@cwSoel and I both have problems connecting to the forum without a VPN. It really looks like we attracted to much attention and got blocked. (Message #9281 by cwsoel – #Chat) Yeah…
OONI Explorer recently got blocked as well, and they said that they got a letter from Роскомнадзор with details on why the block has accurred. @henry, did you receive a similar email? And be on the lookout for Russian spies…
Lastest status for me: discuss.techlore.tech – broken | techlore.tech – working
UPDATE: The forum started working again. It’s good, but something is clearly going on
Oopsie, i might have had something to do with that…
Or maybe that’s just the collateral from their recent crusade on sites using ECH or hiding behind CDNs that enforce it, like Cloudflare. But this site doesn’t appear to enforce ECH or use Cloudflare at the moment though.
Seems to be a region specific advantage, just like with “slowdown” of Youtube spreading gradually (and still partially. It’s still not accessible for me
It seems like the issue happend when Firefox falls back to HTTP/2. I recently saw Firefox using QUIC in Wireshark, which was when the forum worked, but now it’s using TCP and the forum doesn’t work. This whole time Chrome was using UDP and the forum was working.
There’s no way for the censors to distinguish between connections to techlore.tech and discuss.techlore.tech. They might have an issue with the forum, but the entire site with all subdomains will get blocked. Because if they try to block a certain URL, since the site is working over HTTPS and they can’t extract URLs from the packets, so they block the entire *.techlore.tech, regardless of what subdomain they had an issue with in the first place. This is so overkill, but it’s necessary to achieve their goals.
In this case, the ip for techlore.tech and discuss.techlore.tech is different, so they just do an ip ban on discuss.techlore.tech (104.21.33.247) and not techlore.tech (75.2.60.5). (I know it’s an ip bad because curl https://104.21.33.247 fails)
They most likely won’t bother distinguishing between IPs and also likely won’t ban it by the IP address (not saying they won’t, it’s just less likely). Usually, they see a ‘violation’, they enter a violating URL or domain in the blacklists and then leave their blocking hard/software to do the rest. It’s simply another link that they process in thousands a day.
I don’t see a reason to think that this forum or core site have attracted some special attention for them to bother acknowledging that there’s actually two related but independent sites under the same TLD and second-level domain.
