications are blocked by the Iranian government and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, Reddit, Medium, Instagram, and Threads. Some streaming services, including Netflix and Hulu, are also blocked by the government. Websites relating to health, science, sports, news, pornography, and shopping are also routinely blocked.
Internet activism and, specifically, social networking has been instrumental in organizing many of the 2009 Iranian election protests. Online sites have been uploading amateur pictures and video, and Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have been places for protesters to gather and exchange information. Although some scholars in the West stress that Twitter has been used to organize protests, Iranian scholars argue that Twitter was hardly used by Iranian citizens in the midst of the 2009 protests.
The splinternet is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. "Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it", wrote the Economist weekly in 2010, arguing it could soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries. The Chinese government erected the "Great Firewall" for political reasons, and Russia, has enacted the Sovereign Internet Law that allows it to partition itself from the rest of the Internet, while other nations, such as the US and Australia, discussed plans to create a similar firewall to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.
UltraSurf is a freeware Internet censorship circumvention product created by UltraReach Internet Corporation. The software bypasses Internet censorship and firewalls using an HTTP proxy server, and employs encryption protocols for privacy.
Internet censorship circumvention, also referred to as going over the wall or scientific browsing in China, is the use of various methods and tools to bypass internet censorship.
A national intranet is an Internet Protocol-based walled garden network maintained by a nation state as a national substitute for the global Internet, with the aim of controlling and monitoring the communications of its inhabitants, as well as restricting their access to outside media. Other names have been used, such as the use of the term halal internet in Islamic countries.
In Russia, internet censorship is enforced on the basis of several laws and through several mechanisms. Since 2012, Russia maintains a centralized internet blacklist maintained by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor).
Lantern is a free internet censorship circumvention tool that operates in some of the most extreme censorship environments, such as China, Iran, and Russia. It uses wide variety of protocols and techniques that obfuscate network traffic and/or co-mingle traffic with protocols censors are reluctant to block. It also uses domain fronting. It is not an anonymity tool like Tor.
The Tor Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization based in Winchester, New Hampshire. It is founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and five others. The Tor Project is primarily responsible for maintaining software for the Tor anonymity network.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to computer security:
