Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
1 day ago
It has been 120 hours (5 days) since the internet shutdown in Iran began. While international phone calls have started working again, data remains blocked.
I am looking for technical solutions to establish resilient, long-term communication channels that can bypass such shutdowns. What are the most viable options for peer-to-peer messaging, mesh networks, or satellite-based solutions that don't rely on local ISP infrastructure?
States like Iran have signal catchers, where they can get a rough idea where a signal is coming from through triangulation. The US military has had this for over 20 years now. Often these coordinates are fed in as targets into weapons systems.
If you're going the radio route these come to mind:
Meshtastic: 1W, one band, local. Useful if Iran doesn't know about it. But easy to jam and probably triangulate.
Wifi Halow: 1W, can possibly hop between bands, but probably also really easy to jam and triangulate.
WSPR: Possibly good, transmitters can hide in the noise floor, and can go long distances with 100mW of power, but slow. Probably triangulable, very easy to jam once located in the spectrum. Data can be transmitted and received with off the shelf components.
Military Radios: Very good. Transmitters can frequency hop, making triangulation and jamming difficult. Also encryption. You can easily transmit in the same frequency space that Iran would be using to avoid jamming. But also, mostly unobtanium. I have heard stories about US military radios showing up at Ham Fests.
WSPR carries almost no payload data and by default it literally broadcasts your location. You could modify it but it will still take ages to send a short sentence which is probably the last thing you want when you want to avoid getting caught.
Short bursty spread spectrum hopping seems to be more what the military do and they also care deeply about triangulation.
Just to underscore this WSPR sends 50 BITs of data in 110.6 seconds - a data rate of less than 2 baud. It's not practical for really any kind of message passing. Using CW (Morse code) would be at least an order of magnitude faster.
Not knowing much about radio hardware your post made me wonder why we don’t see too many options for radios that can do this outside the military. Is it because there’s rarely a practical use case outside of avoiding jamming? Or is the hardware to do so prohibitively expensive?
There is actually a lot of fairly inexpensive SDR hardware aimed at amateurs, and other ways to do cheap packet radio. But outside the amateur radio community you might not hear about it because you need a license to transmit.
Radio spectrum is licensed, and licenses are very expensive.
There are several bands for Amateur radio in US/EU/AU, but it is explicitly forbidden to use any kind of encryption on them. So no one can sell devices that use encryption on those bands.
And I doubt Iran was friendly to amateur radio in the first place. E.g. in USSR it was crazy to think of any non-approved radio.
9 replies →
Old fashioned phone trees can be really useful IMHO OP. We used them when I worked in a school. If there was winter weather, you'd call say, everyone with a last name from A to G in the staff directory, someone else calls G to K, and so on and so forth.
You can combine the phone tree with literal runners -- so basically, someone takes their burner and calls suburbs A,B,C and D and then the runners go out and pass the word about the protest or action.
Presumably the phones are tapped?
People have been claiming for years that US phone calls are subject to routine computer analysis (Echelon); these days that's a relatively cheap thing to do with LLMs.
I suspect the literal runners solution is what's happening, although that's also very dangerous when the police control the streets.
And don't forget the whatsapp group chat classic: secure communications where at least one person in the group is leaking them.
>Presumably the phones are tapped?
If you simply list a location and time, it's hard to suss out whether it's a coffee or a protest. And there's a limit on how many people can be surveilled in real time, with the focus probably being on organizers not attendees. You're correct it's a possibility, but as a practical matter they can't listen to everyone, all the time -- but the key is to organize some "event" that overwhelms the regime, or days or weeks later they will possibly get around to your intercept and give you grief, yes.
But if the internet has been cut off and the bodies are piling up, sometimes you might choose to take a calculated risk.
> You can combine the phone tree with literal runners
And I thought Mirror’s Edge world was too far fetched back in 2008. But, apparently, it’s the reality now or where things are headed after all.
Using couriers, and not phones, was largely how bin Laden escaped capture for so long. Took months to track a courier back to him.
Radio stations too. The US civil rights movement sometimes used radio DJs to call people out for protests.
I've read that pirate radio is still a big part of protest movements and Mapuche resistance in Chile.
ClearChannel and Spotify certainly changed that potential!
"Stay tuned boppers, stay tuned."
Bitchat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitchat
Surprised to not see it mentioned (more) in this thread. Uses Bluetooth and can bridge via Nostr.
V.92 dial-up. Slow and expensive, but it's Internet access.
I vaguely remember something like that happened during the Egyptian revolution/Tahrir Square protests.
Briar is an option in such cases but its not realtime. Mote of an email/newsletter app that hops delivery across Bluetooth/ WiFi.
https://briarproject.org/
But unfortunately Android only? (not the fault of Briar, still unfortunate)
An important factor to consider when answering this question, is that the average monthly wage in Iran is only $200 to $500 USD/month.
Why it is important?
I guess because a single Starlink subscription would be 30-80% of their monthly income.
7 replies →
For dense areas, mesh applications like BitChat (Jack Dorsey) could bypass the need for a network with p2p bluetooth mesh networks. And works with existing devices, vs something like meshtastic which needs an installed base (afaik).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitchat
Does it actually work though? My experience with Meshtastic is it’s so difficult to get a message delivered beyond the nearest hop that it’s almost useless. And Bluetooth has a significantly shorter range than LoRa.
The LoRa enthusiasts in my area seem to all have moved to Meshcore, largely because of a quirk in Meshtastic's routing algorithm that doesn't handle nodes with widely varying visibility/power/noisefloor well. They report regularly getting traffic hundreds of miles. There might be a couple mountaintop repeaters in the mesh though.
For OP's situation I think runners and a store and forward system like Scuttlebutt/Briar/etc might work better. But I'd love to see a couple of thorough case studies on that kind of system, they've been around for many years targeting related scenarios.
4 replies →
HF radio. Highly depdendent on space weather, but generally I can communicate around the world with only 100 watts and a long wire.
Be aware though that transmitting on any radio is like turning on a giant, extremely bright light bulb directly above your antenna. Anyone with basic radio know-how will be able to hear you and locate you.
I had to think for a second to realize that HF means lower frequency than VHF, not high frequency in an absolute sense.
It's very silly that "high frequency" is among the lowest frequencies, and that we wound up with Very, Ultra, Super, Extremely, and Tremendously High Frequencies!
5 replies →
Back in ye olden days, HF was really high! What we'd consider today to be near useless due to limited bandwidth and insane antenna requirements were once the primary frequencies for communications.
1 reply →
Maybe https://meshtastic.org?
Is it possible to setup LoRA mesh networks in Iran? LoRA chips should be on the order of <$5 bulk shippable from China
You'd have to have a huge network spanning the entire country to get a message out however
I was going to suggest LoRA.
But a country-sized network with the purpose of evading a blackout would likely have to be full mesh. A network organized into a hierarchy (aggregated routing tables) requires some coordination that could quickly be identified and squashed.
The size of such a mesh is limited by scaling factors, so this couldn't span a nation. Let's say you could do that though. The network would be completely choked up with traffic to the point of unusability.
I think starlink, satphone, maybe packet radio on small scale are the most realistic options.
Yggdrasil (mesh network) would be the longer-term solution. It is fast, resilient, and pure IPv6. But you'll have to establish IP links between interested parties to peer over. Eventually some will be able to peer over the internet, and connect everyone else to the rest of the world.
Yggdrasil was never designed to be censorship-resistant and can be blocked with trivial DPI.
That's correct. But it is designed so that it can run over PTP IP links, which is the only option in a full internet blackout. Yggdrasil is censorship-resistant in that it can form one big mesh network, without the internet or ISPs. Peering over the internet is just convenience.
If you want to peer over a censored internet connection, you should set up XRay first and peer over that.
Yggdrasil is not a darknet or anti-censorship tool for the internet. It's an alternative to the internet.
Starlink and/or BGAN/satellite phones.
unless you already have the gear and a subscription, not sure how an Iranian citizen can get starlink set up: starlink doesn't ship there, so needs to be individually imported, plus will need to be paid for by a debit/credit card from a non-sanctioned country
starlink was explictly blocked there. they are jamming gps which is needed for it
The jamming is expensive to maintain and not 100% effective. It's still your best shot.
you can unjam by providing the real signal locally, or a signal close enough for starlink to work. you don't need to be centimeter-precise.
WiFi Halow is a longer range protocol (still probably not long enough). But something like this can get people connected: https://openmanet.net
Couriers and USB flash drives can be pretty effective. They're high latency but can be very high bandwidth. Look at the El Paquete network in Cuba[0] as inspiration. Self-contained HTML/JavaScript SPAs can provide navigation and the likes of TiddlyWiki[1] can allow for collaboration. A network of couriers can move as fast as road traffic and distribute stuff pretty widely.
Contents can be re-shared locally over ad-hoc or mesh WiFi networks even without Internet access.
Encryption and steganography can obscure the contents of drives from casual inspection. You can stuff a lot of extraneous data in Office XML documents that are just zip files and look innocuous when opened.
1. For current events content add descriptions, locations, and timestamps to everything. The recipients need that context.
2. Even unencrypted files can be verified with cryptographic signatures. These can be distributed on separate channels including Bluetooth file transfers.
3. Include offline installers for browsers like Dillo or Firefox. Favor plain text formats where possible. FAT32 has the broadest support in terms of file system for the flash drives. Batch, PowerShell, and bash scripts can also be effective in doing more complex things while not needing local installation or invasive installations on people's computers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki
Do we need to come up with more internet protocols/services that don't require a negotiation process? So that it would work better with very high latency sneaker-net flash-drive networks? Especially for the already asynchronous ones like email? I could envision a user with a messenger/email-like client who "sends" (encrypted) messages that get put on a flash drive. This is carried around the neighborhood, etc, where others do the same. Eventually someone takes it to a machine with regular internet access, where the messages get delivered to their intended recipients. And then replies to these messages (coming hours, days, weeks later) also get put on a flash drive, and maybe hopefully get back to the original receivers. And if the internet-down situation has been resolved, the recipients will already have their messages, but if not, they'll get them when the flash drive arrives.
I suppose this isn't complete without mentioning RFC 1149 (IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers).
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149
In this case NNCP (Note-to-Node Copy)[0] would be useful. It fully supports sneakernet/floppynet distribution but also has an online mode that could be used by nodes with active Internet connections.
[0] http://www.nncpgo.org/index.html
Problem is that most methods involve making your location known openly. The Dark Forest book of the Remembrance of the Earth Past explains why it is not a good idea to do so in the current circumstances
If the phones are working, 56k modem.
Well, up to 33.6k modem. 56k required cooperation between the telco and ISPs.
without searching the internet. imagine you have no internet. do you have any computer with a modem? do you know anyone that does? can you get access to one? do you have dialup software? do you have a dial up international internet provider? can you find one? remember you need to do all of this without the internet. can you sign up for one? would they allow you to pay for it from Iran? the best time to get ready is before SHTF
If you’re using the circuit-switched mobile phone calls it’s unlikely you will be able to negotiate that; GSM compression is optimised for voice and not data.
If you have a phone or cellular dongle with a serial interface you might be able to initiate a “data” call which gives you a modem-like link at speeds much higher than running an actual modem on the audio path. Note that this kind of non-standard usage will stand out like a sore thumb so might not be advisable.
some DNS tunneling solutions work (dnstt for example). Also, many people have smuggled Starlink are are providing proxies inside Iran.
Ideally cjdns or similar can be used inside the country to create an alternative encrypted mesh network inside the borders, with some "exit nodes" out.
A while back there was a lot of hype on ultra wide band that is some sort of pulse code modulation and it being trails t to jamming. Can military jammers jam these too? Or is this similar to spread spectrum and the same jammers work for UWB as well?
Say I wanted to send out one important 1 min long video and I only have access to long distance calling and a PC at home. How could I send that file over? Would that just be dialup and if so why can’t that be used in this situation?
HAM radio is your best option.
I wonder if QRP would be something?
https://hackaday.com/2016/03/08/how-low-can-you-go-the-world...
also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software) https://wsjt.sourceforge.io/wsjtx.html
plus the super simple "Fireball QRP transmitter"
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-DX/73-magazine/73-...
Sure, if you are smart enough. Maybe mount a small transmitter on a tree then use a directional antenna at a very low power and use the tree as a repeater.
Or use NVIS, which at least makes triangulation harder.
We need a communication method that even fools can use.
That way, we might end up with enough nodes such that mesh networking comes within reach.
Isn't one of the problems is that to get appreciable range you have to have a fairly obvious antenna setup?
~5m antenna during the day, 10m at night for a simple dipole antenna
I'd be more worried about them being able to triangulate the radio signals though. If they can jam GPS, surely they can detect a 100W signal around 14MHz.
What do you think amateur radio does? Why do you think that broadcasting your location, and that you're looking to get information from somewhere other than the approved sources will end up in anything other than tragedy? What information do you think could reliably be provided with amateur radio in a situation like this?
The OP wanted a way to bypass a internet shutdown, not a perfect solution.
And you know, I'm fairly sure being able to talk to the outside world makes it so that you can at least get information out to others.
Pray tell, what methods do YOU have to bypass a shutdown with privacy and no reliance on ISP and resistant to jamming?
2 replies →
Related today:
90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683
[dead]
[flagged]
Doubt that one solution alone will be enough to counter info blackout in any country. You need a combination of old and new strategies.
Starlink (satellite, bypasses local infrastructure; currently jammed but partially works in some areas, free access offered): Obtain smuggled terminal (dish + router). Place with clear sky view. Power on. Download Starlink app (iOS/Android) or use web interface. Connect phone/PC to Starlink Wi-Fi. Follow app prompts to activate (no subscription needed in Iran now).
Meshtastic (LoRa mesh, long-range offline text): Buy compatible device (e.g., Heltec/RAK ESP32 LoRa board). Flash latest firmware via web flasher (meshtastic.org). Install Meshtastic app (Android/iOS). Connect via Bluetooth. Set region (e.g., EU433/US915 based on hardware). Create/join channel with shared key. Messages hop device-to-device.
Noghteha (Bluetooth mesh, Iran-specific, offline): Download Noghteha APK (Google Play or sideloading). Install on Android. Open app—no account needed. Enable Bluetooth. Messages auto-hop via nearby phones in mesh.
Briar (Bluetooth/Wi-Fi P2P, offline secure messaging): Download Briar APK (briarproject.org or F-Droid). Install on Android. Create account (nickname + password). Add contacts: meet in person and scan QR, or share link via other channel. Enable Bluetooth/Wi-Fi for sync when in range. Messages store & forward when devices meet.
Delta Chat (email-based, works if any outbound email possible): Download Delta Chat app (delta.chat). Use chatmail server for auto-account (no personal email needed). Or add existing email. Add contacts via QR/link. Send messages (E2EE). Relies on email transit; resilient to blocks if email partially works.
Carrier pigeons: (communications w/ nearby states).
Code Talkers: Use minority Iranian languages (e.g., Kurdish, Balochi, Azerbaijani) as codes for voice/radio comms, training speakers to encode military/civil strategies, similar to WWII code talkers—resilient if monitors lack fluency.
Sci-fi alien languages (e.g., Klingon, Na'vi) could work if users learn them for encrypted messaging apps or calls, but impractical due to learning curve and detection risks in which case create your own code talker language with an AI.
e.g., StratCode System Alphabet: Use 10 simple symbols for phonetics (easy to draw/speak):
⊙ (oh) - Open circle for vowels like O/A. | (ih) - Line for I/E. △ (ah) - Triangle for A/U. × (kh) - X for hard consonants K/G. ~ (sh) - Wave for S/Sh. □ (th) - Square for T/D. ○ (eh) - Empty circle for E. / (fh) - Slash for F/V. \ (rh) - Backslash for R/L.
(mh) - Plus for M/N/H.
Combine for words (e.g., ⊙| = "oi" sound).
Vocabulary for Strategies (map to animals/plants for disguise; speak/draw symbols):
Attack/Advance: Eagle (△×~) - △ for sky, × for strike, ~ for swift. Defend/Hold: Turtle (□\⊙) - □ for shell, \ for slow, ⊙ for safe. Retreat/Evacuate: Rabbit (/~) - / for jump, \ for run, ~ for quick. Scout/Observe: Owl (⊙○+) - ⊙ for eyes, ○ for night, + for wise. Supply/Logistics: Bee (~\□) - ~ for buzz/work, \ for hive, □ for store. Communicate/Signal: Wolf (×/+ ) - × for howl, / for pack, + for alert. Protest/Rally (civil): Flower (△⊙|) - △ for grow, ⊙ for bloom, | for unite. Hide/Conceal: Fox (~/) - ~ for sly, / for trick, \ for burrow. Alliance/Join: Tree (|+) - | for trunk, \ for roots, + for branches. Disrupt/Block: Storm (×~○) - × for thunder, ~ for wind, ○ for rain.
Encoding Example: "Attack then defend" = "Eagle Turtle" (△×~ □\⊙). Learn by associating symbols to sounds/objects; practice short phrases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism
Thanks. Exactly how can I send this page to my friends and family back in Iran?
You cannot, they are on their own with what they have. My genuine condolences and sympathy.