Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it [1] to no avail. Using these terminals activists and journalists continue to upload videos of demonstrations to social media which has enabled analyses that show demonstrations are very wide spread [2] and continue to grow.
They are almost completely inaccessible to the average Iranian. A friend of mine who has come a long way to fight Iranian censorship told me that they essentially don't exist.
Compare that to the number of cell phone users which is very close to 100%. All estimates of the number of mobile subscribers or number of mobile phone numbers are greater than the total population.
They must be smuggled inside the country and the dictatorship can say anything they want and charge if they get caught so they must be very few in numbers
I don't know too much about starlink but is there a way that someone can pay for other person's usage and then build a starlink receiver or something from spare parts or like easy accesible parts from the world?
Because how would people get starlink device. I dont know the mecanism of startlink though or how it works
Where are the ground stations Iranian traffic is using?
Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.
But its not about censorship in the usual sense really. Its about preventing peer to peer communication. With less than a percent of iranians having access to each other either locally or via foreign internet, they cut down their ability to organise significantly. Starlink doesnt offer a solution here. Starlink doesnt matter. Every starlink person could turn up to a protest and it would still be less impactful than previous protests.
The problem with starlink is when the taliban turn off the intenet, if you use it to concerning (tweet, talk to news channel, post a podcast), the governemt know.
> Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.
You really think iran is going to bomb turkey (a nato country) over this?
Yes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.
The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.
I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.
I've got to think it's easy to find starlink receivers--I know they use a directed beam but they must give off a bunch of lateral noise, right? Or does Starlink use the same frequency bands as other common equipment such that it would be difficult to distinguish starlink signals from others? If the government was motivated they could surely start finding these receivers, right?
The discussion about Starlink is interesting, but with only ~0.1% of the population having access, the real story is the 99.9% who are cut off right now. The asymmetry between those who can broadcast to the world and those who can't is staggering — and even among that 0.1%, many are too afraid to broadcast anything, knowing the risks.
There's no single mechanism. Iran's internet is diverse at the edge, and bottlenecked at the international gateway.
Censorship, throttling, and (presumably) surveillance occurs at both layers. In some cases, also the region matters (Sistan and Baluchistan for example have experienced extended blackouts). In part that heterogeneity is because they still ideally want to keep businesses or VIPs online to mitigate the economic loss or logistical issues.
Consequently, the actual means of blocking tends to be on an ISP basis: some will simply drop packets, some will have left certain endpoints open, some will leave international DNS open, etc etc. All that changes when activists notice, exploit the opening, and then the ISP finds out. And then sometimes the TIC (the gateway) will impose blanket limitations or throttling.
My impression is that Iranian intelligence cares less about means than effectiveness, and ISP operators want to keep their license, livelihoods and lives, so they figure out how to meet the mandate. Given that this is something like the fourth blackout in recent years, they've gotten enough practice that there's few options out (that aren't Starlink).
> Consequently, the actual means of blocking tends to be on an ISP basis: some will simply drop packets, some will have left certain endpoints open, some will leave international DNS open, etc etc. All that changes when activists notice, exploit the opening, and then the ISP finds out. And then sometimes the TIC (the gateway) will impose blanket limitations or throttling.
Your international dns is interesting post, can dns over https still work like cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 (I don't think cf would work but still) or any other service?
Is there any iranian person in here hackernews who can test if international dns query works?
There are ways to send some very important data (although small so a little limited but I think in current time if it can help 1% it helps) that I saw that we can program dns to send each other arbitrary data as well
In fact there is a tool which can in fact run dns queries and create a sort of finger like protocol on it called dns.toys https://www.dns.toys/
Which can basically have some cli application like experience on top of dns and there msut be dns tools for communications as well.
Wow its so nice this excuse just happens to shut down the internet when an astronomically unpopular regime faces vast protests after years of economic and political mismanagement
I gave this a skim and a keyword search. Note that I'm not familiar with the matter.
The article claims that the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar that kicked off in 2017 has been substantively fueled by Facebook propaganda efforts, with strong links to Myanmar's own "security forces" (military).
> it's to prevent foreign interference (like CIA) from fueling civil unrest and spreading AI deepfakes, as seen in Myanmar and Brazil
In contrast then, you seem to allege that it was actually a foreign interference campaign by the CIA? Or am I misunderstanding what you're proposing?
Because if I'm not, I fail to see how what you linked supports that at all. Even your mention of deepfakes seems very questionable, as those haven't been a thing until late 2017, by which point this cleansing effort was already long underway. I further see that the US has formally condemned these events, although of course that does not rule out involvement.
Can't wait for a certain dictator to get a cellmate, so that our Persian and Kurdish friends can have freedom, including free unrestricted internet access.
Sure, a US invasion of Iran would undoubtedly lead to good things. And how can you say the Kurds are friends of the USA (I'm presuming you mean friends of the USA) given how many times they've been abandoned?
Just take a look at what happened to Libya, sometimes removing a "bad person" will cause a far worse situation to evolve. Like literal human slavery.
I will never cease to be amazed at the amnesia that arises when folks in power decide now is a good time to sell a war to the people.
In Iran they have had several police forces join the protestors at this point. Hopefully its a theme that continues and includes the military.
It only takes about 30% of the population supporting the regime plus military intervention to hold onto power. For some time now it seems that they've been below the 30% mark.
All correct. But something needs to be frontloaded.
1. Even if removing <bad government> would be good for that country, that doesn’t give some other state the right to do it. We let these entities get away with murder because they are our friends and they have the biggest guns, that’s it.
2. Always interrogate the real reasons why a state is doing it.
Now only after that we get to the facts like all those times it ended horribly for the people that <state> was supposed to help.
Yes, both Venezuela and (in your hypothetical) Iran would certainly be better and not worse after US intervention. How could they not, with such a great track record (Iraq, Lybia, Chile, Guatemala,...)!
Lora is fine if you want to send a very short message. Its not useful for much else.
Its also not a prevalent technology compared to general.internet/mobile phone.
Organising resistance with it is the pipe dream of those who play with chips and antennas, but its not something thats going to happen when crowds and mobs form up in a situation like this. Not least because the hardware is not accessible to your average citizen.
Iran can end up in a much more dire state. It can end up another Syria / Libya.. or worse another aggressive group like Taliban can take hold of the central government.
I also fear that the looming, imminent war between Israel and Iran is going to make things works. I'm expecting Israel to start a conflict within the next 6 months (or sooner) with the aid of United States.
This is the weakest IRGC have been. Many of their allies have been crippled, they have water issues, economical issues and now protests.
I think that securing Venezuela's oil aids this, should IRAN attempt to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, it will allow Israel and United States to maintain reserves (to what extend, I don't know).
I think things are going to get difficult for Iranian people, no matter what.
It worked out poorly for America — we got stuck in a long expensive war that we got basically nothing from — but for the average Iraqi? I'd much rather be an Iraqi citizen than an Iranian one, and that wouldn't have been true in the 90s. Saddam was pretty evil — and a bad leader. Iraq's GDP per capita is 6x higher today than it was in 2002, a year before the invasion.
marcosdumay's comment of here explained situation (giving it more attention)
they can censor IPv4 when they want, but they don't know how to censor IPv6. So they block it entirely.
This is the reason why they aren't blacking out IPv4
From my own experience, my ex gf was iranian. She was using discord via some psiphon vpn or something iirc idk how she got access to it but she had it.
I didn't trust psiphon that much so I asked her to install proton vpn and it did work. I wanted to play minecraft with her so prismlauncher but resources couldn't be downloaded so I made her download protonvpn so that she can play minecraft with me/install it (piracy was forced and also at that point necessary)
She was using tlauncher which somehow worked but tlauncher was russian spyware and prism launcher was open source
I talked to her about how she could use stablecoins crypto but crypto was illegal so ended up not suggesting it in the end to prevent inflation or talked to her about gold which is wild considering its like 3-4 months after we broke up but inflation is at 50% now.
Anyways the point being that protonvpn worked and other vpn worked too.
My question is, would things like protonvpn work after this blackout? I mean marco's and other comments in a thread explain to me that ipv4 can be blocked by them so I presume vpn's for ipv4 would shut down. And so vpns would most likely be using ipv6 which got blocked down
So does that mean that now Iranian people can't access vpns?
I also saw the other day some video about how when people called Iranian numbers from outside countries some random AI robot ass voice called and asked who are you and who are you talking to? And gave pause, and the most logical explaination to it was that the govt was recording these things so dont say anything to them. It was a creepypasta video.
Briar might help but Briar still leaks some metadata when I talked to their authors or heard about it online.
Instagram isn't blocked in Iran so are these social media apps still there after the blackout?
This raises so many questions and wtf is happening in the world
> they can censor IPv4 when they want, but they don't know how to censor IPv6
I'm curious why this is the case? As far as I know the primary benefits of v6 is just the increased address space. Does it provide any privacy benefits? What would prevent Iran from doing the same censorship?
The discussion here assumes that the Iranian government is responsible for this blackout. I actually don't understand enough about network routing to undestand the OP dashboard linked to or be able to answer this question, but could it instead be the work of an opponent preparing to attack Iran?
Seems more likely that an authoritarian regime is suppressing protests. Unless there has been a troop buildup of which I am unaware, there's no imminent invasion.
Matt Lakeman's recent "Notes on Afghanistan" actually covers this as he first-hand experienced a similar situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban had shut off the internet:
"The internet was out. Everywhere. Across the entire country. No cell data, no wifi, no phone service, and as far as I could tell, there are no landlines in Afghanistan [...] But now the blackout was total. Our waiter was complaining to my guide that he couldn’t contact his mother in a western province. I saw other people in the crowded restaurant fiddling with their phones and looking annoyed. I asked my guide what he thought was going on. He shrugged."
"Without internet and phones, people can’t talk to loved ones, businesses can’t function, trade can’t function, and even government offices can’t function. Only the Taliban with their well-established network of short-wave radios can function. But still, if the internet remains off long enough in Afghanistan, the country’s economy and society may very well collapse. Afghans couldn’t get money from banks. Soon enough, would food stop being delivered to cities?"
Russia has been systematically shutting down the Internet for a long time now, to disrupt Ukrainian drones. The effects were very painful intially, especially re payment systems; people were encouraged to withdraw and carry cash. Now they are shifting more and more towards a "whitelisting" approach where a handful of services continue to function while everything else is turned off. As usual in Russia, people complain but adapt.
In recent years they have been trying to build a nation-wide Intranet that can function while international gateways are blocked. It is not perfect and every time they block the Internet, many issues happen but for the most port critical network services (such as payments) continue to function.
Seems like it would be an easy target for the government (or really anyone) to DOS, right? Presumably there's no good way for the nation-wide intranet to exclude government actors? I'm just thinking out loud; I'm glad to hear something is being done and I wish the Iranian people the best.
Seems like v4s zeroed out for a tiny bit too, but even now they are substantially lower than normal. Odd behavior, I don't know if its a precursor to an attack or some infra issue
for context: There is a call to action from an opposition leader for people to join the protests today. They normally cutoff internet infrastructure on purpose in these cases so people cannot communicate
An attack would probably undermine the protests. From a strategy perspective, probably the last thing Israel/USA want to do is give the Iranian regime a common enemy to rally around in the midst of a protest that might plausibly over throw the Iranian regime.
Is this the first country which genuinely effectively is able to ban tor?
Because even in China, tor can work through bridges or some other methods and even Chinese firewalls aren't so extreme as iran right now.
Edit: forgot that north korea exists so I guess the second country but even in north korea there was this chinese interviewer or japanese interviewer who contacted people in north korea ig and those north koreans then interviewed for the first time completely uncensored north korea and it was brutal (a girl saying both her parents died and she was so so skinny i think) , they then went and smuggled the tapes from north korea to china and then to japan and then the company/production company or something blurred the peoples faces involved for anonymity.
There's also this 1 steam connection in north korea so its just gonna be a mystery if we ever see a north korean person using a tor but I am 99% sure that it wont but north korea also got 1 steam connection so you never know.
I'm an Iranian and this protest is very different because it's not about a specific government policy ... It's about the totality of the regime. Unfortunately, government has been following the same old brutal playbook by killing protesters and cutting off the Internet.
that would make it much more suspicious the protests are being orchestrated from outside by CIA/Mossad...
The "regime" is a republic with regularly held presidential (8 presidents in 45 years) and parliamentary elections. What would you like to replace it with? Monarchy
Do people not realize how many American services block IPv6 only requests? This is an aggressively worded response. If Israel had done the same thing, people on here would applaud their cybersecurity.
I just spent the better part of an hour, trying to track down anomalies, in one of my servers (Iran feeds us a lot of data), only to find DNS (IPv4) is not resolving. It worked fine, just a bit earlier.
How many conspiracy theories can people suggest instead of accepting that peaceful Iranians want to live and not be concerned that they won't have water or food to eat
I'd go with reticulum using also loras bridges. You can get data over multiple kilometers, route them to the internet easily, and with a much smarter routing scheme than meshtastic.
> The event was framed by authorities as a demonstration of national solidarity amid a backdrop of ongoing unrest and anti-government protests across multiple Iranian cities, which entered their second week
Two counterintuitive/surprising lessons I've come to appreciate:
1.Talent pools in nation states are extraordinarily deep-- much deeper than they appear. Countries can suffer from brain drain for decades (or centuries!) but when conditions call for it, superbly talented people somehow manifest.
2. The correlation between talent and conscience is weak. Nation states always manage to find superbly talented people to work on problems many of us would recoil from.
This is so much true! Indeed you can find absolutely everywhere absolutely incredible brilliant people in any area you want. The reason for the 1st and 3rd world is that is difficult to come by enough people and then coordinate them: is about critical mass and alignment.
About 2. also 100% true: intelligence/knowledge is totally independent of any other trait.
I tend to agree with most of what you said regarding all governments and countries. What may not be widely known is that some authoritarian regimes have been accused by expatriates of identifying and indoctrinating intellectually gifted children into their state-sponsored organizations for use by these entities for unmentionable purposes. Of course, it's next to impossible to find written documentation, with specific details since detailed evidence in such states are understandably hard to retrieve. Most of these accounts arrive through word of mouth.
Counter-intuitive? The primary motivation for fretting about Brain Drain (whether it is true or not is secondary) is because the people who fret about it are educated professionals, precisely the people who are prone to build their identity around the idea that society thrives and succumbs based on their own existence.
The same people who have unironically latched onto the idea of Meritocracy. A concept/idea that was literally conceived as a parody.
IDK for sure, but might be harder to maintain, monitor, and block.
One characteristic of v4 is it's somewhat reasonable to do a straight forward block on a range of addresses to shut down access. This is still somewhat possible with v6, but harder as there's simply a much larger portion of ip addresses that can be all over the place. It's theoretically a lot easier for anyone that wants to bypass a simple filter to grab a new public IP address.
Because v6 IPs are cheap, expendable and routing it over encrypted tunnels does not look suspicious. Anyone can buy a block and with little help announce them from multiple locations including home, mobile, uni wifi, and route further from there.
A lot of anti censorship organizations have trouble getting more IPv4 /24 for cost reasons or moving it around to different AS since they would go offline.
With IPv6, you can get IPv6 /40 from ARIN/RIPE no problem. You slice that up into /48 and just start bouncing it all over the place. When one /48 goes down, you move everything to another /48, switch providers if required and continue.
EDIT: They also tend to get multiple blocks as well for when ISP figures out to root /40.
Stuxnet v2? Speculation I know, but wow, IPv4 came back up, but IPv6 is completely out, looks like 48 million devices? Compared to IPv4's 47 thousand (wow that's insane).
Looking at IPv6 its not 0 exactly, looks like probably censorship, only some devices allowed online? Some other comment mentioned there's calls to protest again today.
Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it [1] to no avail. Using these terminals activists and journalists continue to upload videos of demonstrations to social media which has enabled analyses that show demonstrations are very wide spread [2] and continue to grow.
[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink....
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre28d2j2zxo
Probably the goal of the blackouts is to hinder organizing on social media, discord, whatsapp, etc, not to prevent news getting out.
They are almost completely inaccessible to the average Iranian. A friend of mine who has come a long way to fight Iranian censorship told me that they essentially don't exist.
There are ~100,000 users, about 0.1% of the population: https://www.newsweek.com/starlink-usage-iran-skyrockets-brea...
Compare that to the number of cell phone users which is very close to 100%. All estimates of the number of mobile subscribers or number of mobile phone numbers are greater than the total population.
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They must be smuggled inside the country and the dictatorship can say anything they want and charge if they get caught so they must be very few in numbers
I don't know too much about starlink but is there a way that someone can pay for other person's usage and then build a starlink receiver or something from spare parts or like easy accesible parts from the world?
Because how would people get starlink device. I dont know the mecanism of startlink though or how it works
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Those who have one surely keep that fact secret.
Where are the ground stations Iranian traffic is using?
Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.
But its not about censorship in the usual sense really. Its about preventing peer to peer communication. With less than a percent of iranians having access to each other either locally or via foreign internet, they cut down their ability to organise significantly. Starlink doesnt offer a solution here. Starlink doesnt matter. Every starlink person could turn up to a protest and it would still be less impactful than previous protests.
My starlink in Afghanistan downlinks in Sofia.
The problem with starlink is when the taliban turn off the intenet, if you use it to concerning (tweet, talk to news channel, post a podcast), the governemt know.
> Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.
You really think iran is going to bomb turkey (a nato country) over this?
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Isn't it possible to jam the starlink receiver?
Yes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.
The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.
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I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.
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Yes, with the caveat that you'll need decent line of sight to it.
I've got to think it's easy to find starlink receivers--I know they use a directed beam but they must give off a bunch of lateral noise, right? Or does Starlink use the same frequency bands as other common equipment such that it would be difficult to distinguish starlink signals from others? If the government was motivated they could surely start finding these receivers, right?
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Destroy the satellites? I mean all that have to do is screw up the trajectory of some of the satellites to cause exponential collisions...
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> social media which has enabled analyses
Social media is such a narrow lens that I would be cautious accepting that analysis at face value.
[flagged]
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in 2019 internet shutdown happened just before crackdown on protests
The discussion about Starlink is interesting, but with only ~0.1% of the population having access, the real story is the 99.9% who are cut off right now. The asymmetry between those who can broadcast to the world and those who can't is staggering — and even among that 0.1%, many are too afraid to broadcast anything, knowing the risks.
The key is that the 99% can transfer data and such internally to the country; the 0.1% can then leak it out.
How effectively can they share data domestically during blackouts?
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but, regrettably, at a trickle
Government enacted shut down due to protests. I'd like to hear more about how they actually do this. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-cutting-internet-amid-dead...
There's no single mechanism. Iran's internet is diverse at the edge, and bottlenecked at the international gateway.
Censorship, throttling, and (presumably) surveillance occurs at both layers. In some cases, also the region matters (Sistan and Baluchistan for example have experienced extended blackouts). In part that heterogeneity is because they still ideally want to keep businesses or VIPs online to mitigate the economic loss or logistical issues.
Consequently, the actual means of blocking tends to be on an ISP basis: some will simply drop packets, some will have left certain endpoints open, some will leave international DNS open, etc etc. All that changes when activists notice, exploit the opening, and then the ISP finds out. And then sometimes the TIC (the gateway) will impose blanket limitations or throttling.
My impression is that Iranian intelligence cares less about means than effectiveness, and ISP operators want to keep their license, livelihoods and lives, so they figure out how to meet the mandate. Given that this is something like the fourth blackout in recent years, they've gotten enough practice that there's few options out (that aren't Starlink).
> Consequently, the actual means of blocking tends to be on an ISP basis: some will simply drop packets, some will have left certain endpoints open, some will leave international DNS open, etc etc. All that changes when activists notice, exploit the opening, and then the ISP finds out. And then sometimes the TIC (the gateway) will impose blanket limitations or throttling.
Your international dns is interesting post, can dns over https still work like cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 (I don't think cf would work but still) or any other service?
Is there any iranian person in here hackernews who can test if international dns query works?
There are ways to send some very important data (although small so a little limited but I think in current time if it can help 1% it helps) that I saw that we can program dns to send each other arbitrary data as well
In fact there is a tool which can in fact run dns queries and create a sort of finger like protocol on it called dns.toys https://www.dns.toys/
Which can basically have some cli application like experience on top of dns and there msut be dns tools for communications as well.
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You might then enjoy this story that was on the front page a couple of days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505352
> Government enacted shut down due to protests
Not just protests, it's to prevent foreign interference (like CIA) from fueling civil unrest and spreading AI deepfakes, as seen in Myanmar and Brazil
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Wow its so nice this excuse just happens to shut down the internet when an astronomically unpopular regime faces vast protests after years of economic and political mismanagement
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I gave this a skim and a keyword search. Note that I'm not familiar with the matter.
The article claims that the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar that kicked off in 2017 has been substantively fueled by Facebook propaganda efforts, with strong links to Myanmar's own "security forces" (military).
> it's to prevent foreign interference (like CIA) from fueling civil unrest and spreading AI deepfakes, as seen in Myanmar and Brazil
In contrast then, you seem to allege that it was actually a foreign interference campaign by the CIA? Or am I misunderstanding what you're proposing?
Because if I'm not, I fail to see how what you linked supports that at all. Even your mention of deepfakes seems very questionable, as those haven't been a thing until late 2017, by which point this cleansing effort was already long underway. I further see that the US has formally condemned these events, although of course that does not rule out involvement.
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Pretty sure the CIA is perfectly capable of doing that without the internet.
If anything its easier to spread rumours without the internet to let people compare notes
or alternatively to shutdown information flowing out just before the killing begins
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2020/11/iran...
Most likely they just go to the head of the ISP (I bet there's only one) and say turn the internet off or else.
Yep, everything connecting to the Internet goes through the TIC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunication_Infrastructu...
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You assume threats need to be made.
One doesn't get to be the head of a business in a country like Iran without being a True Believer.
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they don't need to say the or else part since they control the whole country including the ISP.
Can't wait for a certain dictator to get a cellmate, so that our Persian and Kurdish friends can have freedom, including free unrestricted internet access.
And for fellow HN users from there, here's some great stuff: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://bitchat.free/
Sure, a US invasion of Iran would undoubtedly lead to good things. And how can you say the Kurds are friends of the USA (I'm presuming you mean friends of the USA) given how many times they've been abandoned?
Just take a look at what happened to Libya, sometimes removing a "bad person" will cause a far worse situation to evolve. Like literal human slavery.
I will never cease to be amazed at the amnesia that arises when folks in power decide now is a good time to sell a war to the people.
In Iran they have had several police forces join the protestors at this point. Hopefully its a theme that continues and includes the military.
It only takes about 30% of the population supporting the regime plus military intervention to hold onto power. For some time now it seems that they've been below the 30% mark.
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All correct. But something needs to be frontloaded.
1. Even if removing <bad government> would be good for that country, that doesn’t give some other state the right to do it. We let these entities get away with murder because they are our friends and they have the biggest guns, that’s it.
2. Always interrogate the real reasons why a state is doing it.
Now only after that we get to the facts like all those times it ended horribly for the people that <state> was supposed to help.
> a US invasion of Iran would undoubtedly lead to good things.
I think their neighbor would disagree.
> sell a war to the people.
If you have to sell the war, then you have no business conducting it.
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You also forget how panama Germany, Japan, South Korea are better now after removing their authoritarian regimes.
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Even as we speak Kurds are getting attacked near Aleppo by US-backed ex-Al-Qaeda president of Syria.
Sadly for the Kurds I’d say they are still pretty good friends to the US, as poorly as it’s been reciprocated.
As for the rest of what you said, no notes.
Yes, both Venezuela and (in your hypothetical) Iran would certainly be better and not worse after US intervention. How could they not, with such a great track record (Iraq, Lybia, Chile, Guatemala,...)!
More likely Asad will get another buddy to play Sounter Strike with - both he and Yanukovich must be bored to death by now in 2 people.
The Kurdish separatists and militants allied with the wrong country and they have very little chance of a state of their own.
Iranians though, sure, things can change with or without the current govt
>The Kurdish separatists and militants allied with the wrong country
Which country is that? Last I checked, the Kurds were helping out the US a couple of years ago and got absolutely screwed.
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how does Yggdrasil work if ipv6 is dead?
Yggdrasil uses exclusively IPv6 for routing on its own overlay network, but not on the Internet. See https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/faq.html#does-yggdrasil-...
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It forms its own IPv6 network separate from the internet. It can peer over any IPv4 or IPv6 network, including the internet, LAN, or PTP.
I'm also curious about LoRA / sneakernet applications. Have those been widely used in cases of censorship?
Lora is fine if you want to send a very short message. Its not useful for much else.
Its also not a prevalent technology compared to general.internet/mobile phone.
Organising resistance with it is the pipe dream of those who play with chips and antennas, but its not something thats going to happen when crowds and mobs form up in a situation like this. Not least because the hardware is not accessible to your average citizen.
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MbS? MbZ?
Like when the US removed Saddam?
How did that wirk out?
You need more of a plan than just get rid of a dictator.
Iran can end up in a much more dire state. It can end up another Syria / Libya.. or worse another aggressive group like Taliban can take hold of the central government.
I also fear that the looming, imminent war between Israel and Iran is going to make things works. I'm expecting Israel to start a conflict within the next 6 months (or sooner) with the aid of United States.
This is the weakest IRGC have been. Many of their allies have been crippled, they have water issues, economical issues and now protests.
I think that securing Venezuela's oil aids this, should IRAN attempt to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, it will allow Israel and United States to maintain reserves (to what extend, I don't know).
I think things are going to get difficult for Iranian people, no matter what.
It worked out poorly for America — we got stuck in a long expensive war that we got basically nothing from — but for the average Iraqi? I'd much rather be an Iraqi citizen than an Iranian one, and that wouldn't have been true in the 90s. Saddam was pretty evil — and a bad leader. Iraq's GDP per capita is 6x higher today than it was in 2002, a year before the invasion.
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We have a pro this time
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marcosdumay's comment of here explained situation (giving it more attention)
they can censor IPv4 when they want, but they don't know how to censor IPv6. So they block it entirely.
This is the reason why they aren't blacking out IPv4
From my own experience, my ex gf was iranian. She was using discord via some psiphon vpn or something iirc idk how she got access to it but she had it.
I didn't trust psiphon that much so I asked her to install proton vpn and it did work. I wanted to play minecraft with her so prismlauncher but resources couldn't be downloaded so I made her download protonvpn so that she can play minecraft with me/install it (piracy was forced and also at that point necessary)
She was using tlauncher which somehow worked but tlauncher was russian spyware and prism launcher was open source
I talked to her about how she could use stablecoins crypto but crypto was illegal so ended up not suggesting it in the end to prevent inflation or talked to her about gold which is wild considering its like 3-4 months after we broke up but inflation is at 50% now.
Anyways the point being that protonvpn worked and other vpn worked too.
My question is, would things like protonvpn work after this blackout? I mean marco's and other comments in a thread explain to me that ipv4 can be blocked by them so I presume vpn's for ipv4 would shut down. And so vpns would most likely be using ipv6 which got blocked down
So does that mean that now Iranian people can't access vpns?
I also saw the other day some video about how when people called Iranian numbers from outside countries some random AI robot ass voice called and asked who are you and who are you talking to? And gave pause, and the most logical explaination to it was that the govt was recording these things so dont say anything to them. It was a creepypasta video.
Briar might help but Briar still leaks some metadata when I talked to their authors or heard about it online.
Instagram isn't blocked in Iran so are these social media apps still there after the blackout?
This raises so many questions and wtf is happening in the world
> they can censor IPv4 when they want, but they don't know how to censor IPv6
I'm curious why this is the case? As far as I know the primary benefits of v6 is just the increased address space. Does it provide any privacy benefits? What would prevent Iran from doing the same censorship?
Just DPI hardware not supporting IPv6.
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It depends on how they do it, but you can shut down the router ports that connect to the rest of the world easily if they want.
Internet participation is voluntary between countries.
Most of what's happening in the word can be boiled down to either someone craving power, or someone in power desperately struggling to hold on to it.
Map of protests:
https://pouyaii.github.io/Iran/
Can you please re-share this as a separate link? It deserves it's own attention
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547303
There was a recent post containing a (different) map of the protests that was flagged, but here goes
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I remember reading about how Venezuela had an internet blackout preceding US attack, presumably the blackout was an attack by US "cyber". Ah, here we are. https://securitybrief.co.uk/story/us-cyber-attack-on-venezue...
The discussion here assumes that the Iranian government is responsible for this blackout. I actually don't understand enough about network routing to undestand the OP dashboard linked to or be able to answer this question, but could it instead be the work of an opponent preparing to attack Iran?
Seems more likely that an authoritarian regime is suppressing protests. Unless there has been a troop buildup of which I am unaware, there's no imminent invasion.
Iran has shut down the internet nationwide several times before, this is nothing new when there are protests.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538001
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Wow, that's a lot of Israeli operatives. Sounds like there are more Mossad agents living in Iran than there are Israelis living in Israel!
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Sure thing. I’m sure Israel also caused hyperinflation and stopped the rain from falling, right?
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When the internet will be working again I will show your comment to my friend in Iran, I think he will find it hilarious.
how do you know?
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Not specific to this IPv6 event, but I was wondering what happens to public services during these Internet shutdowns?
Does everything stop or it's mostly business as usual minus some things?
I would imagine hospitals, tax offices etc need the internet to work?
Matt Lakeman's recent "Notes on Afghanistan" actually covers this as he first-hand experienced a similar situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban had shut off the internet:
"The internet was out. Everywhere. Across the entire country. No cell data, no wifi, no phone service, and as far as I could tell, there are no landlines in Afghanistan [...] But now the blackout was total. Our waiter was complaining to my guide that he couldn’t contact his mother in a western province. I saw other people in the crowded restaurant fiddling with their phones and looking annoyed. I asked my guide what he thought was going on. He shrugged."
"Without internet and phones, people can’t talk to loved ones, businesses can’t function, trade can’t function, and even government offices can’t function. Only the Taliban with their well-established network of short-wave radios can function. But still, if the internet remains off long enough in Afghanistan, the country’s economy and society may very well collapse. Afghans couldn’t get money from banks. Soon enough, would food stop being delivered to cities?"
https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/#
Russia has been systematically shutting down the Internet for a long time now, to disrupt Ukrainian drones. The effects were very painful intially, especially re payment systems; people were encouraged to withdraw and carry cash. Now they are shifting more and more towards a "whitelisting" approach where a handful of services continue to function while everything else is turned off. As usual in Russia, people complain but adapt.
Ironically, their long history of shutoff and censorship probably mean they're more resilient to stuff like this.
In recent years they have been trying to build a nation-wide Intranet that can function while international gateways are blocked. It is not perfect and every time they block the Internet, many issues happen but for the most port critical network services (such as payments) continue to function.
Seems like it would be an easy target for the government (or really anyone) to DOS, right? Presumably there's no good way for the nation-wide intranet to exclude government actors? I'm just thinking out loud; I'm glad to hear something is being done and I wish the Iranian people the best.
Seems like v4s zeroed out for a tiny bit too, but even now they are substantially lower than normal. Odd behavior, I don't know if its a precursor to an attack or some infra issue
for context: There is a call to action from an opposition leader for people to join the protests today. They normally cutoff internet infrastructure on purpose in these cases so people cannot communicate
Probably more likely a internet blackout to counter the protests.
For IPv4 the graph does not start at zero, but at around 45K.
Correct, click the "Min/Max scale" toggle to get a zero-based graph that shows the v4 reduction in context.
Yeah I am suprised everyone thinks this is necessarily internal. Could equally be related to IL/USA incoming aggression.
I'd at least keep an open mind for a while.
An attack would probably undermine the protests. From a strategy perspective, probably the last thing Israel/USA want to do is give the Iranian regime a common enemy to rally around in the midst of a protest that might plausibly over throw the Iranian regime.
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Considering the recent events going on, it’s definitely sus.
Quick question but would tor work in this case?
Is this the first country which genuinely effectively is able to ban tor?
Because even in China, tor can work through bridges or some other methods and even Chinese firewalls aren't so extreme as iran right now.
Edit: forgot that north korea exists so I guess the second country but even in north korea there was this chinese interviewer or japanese interviewer who contacted people in north korea ig and those north koreans then interviewed for the first time completely uncensored north korea and it was brutal (a girl saying both her parents died and she was so so skinny i think) , they then went and smuggled the tapes from north korea to china and then to japan and then the company/production company or something blurred the peoples faces involved for anonymity.
There's also this 1 steam connection in north korea so its just gonna be a mystery if we ever see a north korean person using a tor but I am 99% sure that it wont but north korea also got 1 steam connection so you never know.
Tor can reach IPv6 destinations through IPv4 entry nodes, if that's what your asking.
IPv4 is sanctioned/heavily restricted in iran as well, I mean very high filtering
The reason they didn't do this for ipv6 is because ipv6 obviously has a lot more addresses and so they just ended up blocking it whole.
Atleast that's what I read in one of the comment threads discussions in here
I don't think that in iran there would still be any available ipv4 entry nodes that they would allow. They would filter/block it as well?
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I'm an Iranian and this protest is very different because it's not about a specific government policy ... It's about the totality of the regime. Unfortunately, government has been following the same old brutal playbook by killing protesters and cutting off the Internet.
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Thats such bollocks. you can't just order up a whole country protest, prolonged protest when you want.
The average person in the street isn't going to protest, risk death and torture because some bloke with a dodgy accent tells them to
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>American: no you are wrong... let me educate you about your own struggle.
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that would make it much more suspicious the protests are being orchestrated from outside by CIA/Mossad...
The "regime" is a republic with regularly held presidential (8 presidents in 45 years) and parliamentary elections. What would you like to replace it with? Monarchy
> The "regime" is a republic with regularly held presidential (8 presidents in 45 years) and parliamentary elections.
I'd think the regime thing refers to the Supreme Leader of 36 years and his Guardian Council, no?
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I would like people not to get killed when they protest
I would like the internet not to get shut down during the protest
Am I asking too much?
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Do people not realize how many American services block IPv6 only requests? This is an aggressively worded response. If Israel had done the same thing, people on here would applaud their cybersecurity.
I just spent the better part of an hour, trying to track down anomalies, in one of my servers (Iran feeds us a lot of data), only to find DNS (IPv4) is not resolving. It worked fine, just a bit earlier.
Ah, well...
I created a comment in here but does this mean that you cant do something like dns tunneling in iran?
Oh. Looks like they're not announcing V4 networks as well now.
How many conspiracy theories can people suggest instead of accepting that peaceful Iranians want to live and not be concerned that they won't have water or food to eat
Its for times like this briar or similar applications are super useful. Also memory sticks. To bad distributing is not to simple.
briar leaks some metadata from what I've heard (unconfirmed). Meshtastic seems a better alternative
I'd go with reticulum using also loras bridges. You can get data over multiple kilometers, route them to the internet easily, and with a much smarter routing scheme than meshtastic.
https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/
Update: Ipv4 had also blacked out but now its back again
IPv6 is still blacked out
Teredo/Miredo would work on top of IPV4.
Free Iran from the terrorists
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We live in interesting times
I wish interesting times would come without the castrated internet
I sometimes feel like declaring a fatwa on IPv6 too, to be fair
Soon free Coca-Cola for Iran.
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How so?
It’s intended to be human readable, but it’s not and its slow adoption is proof of that. A random 10 digit string would arguably be better.
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> The event was framed by authorities as a demonstration of national solidarity amid a backdrop of ongoing unrest and anti-government protests across multiple Iranian cities, which entered their second week
More:
https://x.com/Safarnejad_IR/status/2009060050527244311
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If pro Iran govt then why shutdown internet and shoot protestors?
We don’t know that Iran shutdown the internet, they never claimed to do that. Any “protesters” that got shot were Israeli plants.
Mind you, the US actually shot and killed a real protester yesterday.
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A communications disruption could mean only one thing...
No competent network engineer wants to work in Iran, so government doesn't know how to block v6 properly. End result: just get rid of it entirely!
Two counterintuitive/surprising lessons I've come to appreciate:
1.Talent pools in nation states are extraordinarily deep-- much deeper than they appear. Countries can suffer from brain drain for decades (or centuries!) but when conditions call for it, superbly talented people somehow manifest.
2. The correlation between talent and conscience is weak. Nation states always manage to find superbly talented people to work on problems many of us would recoil from.
This is so much true! Indeed you can find absolutely everywhere absolutely incredible brilliant people in any area you want. The reason for the 1st and 3rd world is that is difficult to come by enough people and then coordinate them: is about critical mass and alignment.
About 2. also 100% true: intelligence/knowledge is totally independent of any other trait.
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I tend to agree with most of what you said regarding all governments and countries. What may not be widely known is that some authoritarian regimes have been accused by expatriates of identifying and indoctrinating intellectually gifted children into their state-sponsored organizations for use by these entities for unmentionable purposes. Of course, it's next to impossible to find written documentation, with specific details since detailed evidence in such states are understandably hard to retrieve. Most of these accounts arrive through word of mouth.
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Counter-intuitive? The primary motivation for fretting about Brain Drain (whether it is true or not is secondary) is because the people who fret about it are educated professionals, precisely the people who are prone to build their identity around the idea that society thrives and succumbs based on their own existence.
The same people who have unironically latched onto the idea of Meritocracy. A concept/idea that was literally conceived as a parody.
Why would they want to block IPv6 specifically?
IDK for sure, but might be harder to maintain, monitor, and block.
One characteristic of v4 is it's somewhat reasonable to do a straight forward block on a range of addresses to shut down access. This is still somewhat possible with v6, but harder as there's simply a much larger portion of ip addresses that can be all over the place. It's theoretically a lot easier for anyone that wants to bypass a simple filter to grab a new public IP address.
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There are some pretty big protests happening right now: https://bsky.app/profile/chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3mbvphn4...
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Because v6 IPs are cheap, expendable and routing it over encrypted tunnels does not look suspicious. Anyone can buy a block and with little help announce them from multiple locations including home, mobile, uni wifi, and route further from there.
It's much more difficult to block.
A lot of anti censorship organizations have trouble getting more IPv4 /24 for cost reasons or moving it around to different AS since they would go offline.
With IPv6, you can get IPv6 /40 from ARIN/RIPE no problem. You slice that up into /48 and just start bouncing it all over the place. When one /48 goes down, you move everything to another /48, switch providers if required and continue.
EDIT: They also tend to get multiple blocks as well for when ISP figures out to root /40.
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(going with recent ipv6 discussion) they probably failed to make it work properly and decided that it's easier to block it
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Stuxnet v2? Speculation I know, but wow, IPv4 came back up, but IPv6 is completely out, looks like 48 million devices? Compared to IPv4's 47 thousand (wow that's insane).
Looking at IPv6 its not 0 exactly, looks like probably censorship, only some devices allowed online? Some other comment mentioned there's calls to protest again today.
They are almost certainly attempting to shut down communications due to the ongoing anti government protests.
No, it is the Iranian government shutting down the internet.
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