isoHunt.com blocked in Dubai?

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 5:49 pm

I received an email that isohunt.com is inaccessible from Dubai, but verified-p2p-links.com works (alternate domain for isohunt.com). Can anyone else confirm?

We've also had issues with ISP's in different countries, either have problem accessing isohunt.com entirely or have extremely slow DNS in resolving isohunt.com (60s+). I'm not sure if there's some government sanctioned filtering in place (like in Dubai), but any report of network problems to isohunt.com is appreciated so we can see if we can find workarounds. Reply under this topic on verified-p2p-links.com, or post on our Wikipedia article (assuming you can access Wikipedia).

This is another case in point of why we need Network Neutrality.

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 3:43 am

Dubai does indeed employ very strict internet censorship. Porn, dating sites, political sites, any sites critical of Islam or of the Dubai dictatorship, any sites which express liberal views on sexuality, drugs etc, blogs, any sites which explain how to use proxies, any sites which list proxies, Flickr... the list goes on. P2P is banned, and if any other P2P network is working, it's only because the censors haven't found it yet, but rest assured that they will. Any "illicit" material discovered on a computer will result in a mandatory multi-year prison sentence. Dubai is like a rotten apple - pretty on the outside...

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 5:03 am

i live in saudi arabia wich is way more strict in censorship than dubai but isohunt isn't blocked and some of the torrents sites are blocked such as torrentz and all of the porn sites etc..
but trust me when someone wants or needs to get in a site he can do it by using a different proxy or a program that unblocks sites .

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 7:07 am

my boyfriend is currently working in abu dhabi.. just an hour from dubai.. he says that uae only has one isp, etisalat. and that isohunt is indeed blocked there. we haven't tried the alternate site though.

the only solution that we've come up with to fix this is i download the torrent file and save it in my computer, then i send the torrent file to him.. it's the only way that worked.

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:53 am

tinola wrote:

my boyfriend is currently working in abu dhabi.. just an hour from dubai.. he says that uae only has one isp, etisalat. and that isohunt is indeed blocked there. we haven't tried the alternate site though.

Yeah, he's right, most Gulf States run their entire connection through one isp so they can filter traffic, that's how the entire country of Qatar came to be blocked by Wikipedia for a time last year. In Qatar it's QTel, Dubai it's Etislat, not sure about Saudi, though I know that there's a stronger hacker / proxy culture in Saudi than the UAE. There are ways around it of course, but the information is hard to come by online because the authorities are very active in shutting down any information, or blogs that carry proxy lists etc. I used isohunt, Limewire etc in Qatar no problem, but in Dubai the filtering strategy is much more robust - you can't even load Flickr, BoingBoing or any kind of Skype / MSN etc.

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 10:40 am

I never knew it was like that in Dubai. Good luck to you all. One World, Many People, Much Love.

=^_@= ...kakashi says, "Yeah, Much Love To My People In The Middle East, but since I'm from Japan...Much Love To My People In The Middle West."

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 1:27 pm

In Algeria, it's the same....ishunt is opening once in a week!!!
also some stuff downloaded from there is about 0.3 kb/s when the file have 200 seeders!!!!

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 5:23 am

bs'd
Just to let you know that I am having no problems in Israel with Isohunt.As a matter of fact, it works better here than in the States
Don't know what it means, but thank you for everything.
M

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 10:26 am

a friend of mine lives out there and yeah, it's been inaccessible for the past year and a half. etisalat pick the most random sites to block too; habbo hotel's blocked because apparently it's a "dating site" and lastfm has "nudity" and same goes for flickr.. the pirate bay site is blocked completely a long with it's trackers, the only torrent site that's left alone is mininova

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 12:45 pm

if it helps any try switching DNS servers to opendns i know a few friends in college did this and it was able to get around some of theyre blocks and made them able to download a little bit again.

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 2:58 pm

I live in Dubai. Yes, since few months ago isohunt and other major torrent related sites are blocked!!! Crap Etisalat!!! Even flickr also got blocked.

Exception to IT related offices in Dubai Internet City complex, like my office, there's no filter at all.

Earlier social sites like facebook, myspace, etc got blocked but since people are protesting through newspaper/radio they unblocked some. FYI, 90% Dubai residents are expats where 30% of it from EU/US so you can imagine.

Some techies, like me, got to workaround it by purchasing VPN service, since free proxies are not reliable. There's a free VPN service my friend is using, but it's an ad-ware (+spyware?). I don't want to take a risk.
If anyone of you can tell free & nag-free VPN/proxy services, please PM.

And to Rhamadahn Dave, are you sure OpenDNS can do it? Because I too use OpenDNS but still it gets blocked.

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 4:55 pm

I'm using several services to bypass censorship. One of the best is strongvpn. com service. It's an OpenVPN or VPN accounts. While using OpenVPN for several months I can say that this service has stable and fast connection with real support. My torrents became to download much faster!

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 9:04 am

I live in Dubai and I have no trouble connecting to IsoHunt, I don't know what I would do without you! I am on du internet, which might be the reason why you are not blocked. There are two main ISPs in Dubai, Du and Etisilat. Du has nothing blocked, Etisilat has every other site blocked (they block nearly everything)

Anyway, Du customers in Dubai can access your site blockage free

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 9:17 am

I am in Qatar and although I can access Isohunt, when I do a search for new torrents it doesn't give me what I think is the correct result. For example, a search for Colbert Report or Daily Show indicates no torrents for the past two shows, when there are normally hundreds available.

Mininova is slow today also, mostly going to a page that tries to refresh to reconnect to the site. Torrentspy is blocked by the Qtel ISP (has been for about a year now), PirateBay and BTJunkie are working.

The strongvpn website is blocked here. Does anyone else have a recommendation for a good workaround or a good pay service to help circumvent all the censorship from the Qtel ISP?

-Thanks

Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 7:39 pm

opendns gets around some blocks but not all. best bet to use a vpn of some sort. also has anyone tried using proxies to get around said blocks?