Irad is back on the internet, more or less

TALAS — Iradi websites have returned to the results of foreign search engines for the first time since October 2023. The Herald's own pages, the Office of the Governor's portal, the e-Irad services and IradOne can be found again from Almaty, Istanbul and Chicago, readers abroad told this newspaper this week, and Iradi engineers who track the zone say most sites hosted in the ISEZ were reappearing in the results through July.

Since the protest data cut of October 2023, the "national segment" mode of Attelkom's international gateways had never been fully switched off, so that foreign visitors and search crawlers trying to reach a site hosted in the ISEZ received only an outage page. In June Attelkom moved its international traffic to new gateway equipment, bought with Chinese export credit, which blocks listed sites one by one instead of refusing foreign connections wholesale.

Attelkom described the change as "routine network modernization" and declined to say what was on the list. Sites that were blocked inside Irad before the change are still blocked. "The door is open again," said an engineer at a Talas hosting firm. "It is a different door, and somebody else holds the key."

Believers in the theory that foreign companies have erased Irad from the internet were not convinced. Students in Talas have a new line instead: "Google knows we exist now."