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Showing posts from October, 2013

Psiphon and the 2013 Iranian Election

Psiphon has over a million active users every week. People use our software to get news, information and social media content that they would otherwise not be able to see. We offer apps for Windows and Android devices, mostly distributed through partnerships with news broadcasters and human rights organisations. This year, we’ve made a particularly big impact in Iran, coinciding with their Presidential election. Iran has always been a big challenge for us, and it’s also where we see the most people using our software. In a normal week, we see as many as 1.5 million unique users connect to our network from inside Iran. There are somewhere around 45 million people connected to the network in Iran, which accounts for 60% of the population . We knew that the election period was going to cause some problems, but had no idea exactly what we would face. First, as early as March there were reports that VPN software was being blocked inside the country, as reported on Wired magazine’s si