Seems like a big flaw that low-orbit constellations have a dependency on GPS, which are high-altitude satellites. They're 40x further away and so have 1,600x greater path loss. Why can't they use their own satellites for this?
> "But Starlink receivers use GPS to locate and connect to satellites. “Since its 12-day war with Israel last June," The Times says, “Iran has been disrupting GPS signals.”"
This isn’t even true; Starlink can use the local starlink constellation for positioning and the option is available in the customer facing configuration specifically for GPS denied areas (since about two years ago), where it’s been used for ages.
Something else is going on here - perhaps there’s an edge case where Starlink can be made to perform poorly without falling back away from GPS, but I wouldn’t expect this since it’s been “tested” in the most GPS hostile places for quite some time now.
It sounds like Starlink uses GPS to localize the receiver, rather than for any active step in the communication link. Since most receivers are static, I wonder if an effective workaround to this is for the receiver to just remember its last GPS fix for longer, or worst-case allow a manual location specification in lieu of a GPS fix.
A user provided location cannot be trusted for geofencing purposes. A GNSS (GPS or other) is needed sooner or later. This is a legal requirement for sanction and regulation enforcement (US, if not others).
Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
According to [1], “[o]ne of the current generation of GPS satellites (Block III) weighs over 2,200 kg (4,850 lb), the weight of an average pickup truck. The body of these satellites are 1.8 m x 2.5 m x 3.4 m (5.9’ x 8.2’ x 11.2’) in size”. In comparison, “the current V2 Starlink satellite version weighs approximately 1,760 lbs (800 kilograms) at launch, almost three times heavier than the older generation satellites (weighing in at 573 lbs or 260 kg)” [2]
> Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
Thanks you provide some great insights on why starlink didnt use gps but still if starlink wants to focus itself as the uncensorable internet in places like protests etc. I feel like they can probably do this after this recent incident
I just can't feel but sad right now because starlink was still providing activists ways to report outside and that helped protestors a lot and information. Now even starlink got removed because starlink tried to save money and I think might not have thought about what if gps itself gets blocked.
This is giving very bad signals for Iran. Is there any way now that Protestors are able to communicate to the outside world/ activists be able to report data outside?
Chip scale atomic clocks are quite small[1], have been used in space, and could be part of the existing Starlink satellites. Finding reliable details about the orbital vehicles the internet eludes me.
GPS comparison is moot in this case, as there's no need for Starlink constellations to provide full GNSS capability, just locating the satellites precisely enough to facilitate beamforming.
GPS signals are extremely weak, and they're necessarily received from omnidirectional antennas that can't provide much antenna gain. In some sense it's a miracle of signal processing that GPS can ever be received.
For legal reasons I base this off of nothing but just turn your jammer to the sky. Could get fancy and point out directly at the satellites since my understanding is it's pretty easy to know where they are.
Edit to add: I do not mean the GPS satellites or the starlink ground terminals. That was not the question so that is not my answer. I mean the starlink satellites
This whole stalink for military use (Starshield) was a scam Elon sold the military from the beginning. Just like his dumb ass tunnels and his self driving cars. He is putting the military at risk.
Not too surprising, given that Starlink operates in Iran without a permit, "space pirate radio" style, and has something of a habit of making the access free when major protests happen and the government imposes a network blackout. Iranian government and Starlink have no love for each other, clearly.
It's a pattern by now: whenever a government wants to do something awful, it shuts down internet access - so that no one can hear it, see it or coordinate a response. And Starlink becomes a lifeline that the regime would rather people didn't have.
This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place. If you give a government a capability to restrict access to whatever it wants and enact a network blackout whenever it wants, it's a matter of time until it gets abused.
They "operate" in Iran because of OFAC issues general licenses under the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR Part 560) permitting non-commercial personal communications, including satellite internet for free expression. Starlink activation in 2022 protests and recent events exploited these, as Musk sought formal exemptions for "internet freedom."
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
Starlink isn't perfect, but at least it doesn't go for "it's so not our problem, we'll just make sure that every single VPN exit point Iranians use is GeoIP'd as Iran in our systems" like Google tends to, or "let's lick every authoritarian boot, we control the app distribution and our users will suck it up" like Apple does.
Not even Starlink has the balls to oppose the likes of Russia and China directly - they aren't operating there without a permit, sadly. But at least they don't kneel before every two-bit dictatorship and cave to every single "we want you to do censorship on our behalf" demand. Way better than what most tech companies do now.
Does anyone know how Iranians are _actually_ communicating right now? I remember seeing here on HN (admittedly a long time ago) some Bluetooth-mesh technologies that promised decentralized solutions to these very type of problems
So like they are very heavily DPI censored though and maybe govts able to spy on any messages you send right now but I feel like there is a still possibility that for the average communication, they might still exist but although heavily heavily censored/bad and I feel like protestors might not be able to communicate (which I feel like is the question you meant to be asking)
So TLDR: protestors must have a hard time sadly and they may be using bluetooth mesh or other tech, only they can tell after we figure things out but also lets say some major services websites might still exist after all if they bypass the dpi censorship for IPv4 services.
In my opinion, I feel like Protestors must be using mesh based technologies as you mention. We'll see what really ends up happening after we get some reports from Iran.
It is said they pulled the plug for all peering on Thursday, although I would assume some kind of government-run ISP may be operational still (I haven't checked Cloudlfare radar)
Hypothecally speaking.
If I were to live in an authoritarian country that would shut off all means of communication like that. What off grid technology would be viable?
in a country that hostile to you I would be worried about radiating any kind of EM, honestly. It's too easy to track and could cause undue targetting & victimization.
my real answer : I think at that point in time effort is best spent trying to arrange escape.
my technical answer : depends on the scene. directed optical/laser or microwave is very hard to track if that can facilitate the links you need -- but realistically most war-time off-grid comms historically has been established via runners, dropboxes, or community radio systems ; all options with very real inherent risks.
Under packetloss my assumption is text is king, but I wonder if forward error correcting audio and video is actually better in some ways?
Media is information rich. Maybe we're beyond a samzdat moment and the value in comms is contextual immediacy of live feeds, text can squeeze alongside.
Long ago, broadcast quality TV was shipped as slow feed. Maybe a tiktok generation goes back there: use a phone on the street (probably surreptitiously) do post production and upload asynchronously on 30% packetloss or worse for redistribution.
You are acting like people dont upload videos anymore.
The people filming protests in iran are probably not in range of their home starlink connected wifi. They are almost certainly filming stuff offline then uploading it later, not livestreaming.
Satellite signals are just weak RF signals and can be disrupted easily. There is nothing 'hardened' about them. It's funny that people think Starlink or any of its many incipient competitors are any different.
Starlink uses beamforming with directional antenna arrays, so it should be rather difficult to jam compared to omnidirectional antennas. It's basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Antenna arrays aren't perfect so it still picks up some energy omnidirectionally, but it should be possible to shield it with some metal plates in a way that only sky is visible.
> basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Which isn't hard to do if you have the budget of a government. Directional antennae, GPS and a helicopter/Cessna flying patterns over a metro. Beams from the terminal are constantly scanning the sky chasing the constellations.
A higher hit rate option would be a fleet of low altitude drones taking high-res pictures of the ground, and running a fine-tuned classifier to identify Starlink Dishies which require a clear line of sight to the sky.
People who think Starlink is unblockable, or somehow anonymous IRL are unimaginative. Iran is well-versed enough with electronic warfare that it tricked a RQ-170 Sentinel land on it's territory - how hardened are Starlink terminals against responding to a spoofed signal and exposing their locations?
I think, to beamform in the right direction you have to be able to locate yourself precisely, have an up-to-date almanach of the satellites, and a precise enough datation source. Jamming GNSS is a source of problems for 2 of those issues.
Also, the antennas on starlink dishes are still pretty small, likely to pick up some hard-to-remove sidelobes and the tech to cancel them properly might be export-controlled. You still need to be within electromagnetic visibility to jam them, though.
But it's in extremely difficult to disrupt the signals across the whole country? I person go go out with a battery and setup a starlink terminal in the middle of nowhere in 2 minutes (exactly how I'm writing this post right now from Boliva)
If your objective is to stop or at least slow coordination of protests and flow of information about things the regime is doing in the major cities of Tehran and Mashhad, you're a lot less worried that plenty of rural villages get completely unhindered signals, if anyone in them happens to have a Starlink terminal.
In my experience 80% packet loss makes most common protocols basically unusable. Yes you can still get data out...but many apps will just fail due to timeouts and other things.
I imagine the people with illegal starlink terminals are fairly tech savy and can use custom protocols. Living in Iran they probably already have a lot of experience with vpns and lower level protocols to evade censorship.
Matrix published a proof of concept a few years ago of an alternative transport layer designed to work over connections with a few hundred bits per second, and massive packet loss, while still providing E2EE:
Wow this sucks! however if i were iranian brass i would do it too. IT/OT and IoT is not safe full stop. Pull the plug. It wouldnt be pretty over here either, also china already got us good (Volt Typhoon, OPM hack, why bother to list 30 or 40 more?)
I am wondering if Starlink users can't compensate for it themselves by transmitting a GPS signal using some SDR device locally, just putting in correct coordinates from Google Maps into it? GPS signals are at 1.5GHz which is easily accessible for cheap SDRs.
But really, why doesn't Starlink device allow to simply enter coordinates manually? After all, if someone enters wrong coordinates (say to enable operation in a place where Starlink has no service), it won't work because it won't find satellites where it expects them to be.
I don't own a starlink dish, but I assume one can log in and configure some things. It would be a nobrainer to have a way to enter coordinates and system time. Also the manual could have sane advice like recommendation to use "peace time" to establish the locations GPS coordinates and write them down on some sticker or so.
If it can serve a basic web page with a world map, it may be justifiable to include it for the price of the dish (yes will require some flash storage).
My thoughts to the Iranian people, may they get what they need and deserve at a cost that is not too high.
As in all conflicts, there's always a "fog of blame" where there isn't absolute certainty about who is right and who is to blame. Though it's not that hard. Because their survival depends on it, dictators are very good at blaming others--anybody, really--for their own shortcomings, and they usually wield the kind of hard power that makes them extremely costly to topple in terms of suffering and human lives.
Life is too short to have to deal with despots. We need a better, perhaps less-crowded or less xenophobic world where every person can protect their right to exist by simply packing and leaving as a last resort.
Agreed, but right now, I'm getting Bay of Pigs vibes from the whole affair. Trump baits the protestors into action -- don't worry, we've got your backs! -- and then hangs them out to dry.
The hubris of US idealists. There's no packing up and leaving. If you leave your tribe you are dead. This was true 10k years ago and it is true again. If you weren't born under the US security umbrella you are nothing but an ant avoiding the boots of those above you. And the whole world is returning to mean once more. There's no packing bags, there's fighting for YOUR freedom or being a slave. Those above will always seek to oppress those below.
There are a lot of people not particularly under the US umbrella who are doing ok. India for example. It's debatable how under the umbrella Europe is these days with the current president.
The title is wrong, as usual. This is a re-hash of earlier reports. Starlink is getting 30-80% packet loss, depending on where they're using it. Likely local jammers. But it still gets through.
Any satellite signal is going to be relatively weak compared to what you can produce on the ground. Inverse square law, and power limitations of a mobile transmitter.
It's fairly trivial to set up a transmitter that saturates a slice of spectrum at an amount of power that is ridiculous compared to a satellite signal. There are still AM radio stations operating that go as high as 50kW. The satellite transmitters aren't going to exceed maybe a hundred Watts, at a great distance, and that falls off at 1/(distance)^2.
The Russians have developed rather efficient GPS jamming equip., as we know, Iranian Gov't is partners with Russians, providing drone technology, so no great mystery where likely the jammers originated from.
There's a difference between possible and plausible. In the most absurd case, it was always a given that a sufficiently large faraday cage or a literal iron dome would block starlink from reaching anybody in iran therefore it was never thought to be impossible to block starlink. At best it's implausible but that would refer specifically to the construction of the giant faraday cage and the literal iron dome, not the concept of blocking starlink.
Starlink has no ground stations on Iranian soil and is formally prohibited by its government, so there is nothing being "provided" to Iran, per se. Iranians smuggle Starlink dishes in, at great personal risk.
> Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it to no avail.
Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
I wouldn't consider it funny though when you realize the gravitas of the situation though but yea.
I just wanted to point out that it felt rude to call it funny but I understand what you mean and what intention but please be more sincere about such issues.
> Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
Someone mentions that there is a huge packet loss but its still possible. Other mentions that its possible to do this in rural villages and there are many nuances. I genuinely dont know the technological reasons or know how of what it is or what the ground state of reality is and what's actually happening but I hope that starlink still works or can have a work-around for the activists. We will see in sometime what really happens in the ground state as I must admit I still don't know if its 100% censored or what the reality is.
The situation as a whole is in no way funny, sorry I gave you that impression. What is funny to me, is a confidently incorrect comment from a related story just two days ago that also ended up the highest upvoted one, which quickly seemed to have been proven wrong. This is still funny to me, yet the situation itself remains helplessly depressing.
What do you mean, Russia has been doing the same thing for most of the war? The success relies on you controlling the territory, or at least territory close enough, so the results vary.
I am an RF ignoramus. It all seems like black magic to me. I have seen "80% packet loss" being thrown around in these discussions, and also that it is just GPS spoofing.
My main question is that is there anything novel happening here? What is the actual range of disruption?
In a war zone any large high power jammer will be like supernova in the darkness visible for detectors from tens of kilometers away. So its gonna be immediately destroyed.
Iran protesters cant find or destroy jammers though.
Isn't Iran doing this from the air? That would be far more effective. In a contested space with AA everywhere that wouldn't be feasible (i.e. large parts of Ukraine)
I don't think it will have much implication. Jamming is a two way street. You can erase some spectrums, but you are also creating massive electromagnetic beacon for home-on-jam ammunition.
However if you are a protester without any advanced weapons, then you can't do anything against that.
Link budget cuts both ways. If your user terminal sucks, you can compensate somewhat - by building a larger, beefier satellite that has better antenna directionality and pumps out more transmission juice, and throwing the data rate under the bus. This is how it's done now.
Having a terminal that doesn't suck puts less strain on the satellite side and, thus, scales better. But for emergencies and serving middle of nowhere, "direct to cell" makes sense.
Why are none of the people I saw posting non-stop about Palestine saying anything about Iranian freedom? Would honestly love to hear a genuine response from anyone who is against the movement in Iran. Or even conflicted about it.
I would say it's really about opposition to death and suffering.
The activists want the excessive death and suffering to end in Palestine, and they want to avoid death and suffering in Iran.
Many politicians want to use the protests as a pretext for military intervention in Iran, and my blunt opinion is that they don't actually have the interests of Iranians in mind. There are many reasons to believe it will end up worse for both America and the Iranians than our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A valid response would be to say that you think abuses in Iran are bad enough that a military intervention is justified, and that it will lead to a better outcome for Iranians. My intuition would be to disagree with that, based on the results of past interventions, etc...
I’m not against the movement, but the last time Iran had protests this bad was in 1979. It didn’t get better afterwards. It’s a huge mess and I hope they figure something out to fix it, but I’m just pessimistic.
1. Iran has frequent large protests that consistently get crushed. So while I assume the vast majority of Americans oppose the Iranian government, it’s hard to get worked up for the 5th, 6th time.
2. The US doesn’t support the Iranian government. We already sanction them. What additional support can US citizens lobby for? In the case of Israel, decreased US support would have a tangible effect. Unclear how increased US support for Iranian protestors would matter.
Definitely part of it. But the Mexican leftists I know are equally silent. As they were on Ukraine too. It’s really only when then can root against the US or Jews, as far as I can tell.
There are a lot of signs that the leader being suggested would be a king, which is not something most citizens in democratic nations would feel natural fighting for.
I've been curious myself about why the activist class seems weirdly quiet on this issue.
On a quick scan of media feeds I've seen a couple of things that stand out (I do not confirm or deny how true these claims are)
1) Current Iran is a enemy of the USA and thus activists can't support the destruction of the current regime. Iran is able to create nukes so can put pressure on the USA in Middle East Politics (esp. Palestine and Israel)
2) The uprising and the Shah are CIA/Western Backed and thus supporting the protestors is de-facto colonialism/imperialism.
3) Contrary to popular belief Iran is not actually a Muslim nation, only the leadership is. The population is significantly more varied and people do not want to be seen supporting the firebombing of Mosques because Islamphobia.
I don't know how widespread these opinions are, but it IS very strange how I don't see more outrage.
There's an alliance between the new left and islamism due to some ideological similarities.
Sure one side would march for pride and the other hangs gays on cranes.
However, in foreign policy both explain anything as some product of colonialism, a phenomena that essentially disappeared 60 years ago.
This is due to the effect Edward Said had on US humanities, which was in turn was influenced by Muslim Brotherhood thought in his home country of Egypt
I think the left-leaning activist people in the Americas are so against any position that could align with a Trump position, that they can’t think beyond those lines. If Trump supports the revolution it must be bad.
I have a less charitable and more direct answer. Right now there is a notion in Left that Israeli are the oppressor. In Iran large majority of population is Persian but MINO (Muslim in name only due to dictatorship). They are struggling to get freedom from the Islamic regime and getting some help from Israel. This flips the narrative in Left's mind (if they accept it) that Muslims can be oppressors too and that is untenable for them. especially because Left in Western nations has basically aligned themselves with muslims so its easier for them to just ignore it.
BTW its not just left here, I originally hail from India and you can feel the pin-drop silence from left on Iran there too. They just hope the rebellion gets crushed by regime like other ones and they'll pretend status quo.
My TLDR takeaway: Muslims only care about when they are oppressed & Left is completely aligned with them right now.
Iranians are living under Islamic colonial dictatorship. Blaming this unrest on Israeli and US influence is absurd. And only exposes you as a sympathizer to the oppressive regime.
You're saying that the Brits should throw their colonizer and Christian king out of the island and return to their old Celtic traditions and deities, no? Or what exactly? Because the timeframes are very comparable, Saint Colombanus died in the early 600s, while the Arabs got all the way to Merv by the 670s-680s.
I think this is a major unforced error by the USG, of course we have seen plenty of those of late. There may be Israeli, American or other intelligence agencies present. But history has shown that spies can't just foment a revolution out of thin air. The Americans' first attempt at a coup in Chile, in 1970, failed. It was only after three years of US machinations and missteps by the Allende administration that Pinochet arose — Pinochet was given his fateful promotion by Allende himself! And that was in a "friendly" country where the US had many connections.
Iranians wouldn't be on the streets right now if the government had listened to its own water engineers over the years. But the new political culture in our government is more interested in braggadocio than achieving real change. I doubt that if the protesters succeed that Iran would become friendly to the West. At the same time there is probably a not too contrived worry among the Iranians that Netanyahu will seize the opportunity to attack if a political transition occurs. Bluster like this only hurts the cause.
I have to imagine the protests would stop immediately if Iran is attacked by Israel or the U.S. You can be angry at your government while not welcoming bombers.
Ordinarily I'd have faith the governments were smart enough to know better, but at this point I've lost hope.
Which governments are referred to as "regimes" is usually propaganda about how you should feel about them. Consider: all articles written about US using the words "The US regime".
I don't think I've ever read an article using the term "US regime," as that usually refers to an undemocratic or authoritarian government. You might want to clean up your information diet if you're reading lots of articles over the years with that term...
Yes it is a value judgement, but Iran's government is nothing if not oppressive and authoritarian. Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
> Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
I tend to believe the US is already past that point. It's just people are not really realizing that yet. Might take the next election for them to realize. That will be to late however.
I hope so much that this is wrong and the US turns out to be more resilient than it looks like from the outside though.
Regime refers to who holds power in a nation. It encompasses power holders in both formal and informal institutions which span beyond just the government. The major distinction is democratic versus autocratic regimes, with regime on its own referring specifically to the autocratic version. There are plenty of autocratic regimes which we (assuming everyone on the internet is American or at least from the West) are friendly with, like Jordan's.
> How likely is it that those "protestors" are US and Israel propped
It's almost sure that both US and Israel are meddling with the current situation. That doesn't mean the situation isn't also started by and wanted by the population.
For a comparison point in the past, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the US were grass-roots movements started by local people with legitimate claims. At the same time, opponents of the US like USSR were involved in stirring these movements, because of course they would.
There isn't much you can infer about the legitimacy of a movement by learning that the movement is helped by foreign intelligence agencies.
The best way you can avoid this kind of confusion is 1) make a society in which malicious actors don't have many latent issues to stir, and 2) make it so your country's intelligence agencies aren't malicious actors. There isn't much else to do.
Iran has a water crisis, and allegedly the economic situation is so bad that people are starting to wonder if it will soon affect their ability to buy food.
Even the Romans knew that if you wanted to stay in power you had to provide bread and circuses.
Very, but at the same time the Iranian leadership have been a really shitty government and ran the country into the gutter. People have genuine grievances.
The only way to believe this is if you're a Westerner being fed a purely US-centric media diet. Otherwise you'd know all the ways that the Iranian government has been failing their people recently and for a long time now, and how unhappy Iranians are with their government. You people act like people can't be upset at how they're being treated by their own government without being incited by an external actor. That's honestly quite the dehumanising and insulting way of looking at it.
Also, if the US wanted to do a regime change, they'd just move in militarily a la Venezuela and Trump would be talking about it non-stop. He's not the subtle type, I promise. We'd already know if they were involved.
Starlink is primarily a military technology that is used both on a battlefield and to coordinate USA-backed "protests". Why, for instance, it just become free in Venezuela? Every country needs to be able to to defend itself from Starlink.
No, only US-backed puppets that US uses against Russia. For example, Russia has very good relations with Belorussia where the government wasn't lured into this role and did not let US to overthrow it.
Insane only for americans who refuse to accept the fact that their country, with some of their "allies", is the primary cause of wars and instability in today's world.
And who refuse to understand that providing means of communication to people of country X to organize military actions against the army and police of country X, is a military agression against country X.
Seems like a big flaw that low-orbit constellations have a dependency on GPS, which are high-altitude satellites. They're 40x further away and so have 1,600x greater path loss. Why can't they use their own satellites for this?
> "But Starlink receivers use GPS to locate and connect to satellites. “Since its 12-day war with Israel last June," The Times says, “Iran has been disrupting GPS signals.”"
This isn’t even true; Starlink can use the local starlink constellation for positioning and the option is available in the customer facing configuration specifically for GPS denied areas (since about two years ago), where it’s been used for ages.
Something else is going on here - perhaps there’s an edge case where Starlink can be made to perform poorly without falling back away from GPS, but I wouldn’t expect this since it’s been “tested” in the most GPS hostile places for quite some time now.
It sounds like Starlink uses GPS to localize the receiver, rather than for any active step in the communication link. Since most receivers are static, I wonder if an effective workaround to this is for the receiver to just remember its last GPS fix for longer, or worst-case allow a manual location specification in lieu of a GPS fix.
A user provided location cannot be trusted for geofencing purposes. A GNSS (GPS or other) is needed sooner or later. This is a legal requirement for sanction and regulation enforcement (US, if not others).
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Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
According to [1], “[o]ne of the current generation of GPS satellites (Block III) weighs over 2,200 kg (4,850 lb), the weight of an average pickup truck. The body of these satellites are 1.8 m x 2.5 m x 3.4 m (5.9’ x 8.2’ x 11.2’) in size”. In comparison, “the current V2 Starlink satellite version weighs approximately 1,760 lbs (800 kilograms) at launch, almost three times heavier than the older generation satellites (weighing in at 573 lbs or 260 kg)” [2]
[1] https://novatel.com/an-introduction-to-gnss/basic-concepts/s... [2] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
> Gps is free to use. Running your own gnss service requires an atomic clock and possibly separate transmission hardware, which is possible, but adds cost, volume, and weight.
Thanks you provide some great insights on why starlink didnt use gps but still if starlink wants to focus itself as the uncensorable internet in places like protests etc. I feel like they can probably do this after this recent incident
I just can't feel but sad right now because starlink was still providing activists ways to report outside and that helped protestors a lot and information. Now even starlink got removed because starlink tried to save money and I think might not have thought about what if gps itself gets blocked.
This is giving very bad signals for Iran. Is there any way now that Protestors are able to communicate to the outside world/ activists be able to report data outside?
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Chip scale atomic clocks are quite small[1], have been used in space, and could be part of the existing Starlink satellites. Finding reliable details about the orbital vehicles the internet eludes me.
[1] https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/aemDocuments/documents/F...
GPS comparison is moot in this case, as there's no need for Starlink constellations to provide full GNSS capability, just locating the satellites precisely enough to facilitate beamforming.
If the GPS satellites are above the starlink ones how is Iran able to disrupt the GPS signals?
GPS signals are extremely weak, and they're necessarily received from omnidirectional antennas that can't provide much antenna gain. In some sense it's a miracle of signal processing that GPS can ever be received.
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By jamming the receivers on the ground
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For legal reasons I base this off of nothing but just turn your jammer to the sky. Could get fancy and point out directly at the satellites since my understanding is it's pretty easy to know where they are.
Edit to add: I do not mean the GPS satellites or the starlink ground terminals. That was not the question so that is not my answer. I mean the starlink satellites
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Musk tweeted a while back that the constellation could be used as its own GPS service, but it wasn’t a priority right now. Maybe later.
A CRPA should still work.
This whole stalink for military use (Starshield) was a scam Elon sold the military from the beginning. Just like his dumb ass tunnels and his self driving cars. He is putting the military at risk.
Is there any actual evidence that Starshield doesn't work substantially as promised?
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Not too surprising, given that Starlink operates in Iran without a permit, "space pirate radio" style, and has something of a habit of making the access free when major protests happen and the government imposes a network blackout. Iranian government and Starlink have no love for each other, clearly.
It's a pattern by now: whenever a government wants to do something awful, it shuts down internet access - so that no one can hear it, see it or coordinate a response. And Starlink becomes a lifeline that the regime would rather people didn't have.
This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place. If you give a government a capability to restrict access to whatever it wants and enact a network blackout whenever it wants, it's a matter of time until it gets abused.
They "operate" in Iran because of OFAC issues general licenses under the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR Part 560) permitting non-commercial personal communications, including satellite internet for free expression. Starlink activation in 2022 protests and recent events exploited these, as Musk sought formal exemptions for "internet freedom."
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
It's weird how Apple and Google don't get it, while SpaceX does.
Starlink isn't perfect, but at least it doesn't go for "it's so not our problem, we'll just make sure that every single VPN exit point Iranians use is GeoIP'd as Iran in our systems" like Google tends to, or "let's lick every authoritarian boot, we control the app distribution and our users will suck it up" like Apple does.
Not even Starlink has the balls to oppose the likes of Russia and China directly - they aren't operating there without a permit, sadly. But at least they don't kneel before every two-bit dictatorship and cave to every single "we want you to do censorship on our behalf" demand. Way better than what most tech companies do now.
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Does anyone know how Iranians are _actually_ communicating right now? I remember seeing here on HN (admittedly a long time ago) some Bluetooth-mesh technologies that promised decentralized solutions to these very type of problems
You might be referring to Bitchat.
The only working communication I see mentioned on X is Starlink.
I think IPv4 services are still present no?
So like they are very heavily DPI censored though and maybe govts able to spy on any messages you send right now but I feel like there is a still possibility that for the average communication, they might still exist but although heavily heavily censored/bad and I feel like protestors might not be able to communicate (which I feel like is the question you meant to be asking)
https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/ir
So TLDR: protestors must have a hard time sadly and they may be using bluetooth mesh or other tech, only they can tell after we figure things out but also lets say some major services websites might still exist after all if they bypass the dpi censorship for IPv4 services.
In my opinion, I feel like Protestors must be using mesh based technologies as you mention. We'll see what really ends up happening after we get some reports from Iran.
It is said they pulled the plug for all peering on Thursday, although I would assume some kind of government-run ISP may be operational still (I haven't checked Cloudlfare radar)
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Maybe better for an after the brutal theocratic regime crackdown discussion?
I saw a comment yesterday from a user claiming to be in Iran. I think he said StarLink was usable. ( Maybe that’s changed, though. )
https://github.com/x011/smtp-tunnel-proxy :
> A high-speed covert tunnel that disguises TCP traffic as SMTP email communication to bypass Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) firewalls
It seems like these smuggle-disguise protocols are almost always trivially detectable.
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No mention of any security review, or even testing. Reason enough to stay away from such tools.
Hypothecally speaking. If I were to live in an authoritarian country that would shut off all means of communication like that. What off grid technology would be viable?
Lora? Shortwave radio? Or nothing at all?
in a country that hostile to you I would be worried about radiating any kind of EM, honestly. It's too easy to track and could cause undue targetting & victimization.
my real answer : I think at that point in time effort is best spent trying to arrange escape.
my technical answer : depends on the scene. directed optical/laser or microwave is very hard to track if that can facilitate the links you need -- but realistically most war-time off-grid comms historically has been established via runners, dropboxes, or community radio systems ; all options with very real inherent risks.
Carrier pigeon
Under packetloss my assumption is text is king, but I wonder if forward error correcting audio and video is actually better in some ways?
Media is information rich. Maybe we're beyond a samzdat moment and the value in comms is contextual immediacy of live feeds, text can squeeze alongside.
Long ago, broadcast quality TV was shipped as slow feed. Maybe a tiktok generation goes back there: use a phone on the street (probably surreptitiously) do post production and upload asynchronously on 30% packetloss or worse for redistribution.
You are acting like people dont upload videos anymore.
The people filming protests in iran are probably not in range of their home starlink connected wifi. They are almost certainly filming stuff offline then uploading it later, not livestreaming.
Satellite signals are just weak RF signals and can be disrupted easily. There is nothing 'hardened' about them. It's funny that people think Starlink or any of its many incipient competitors are any different.
Starlink uses beamforming with directional antenna arrays, so it should be rather difficult to jam compared to omnidirectional antennas. It's basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Antenna arrays aren't perfect so it still picks up some energy omnidirectionally, but it should be possible to shield it with some metal plates in a way that only sky is visible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
> basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Which isn't hard to do if you have the budget of a government. Directional antennae, GPS and a helicopter/Cessna flying patterns over a metro. Beams from the terminal are constantly scanning the sky chasing the constellations.
A higher hit rate option would be a fleet of low altitude drones taking high-res pictures of the ground, and running a fine-tuned classifier to identify Starlink Dishies which require a clear line of sight to the sky.
People who think Starlink is unblockable, or somehow anonymous IRL are unimaginative. Iran is well-versed enough with electronic warfare that it tricked a RQ-170 Sentinel land on it's territory - how hardened are Starlink terminals against responding to a spoofed signal and exposing their locations?
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I think, to beamform in the right direction you have to be able to locate yourself precisely, have an up-to-date almanach of the satellites, and a precise enough datation source. Jamming GNSS is a source of problems for 2 of those issues.
Also, the antennas on starlink dishes are still pretty small, likely to pick up some hard-to-remove sidelobes and the tech to cancel them properly might be export-controlled. You still need to be within electromagnetic visibility to jam them, though.
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But it's in extremely difficult to disrupt the signals across the whole country? I person go go out with a battery and setup a starlink terminal in the middle of nowhere in 2 minutes (exactly how I'm writing this post right now from Boliva)
If your objective is to stop or at least slow coordination of protests and flow of information about things the regime is doing in the major cities of Tehran and Mashhad, you're a lot less worried that plenty of rural villages get completely unhindered signals, if anyone in them happens to have a Starlink terminal.
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10W is enough to block GPS signals in a 15-30km radius. The signals are below the noise floor and easy to disrupt.
Russia seems to have been ineffective at stopping the Ukranians using it.
There are multiple photos of Russian drones using Starlink terminals, so they would be blocking their own use of it.
The article seems quite speculative.
I'm sure the Iranian regime would live to jam starlink, but i don't think we have any ability to know what is actually happening here.
The article claims 80% packetloss. That's still 1 in 5 packets getting through. That is annoying but not going to stop information getting out.
I also wonder, if all other coms are cut off, is it possible star link in the country is just overloaded?
In my experience 80% packet loss makes most common protocols basically unusable. Yes you can still get data out...but many apps will just fail due to timeouts and other things.
I imagine the people with illegal starlink terminals are fairly tech savy and can use custom protocols. Living in Iran they probably already have a lot of experience with vpns and lower level protocols to evade censorship.
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Matrix published a proof of concept a few years ago of an alternative transport layer designed to work over connections with a few hundred bits per second, and massive packet loss, while still providing E2EE:
https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100bps-barri...
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Wow this sucks! however if i were iranian brass i would do it too. IT/OT and IoT is not safe full stop. Pull the plug. It wouldnt be pretty over here either, also china already got us good (Volt Typhoon, OPM hack, why bother to list 30 or 40 more?)
I am wondering if Starlink users can't compensate for it themselves by transmitting a GPS signal using some SDR device locally, just putting in correct coordinates from Google Maps into it? GPS signals are at 1.5GHz which is easily accessible for cheap SDRs.
But really, why doesn't Starlink device allow to simply enter coordinates manually? After all, if someone enters wrong coordinates (say to enable operation in a place where Starlink has no service), it won't work because it won't find satellites where it expects them to be.
Or is there something here that i'm missing?
I don't own a starlink dish, but I assume one can log in and configure some things. It would be a nobrainer to have a way to enter coordinates and system time. Also the manual could have sane advice like recommendation to use "peace time" to establish the locations GPS coordinates and write them down on some sticker or so.
If it can serve a basic web page with a world map, it may be justifiable to include it for the price of the dish (yes will require some flash storage).
My thoughts to the Iranian people, may they get what they need and deserve at a cost that is not too high.
As in all conflicts, there's always a "fog of blame" where there isn't absolute certainty about who is right and who is to blame. Though it's not that hard. Because their survival depends on it, dictators are very good at blaming others--anybody, really--for their own shortcomings, and they usually wield the kind of hard power that makes them extremely costly to topple in terms of suffering and human lives.
Life is too short to have to deal with despots. We need a better, perhaps less-crowded or less xenophobic world where every person can protect their right to exist by simply packing and leaving as a last resort.
A politicide is occuring right now in Iran.
Agreed, but right now, I'm getting Bay of Pigs vibes from the whole affair. Trump baits the protestors into action -- don't worry, we've got your backs! -- and then hangs them out to dry.
The hubris of US idealists. There's no packing up and leaving. If you leave your tribe you are dead. This was true 10k years ago and it is true again. If you weren't born under the US security umbrella you are nothing but an ant avoiding the boots of those above you. And the whole world is returning to mean once more. There's no packing bags, there's fighting for YOUR freedom or being a slave. Those above will always seek to oppress those below.
There are a lot of people not particularly under the US umbrella who are doing ok. India for example. It's debatable how under the umbrella Europe is these days with the current president.
I candidly thought it wasn’t possible to block Starlink.
I guess with motivated actors anything is possible.
The title is wrong, as usual. This is a re-hash of earlier reports. Starlink is getting 30-80% packet loss, depending on where they're using it. Likely local jammers. But it still gets through.
Any satellite signal is going to be relatively weak compared to what you can produce on the ground. Inverse square law, and power limitations of a mobile transmitter.
It's fairly trivial to set up a transmitter that saturates a slice of spectrum at an amount of power that is ridiculous compared to a satellite signal. There are still AM radio stations operating that go as high as 50kW. The satellite transmitters aren't going to exceed maybe a hundred Watts, at a great distance, and that falls off at 1/(distance)^2.
The Russians have developed rather efficient GPS jamming equip., as we know, Iranian Gov't is partners with Russians, providing drone technology, so no great mystery where likely the jammers originated from.
There's a difference between possible and plausible. In the most absurd case, it was always a given that a sufficiently large faraday cage or a literal iron dome would block starlink from reaching anybody in iran therefore it was never thought to be impossible to block starlink. At best it's implausible but that would refer specifically to the construction of the giant faraday cage and the literal iron dome, not the concept of blocking starlink.
Jamming or hijacking geostationary satellites signal is trivial for literally a team of 3 hm radio veterans with 10+ years of experience.
Jamming RF is easy in general. Nowadays we can even do beamforming so i guess it would be trivial.
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Who is "we" and "them"? Don't you find it ironic, such a comment on a thread about protesting a regime which tries to control who does what?
Starlink has no ground stations on Iranian soil and is formally prohibited by its government, so there is nothing being "provided" to Iran, per se. Iranians smuggle Starlink dishes in, at great personal risk.
If it were impossible, China would've had reason to blow up their satellites in orbit. The US would do the same thing for Chinese satellite ISPs.
Jamming on such a large scale is expensive, but it's hardly impossible.
There’s no evidence that China (or anybody else) has the capacity to meaningfully harm the 9000+ satellite Starlink constellation.
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How do these tens of thousands of Starlink terminals get smuggled into Iran?
Trucks I assume
Iran has a thriving black market through its borders
Funny considering the top comment from the two-day old "Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683):
> Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it to no avail.
Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
I wouldn't consider it funny though when you realize the gravitas of the situation though but yea.
I just wanted to point out that it felt rude to call it funny but I understand what you mean and what intention but please be more sincere about such issues.
> Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
Someone mentions that there is a huge packet loss but its still possible. Other mentions that its possible to do this in rural villages and there are many nuances. I genuinely dont know the technological reasons or know how of what it is or what the ground state of reality is and what's actually happening but I hope that starlink still works or can have a work-around for the activists. We will see in sometime what really happens in the ground state as I must admit I still don't know if its 100% censored or what the reality is.
The situation as a whole is in no way funny, sorry I gave you that impression. What is funny to me, is a confidently incorrect comment from a related story just two days ago that also ended up the highest upvoted one, which quickly seemed to have been proven wrong. This is still funny to me, yet the situation itself remains helplessly depressing.
Is this not only a side effect of Iran doing widespread GPS and GNSS jamming or spoofing?
HAM Radio still works
I am curious if there are any implications for the Russian invasion of Ukraine from this tactic working.
What do you mean, Russia has been doing the same thing for most of the war? The success relies on you controlling the territory, or at least territory close enough, so the results vary.
> What do you mean...
I am an RF ignoramus. It all seems like black magic to me. I have seen "80% packet loss" being thrown around in these discussions, and also that it is just GPS spoofing.
My main question is that is there anything novel happening here? What is the actual range of disruption?
In a war zone any large high power jammer will be like supernova in the darkness visible for detectors from tens of kilometers away. So its gonna be immediately destroyed.
Iran protesters cant find or destroy jammers though.
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Isn't Iran doing this from the air? That would be far more effective. In a contested space with AA everywhere that wouldn't be feasible (i.e. large parts of Ukraine)
I don't think it will have much implication. Jamming is a two way street. You can erase some spectrums, but you are also creating massive electromagnetic beacon for home-on-jam ammunition.
However if you are a protester without any advanced weapons, then you can't do anything against that.
Both sides are using starlink, yes?
Also there's now guowang to contend with. I'm not sure how widely available access to it is.
I would assume both sides are heavily jamming the frontlines. But presumably long range drone operations are more likely to use it.
Jamming is subject to the inverse square law.
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I am curious how phones now can reach LEO for enough bandwidth for voice calls but you need a full dish, however small, for starlink?
Could you get at least 1mbps from a phone to LEO now for email and non-realtime data?
Link budget cuts both ways. If your user terminal sucks, you can compensate somewhat - by building a larger, beefier satellite that has better antenna directionality and pumps out more transmission juice, and throwing the data rate under the bus. This is how it's done now.
Having a terminal that doesn't suck puts less strain on the satellite side and, thus, scales better. But for emergencies and serving middle of nowhere, "direct to cell" makes sense.
You pretty much nailed it, its all about bandwidth.
The emergency SOS feature is optimized down to the byte to ensure it can work with poor signal and low bandwidth.
Why are none of the people I saw posting non-stop about Palestine saying anything about Iranian freedom? Would honestly love to hear a genuine response from anyone who is against the movement in Iran. Or even conflicted about it.
I would say it's really about opposition to death and suffering.
The activists want the excessive death and suffering to end in Palestine, and they want to avoid death and suffering in Iran.
Many politicians want to use the protests as a pretext for military intervention in Iran, and my blunt opinion is that they don't actually have the interests of Iranians in mind. There are many reasons to believe it will end up worse for both America and the Iranians than our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A valid response would be to say that you think abuses in Iran are bad enough that a military intervention is justified, and that it will lead to a better outcome for Iranians. My intuition would be to disagree with that, based on the results of past interventions, etc...
I’m not against the movement, but the last time Iran had protests this bad was in 1979. It didn’t get better afterwards. It’s a huge mess and I hope they figure something out to fix it, but I’m just pessimistic.
Thanks for the reply. Makes sense.
I offer two possibilities:
1. Iran has frequent large protests that consistently get crushed. So while I assume the vast majority of Americans oppose the Iranian government, it’s hard to get worked up for the 5th, 6th time.
2. The US doesn’t support the Iranian government. We already sanction them. What additional support can US citizens lobby for? In the case of Israel, decreased US support would have a tangible effect. Unclear how increased US support for Iranian protestors would matter.
Makes sense!
Speaking from an American perspective, many left-leaning commentators I've seen are focused on the ICE situation in the states right now.
But that's the most optimistic take I can conjure.
Definitely part of it. But the Mexican leftists I know are equally silent. As they were on Ukraine too. It’s really only when then can root against the US or Jews, as far as I can tell.
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There are a lot of signs that the leader being suggested would be a king, which is not something most citizens in democratic nations would feel natural fighting for.
Because the Iranian regime was the one pushing that pro Palestine narrative.
Yup. Hard to be pro Hamas and then cheer a secular revolution in Iran.
I hope the movement succeeds.
I've been curious myself about why the activist class seems weirdly quiet on this issue.
On a quick scan of media feeds I've seen a couple of things that stand out (I do not confirm or deny how true these claims are)
1) Current Iran is a enemy of the USA and thus activists can't support the destruction of the current regime. Iran is able to create nukes so can put pressure on the USA in Middle East Politics (esp. Palestine and Israel)
2) The uprising and the Shah are CIA/Western Backed and thus supporting the protestors is de-facto colonialism/imperialism.
3) Contrary to popular belief Iran is not actually a Muslim nation, only the leadership is. The population is significantly more varied and people do not want to be seen supporting the firebombing of Mosques because Islamphobia.
I don't know how widespread these opinions are, but it IS very strange how I don't see more outrage.
There's an alliance between the new left and islamism due to some ideological similarities.
Sure one side would march for pride and the other hangs gays on cranes.
However, in foreign policy both explain anything as some product of colonialism, a phenomena that essentially disappeared 60 years ago.
This is due to the effect Edward Said had on US humanities, which was in turn was influenced by Muslim Brotherhood thought in his home country of Egypt
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I think the left-leaning activist people in the Americas are so against any position that could align with a Trump position, that they can’t think beyond those lines. If Trump supports the revolution it must be bad.
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The core of far left activism is being anti-Western. Therefore, they can't say anything bad about even the most despicable anti-Western governments.
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I have a less charitable and more direct answer. Right now there is a notion in Left that Israeli are the oppressor. In Iran large majority of population is Persian but MINO (Muslim in name only due to dictatorship). They are struggling to get freedom from the Islamic regime and getting some help from Israel. This flips the narrative in Left's mind (if they accept it) that Muslims can be oppressors too and that is untenable for them. especially because Left in Western nations has basically aligned themselves with muslims so its easier for them to just ignore it.
BTW its not just left here, I originally hail from India and you can feel the pin-drop silence from left on Iran there too. They just hope the rebellion gets crushed by regime like other ones and they'll pretend status quo.
My TLDR takeaway: Muslims only care about when they are oppressed & Left is completely aligned with them right now.
I completely agree with you.
Good for them, as they’re under external attack. For example a US ghoul like Mike Pompeo had this to say recently [1]:
> Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them
so under those circumstances anything goes to defeat the likes of Mossad and associated foreign entities doing their thing on Iranian soil.
[1] https://xcancel.com/mikepompeo/status/2007180411638620659
Iranians are living under Islamic colonial dictatorship. Blaming this unrest on Israeli and US influence is absurd. And only exposes you as a sympathizer to the oppressive regime.
You're saying that the Brits should throw their colonizer and Christian king out of the island and return to their old Celtic traditions and deities, no? Or what exactly? Because the timeframes are very comparable, Saint Colombanus died in the early 600s, while the Arabs got all the way to Merv by the 670s-680s.
Is them the Iranian people or their dictators?
I think this is a major unforced error by the USG, of course we have seen plenty of those of late. There may be Israeli, American or other intelligence agencies present. But history has shown that spies can't just foment a revolution out of thin air. The Americans' first attempt at a coup in Chile, in 1970, failed. It was only after three years of US machinations and missteps by the Allende administration that Pinochet arose — Pinochet was given his fateful promotion by Allende himself! And that was in a "friendly" country where the US had many connections.
Iranians wouldn't be on the streets right now if the government had listened to its own water engineers over the years. But the new political culture in our government is more interested in braggadocio than achieving real change. I doubt that if the protesters succeed that Iran would become friendly to the West. At the same time there is probably a not too contrived worry among the Iranians that Netanyahu will seize the opportunity to attack if a political transition occurs. Bluster like this only hurts the cause.
I have to imagine the protests would stop immediately if Iran is attacked by Israel or the U.S. You can be angry at your government while not welcoming bombers.
Ordinarily I'd have faith the governments were smart enough to know better, but at this point I've lost hope.
Which governments are referred to as "regimes" is usually propaganda about how you should feel about them. Consider: all articles written about US using the words "The US regime".
I don't think I've ever read an article using the term "US regime," as that usually refers to an undemocratic or authoritarian government. You might want to clean up your information diet if you're reading lots of articles over the years with that term...
Yes it is a value judgement, but Iran's government is nothing if not oppressive and authoritarian. Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
> Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
I tend to believe the US is already past that point. It's just people are not really realizing that yet. Might take the next election for them to realize. That will be to late however.
I hope so much that this is wrong and the US turns out to be more resilient than it looks like from the outside though.
>I don't think I've ever read an article using the term "US regime," as that usually refers to an undemocratic or authoritarian government.
Pretty fuckin' big rock you've been living under for the last couple years.
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Regime refers to who holds power in a nation. It encompasses power holders in both formal and informal institutions which span beyond just the government. The major distinction is democratic versus autocratic regimes, with regime on its own referring specifically to the autocratic version. There are plenty of autocratic regimes which we (assuming everyone on the internet is American or at least from the West) are friendly with, like Jordan's.
Yes, a "regime" is basically a country where they wants to have control but can't for some reason
How likely is it that those "protestors" are US and Israel propped and the plan is to do another regime change via this route?
Isn't this "son of the late Shah" a guy from the US?
> How likely is it that those "protestors" are US and Israel propped
It's almost sure that both US and Israel are meddling with the current situation. That doesn't mean the situation isn't also started by and wanted by the population.
For a comparison point in the past, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the US were grass-roots movements started by local people with legitimate claims. At the same time, opponents of the US like USSR were involved in stirring these movements, because of course they would.
There isn't much you can infer about the legitimacy of a movement by learning that the movement is helped by foreign intelligence agencies.
The best way you can avoid this kind of confusion is 1) make a society in which malicious actors don't have many latent issues to stir, and 2) make it so your country's intelligence agencies aren't malicious actors. There isn't much else to do.
Iran has a water crisis, and allegedly the economic situation is so bad that people are starting to wonder if it will soon affect their ability to buy food.
Even the Romans knew that if you wanted to stay in power you had to provide bread and circuses.
Very, but at the same time the Iranian leadership have been a really shitty government and ran the country into the gutter. People have genuine grievances.
The only way to believe this is if you're a Westerner being fed a purely US-centric media diet. Otherwise you'd know all the ways that the Iranian government has been failing their people recently and for a long time now, and how unhappy Iranians are with their government. You people act like people can't be upset at how they're being treated by their own government without being incited by an external actor. That's honestly quite the dehumanising and insulting way of looking at it.
Also, if the US wanted to do a regime change, they'd just move in militarily a la Venezuela and Trump would be talking about it non-stop. He's not the subtle type, I promise. We'd already know if they were involved.
I mean, Trump is talking about Iran nonstop.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2026-01-10/ty-artic...
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...
I guess the people Israel is murdering on a massive scale are generally noncitizens, but it's still not really in a position to throw stones.
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It is 100% that.
Starlink is primarily a military technology that is used both on a battlefield and to coordinate USA-backed "protests". Why, for instance, it just become free in Venezuela? Every country needs to be able to to defend itself from Starlink.
mobile phones are primarily a military technology
Every country needs to be able to defend itself from Russia, too, apparently.
What’s wrong with that end-result?
Way worse outcomes.
No, only US-backed puppets that US uses against Russia. For example, Russia has very good relations with Belorussia where the government wasn't lured into this role and did not let US to overthrow it.
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What an insane take.
Insane only for americans who refuse to accept the fact that their country, with some of their "allies", is the primary cause of wars and instability in today's world. And who refuse to understand that providing means of communication to people of country X to organize military actions against the army and police of country X, is a military agression against country X.
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I publicly beg people not to do this.
Sharing anything but the prompt you wrote is useless and arguably harmful.