{"id":3819,"date":"2022-08-19T13:12:50","date_gmt":"2022-08-19T13:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/filter.watch\/en\/?p=3819"},"modified":"2022-10-11T19:55:07","modified_gmt":"2022-10-11T19:55:07","slug":"network-monitor-july-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/filter.watch\/english\/2022\/08\/19\/network-monitor-july-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Network Monitor: Iran\u2019s TIC Activated Google SafeSearch Across Several Search Engines"},"content":{"rendered":"

As reported in the June Network Monitor<\/a>, Iran\u2019s Telecommunication Infrastructure Company (TIC) activated SafeSearch<\/a> on Google for all Iranians instead of the regular Google search engine. Google<\/a> SafeSearch is a feature designed, in part, for children that excludes explicit content.<\/p>\n

On July 20, in response to a reporter\u2019s question on why they activated SafeSearch for citizens, Minister of ICT Issa Zarepour claimed<\/a> that, \"The activation of SafeSearch on search engines is the demand of Iranian families.\" However, he did not provide any information regarding how and when Iranian families requested Safe Search.<\/p>\n

By the end of July, SafeSearch was enforced on all search engines, including Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yandex. Interestingly, Yandex was blocked for years but recently unblocked after Zarepour\u2019s visit<\/a> to Russia in late July.<\/p>\n

On July 25, a power outage at the Telecommunication Infrastructure Company (TIC)\u2019s LCT (Large Capacity Tandem) building<\/a>, caused<\/a> an internet outage in several provinces by various\u00a0 providers. The LCT building is responsible for distributing the internet among Iran's internet providers and other companies. Earlier this year in March, electric issues led to a fire<\/a> in the very same building.<\/p>\n

The fact that these electric issues are recurring and TIC fails to secure power for such a strategic building demonstrates a clear sign of mismanagement at TIC.\u00a0 Iran\u2019s internet, which is centralized by design, is quite vulnerable by nature meaning that any technical issue or cyber attack could put the entire country\u2019s network access at risk.<\/p>\n

Based on data collected this month, several major internet outages occurred across the provinces of Kerman, Fars, Hormozgan, and Hamadan. Users in these provinces experienced prolonged outages lasting several days. Iranians in almost all provinces experienced one or more outages on July 25 due to the TIC power outage. No outages were reported for ChaharMahal and Bakhtiari province, or North Khorasan.<\/p>\n

Timeline of Regional Disruptions<\/h1>\n

NOTE:\u00a0 In some cases the available data allows Filterwatch to determine if the disruption is a type of shutdown of access or throttling (i.e., a dramatic slowing of connection speeds). In other cases we can just observe a disruption or outage of some kind without more specificity. <\/i>Overall, our existing tools are not always able to accurately identify and fully examine the nature and scale of disruptions to Iran\u2019s domestic internet connections.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Timeline of internet shutdowns, throttling, and disruptions based on regions and cities.<\/p>\n