On January 8, 2026, the digital sky went dark. I thought we are pushing the boundaries of the tech world and have super powers when needed. I was so wrong.
This is Iran's third total internet shutdown, but the methodology has evolved into something far more surgical. They didn't just block IP addresses; they severed BGP routes, killed mobile data, and effectively jammed Starlink signals into a dead zone thanks to Russian imports. When the signal itself is murdered, your Tor bridges and VPNs become expensive paperweights.
As builders, we are being out-engineered. We have grown complacent, assuming the "always-on" cloud is a fundamental constant of the universe. But if your software requires a remote handshake to function, it is a liability, not a tool, in a crisis zone. Every application built with heavy reliance on centralized APIs vaporizes the moment the backbone is cut.
We must stop designing for the "connected" illusion and start building for the darkness.
This is my plea to the HN community: stop treating "offline-first" as a niche feature and start treating it as a human right. We need robust, decentralized mesh networks that bypass state-controlled gateways entirely. We need isolated documentation tools and local-first databases that can sync via Bluetooth or physical handoffs.
Build for the 212 regions that went dark last year so that the next time a state pulls the plug, the people aren't left helpless.
a throwaway account for obvious reasons (they have also Chinese tech to track); make your code work when the world goes quiet.
> This is my plea to the HN community: stop treating "offline-first" as a niche feature and start treating it as a human right. We need robust, decentralized mesh networks that bypass state-controlled gateways entirely. We need isolated documentation tools and local-first databases that can sync via Bluetooth or physical handoffs.
I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of the problems in Iran, but switching to a world where tools are design first for syncing via Bluetooth and offline methods just isn’t going to make a better world for all of us.
You need specialized tools for specialized situations. Trying to get the whole world to pay the overhead of mesh networks and Bluetooth handoffs and all of the design choices that go along with it would be a mistake.
The software world is not monolithic. Pleas for everyone to stop building for the way the world works and start building for highly unusual and specific use cases isn’t reasonable.
Build specialized tools for specialized circumstances. They will always serve the purpose far better than if you try to get everyone to build their general purpose tools around extremely rare circumstances.
Expecting all apps to go offline-first is probably a nonstarter.
Expecting a robust ecosystem of offline-first apps, ideally compatible with everyone else's existing apps, would be awesome.
An opt-in facebook streaming offline mode where posts are queued and sent...
or an opt-in signal mode where p2p messaging is possible via transient connections (imagine the data mule movie that would be coming out in 2030). All this is technically possible, just not prioritized.
> The software world is not monolithic. Pleas for everyone to stop building for the way the world works and start building for highly unusual and specific use cases isn’t reasonable.
This expressed expectation of "how the world works" is the perception of a monolith, however. There is no divine right or reason for things to be designed online-first, except for incentives to the service providers. When somebody designs an app to be online-first, they are choosing to be a service provider, and not an app author. This distinction may not be clear to developers who came to be in a culture where online-first is a first order concern, but it is immediately clear to anybody who "owns" the "app" in question when the service is either neglected or decommissioned in a few years, or is otherwise made inaccessible via the internet.
> We need robust, decentralized mesh networks that bypass state-controlled gateways entirely.
Let's do a thought experiment: assume they're here and that we are talking about a dictatorship. What's next?
If it's something like Meshtastic — it requires standalone hardware. These devices will be outlawed. The entire country will stop importing them, confiscating these devices from whoever uses them, probably jailing people who own them.
Alright, then what if it's something like BitChat instead — you only need your phone. If it gets traction, police will stop you and force you to unlock your phone. They do this already in Russia.
It's not a technical problem and can't be solved like one.
A million years ago when I was in highschool, teachers would make us show them that we cleared our TI-83 calculators.
So there were of course various programs to simulate the experience of clearing the calculator. Plenty of ways through the police stop with our illicit digital goods, even then.
Generally just don't come here anymore, but with the US fascists now checking phones at borders, the idea of having low detectability digital "smuggling compartments" (digitally speaking) in our devices is becoming all too real. Some loopback filesystem that your phone can mount that has the rest of the phone, various systemd-sysext layers for bitchat.
With the UK joining the idiot races to maybe ban VPNs, we have another not so far off reason for needing protection versus the totalitarian. Sorry but if you believe tailscaling home is a crime you're the enemy of society, your rules are a joke, and declaration of Independence of cyberspace strongly is in detail about what a mockery of yourself you are making.
I disagree. Build for your target audience and your targeted application. We don't need for every vehicle to be off-road-capable when you're expecting to deliver cargo on paved roads. We can do that, but it will make things more complex and more expensive.
I'm not saying that nobody should ever consider "the state cuts off the internet" as a criteria when deciding what to do, but making that a foundational requirement is like starting out with "handle google-scale" as a requirement when you have zero reason to believe you will.
There are plenty of good reasons for local first apps, but "build for darkness" is pretty far down the list for me.
The sad thing about continuing development of existing technologies is that all reliability, robustness, and multi-purpose capabilities get optimized away over time. In the ideal world, companies wouldn't even sell you hardware or software, they'd just charge for magically doing the one thing you want at the moment, with no generality and no agency on your end.
It's a miracle we still have electric outlets in homes, and not just bunch of hard-wired appliances plugged in by vendor subcontractors.
Shameless plug: start with https://comaps.app/ . Recently I helped a woman find an address because she told me there's some problem with her internet connection.
I think having an offline map of at least the region you live in can come in handy. In fact, I carry an old phone with impressive battery life (Samsung Galaxy A10) and offline maps installed on it so I don't get lost.
Paper maps (or printed) is mandatory when you are on track in mountains. Offline digital maps are useless in -30 when phone battery and powerbank are dead.
Great to see more offline map projects. Is this any different than Organic Maps currently? The about page indicated this project is a continuation of Organic Maps due to issues with that project, not sure if there are new features or if it will be the main project going forward.
definitely not what you have in mind here, but at least something going a different route: https://offbridge.net
of course nothing that would help iranians right now. even if, the numbers would be blocked quickly i guess. but also there doesnt seem to be features that would help in such a serious situation
> The funny part of engineers is that they always think that, at some point, they will reach perfect engineering.
This is the opposite of what I’ve observed. Most engineers know that everything is tradeoffs and compromises. They know there will always be a better way.
A lot of engineering management is getting engineering teams to accept good enough rather than endless iterations and refactoring.
> As of Saturday, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said it had confirmed 5,459 deaths and is investigating 17,031 more.
The 30,000 number comes from the Ministry of Health. It seems the UN number also aligns with the new 30,000 number. This is much worse than the 3,000 that was reported earlier. But it also seems like the crackdown is over now, and we're still just counting deaths from Jan 8 and 9.
I compare this to the recent protests in Bangladesh, where Sheikh Hasina ordered the military to shoot the protesters and the military refused. The difference between these two countries is proof that people do have the ability to disobey orders from authoritarian leaders, and that decision can have a huge impact.
The difference is that IR didn’t use Artesh (it’s military) to suppress the protests. They bused in its proxy militias from Iraq, who doesn’t care much who to shoot.
I'm Iranian (diaspora from Canada), there are multiple branches of security forces in the regime:
1. The army (air, land, sea, etc)
2. IRGC (revolutionary guards)
3. Basij (a specialized militia within IRCG, often with their own chain of command)
4. Police (for civilian monitoring and control)
5. Guidance Patrol (specialized "morality" police for enforcing Islamic law)
6. Other (undercover, highly trained agents both inside and outside of country)
The reason why it's setup up this way, is to prevent mutiny within the regime.
After the revolution, they realized that they have to setup a system like this to protect themselves, if one of these is compromised.
Currently, Iran is in the process of preparing for a long war with Israel, United States (and their allies in the region). Khamenei has been moved to a secure location and is no longer appearing for "Friday prayers".
He will likely attempt to flee should the regime falls.
I hope that he is captured alive and is forced to stand trial.
He has to answer for every single person he has harmed, both in Iran and elsewhere.
Is it really a gotcha that CIA is pushing money towards orgs that are in opposition to a US adversary? Is the French resistance during ww2 tainted because they received support from OSS?
>The 30,000 number comes from the Ministry of Health.
It comes, allegedly, from people from that ministry who were talking to TIME.
I would imagine their contact was probably mediated by the state department - the same people currently gearing up for an Iraq-style invasion.
Later on TIME adds:
>TIME has been unable to independently verify these figures.
Which is not altogether unsurprising. TIME wasnt exactly the most careful magazine when it came to verifying state department supplied intelligence about WMDs back in 2003.
There are reports from Iranians and admissions from the US that they had people inside the protests to cause chaos.
“The Iranian regime is in trouble. Bringing in mercenaries is its last best hope,” Mr Pompeo wrote on X. “Riots in dozens of cities and the Basij under siege — Mashhad, Tehran, Zahedan. Next stop: Baluchestan," he added.
At least ten killed in Iran protests as authorities issue warnings to demonstrators"
“Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them."
What explains the silence from activists outside Iran on this particular issue? I see relatively limited coverage on global media. Iranians seem to be fighting this alone, and dying by the thousands.
Perhaps we know, but the reasons will be unpopular.
There's limited coverage of all global conflicts, certainly in American media, but quite likely in other Western media.
> What explains the silence from activists outside Iran on this particular issue?
What explains the silence from the media on all other conflicts. It's certainly not because lives are not being destroyed in Sudan [1] and Myanmar [2].
Lack of shock images, and lack of personnel for humanitarian orgs. Protests and killings are happening outside of the locations MSF is implanted, and even if we have stories from doctors prevented from helping shot protesters, we don't have videos (and in the last few years and especially the last two weeks, doctors finally understood no one cared if they were prevented to help, since it was acceptable in France and even in the US).
The only NGO looking for Iran exclusively is Iran Human Right (https://iranhr.net/en/) and depend on the UNHRC, which is not particularly media trained and not good at reacting (also, they lost US funding less than a year ago and are reorganizing as we speak).
In the end, it will be like Yemen or Sudan all over again: media hear of the massacre late, send journalists, journalists get refused, they send journalists to neighboring countries and infiltrate with local guide help, some journalist dies, and three month after the beginning of the trouble we will get images and information.
Probably the activists are hesitant because the US is rearing to start a war with Iran (that will certainly kill way more civilians) and they don’t want to contribute to that decision.
US activists against IDF wanted US to stop arming and funding and enabling genocide directly. Many IDF soldiers are also from the US or go back and forth.
US isn’t arming or funding or enabling Iran directly, so calls for US action would mean call to war, which US leadership has already been signaling.
Maybe you think US should go to war. Regardless that’s the biggest difference.
There are also frankly many who are confused about Iran - sympathizing with Iran leadership as enemies of IDF and not understanding who they are and what they do. Lack of video going around doesn’t help.
In America at least, we saw protests against some of the things Israel did in Gaza because the US government is supporting Israel. Since the US is not a supporter of Iran, and in fact has been strong adversary for decades, there is less reason to protest here. Plus, we’ve got some serious problems of our own that are keeping us occupied at the moment
But the protests weren’t limited to Ameica, there were protests all over the world, including in Muslim countries.
And the outrage wasn’t always directed at the government. We don’t see Iranian students in the US being attacked. We don’t see Iranian places of worship in the US being attacked. We don’t see as much outrage in the comments on HN - there were some event justifying it.
It's true that the recipient of the protest might be different, but that's no reason to be quiet.
China in Tibet, China's treatment of the Uyghurs, Russia's war against Ukraine, Kony 2012 etc, there are lots of causes where the local government in whichever country you look at isn't actively involved, yet there was a lot more public noise and campaigns.
I don't know what the answer is, but "my government doesn't deliver weapons to them" hasn't been a reason before, so I don't see why it would be now.
Quite possibly because they don't want to become the US and Israel's useful idiots - contributing to calls for war that could easily lead to the deaths of millions if past experience is anything to go by.
If the US were serious about the well-being of Iranian people they'd stop trying to screw the economy and foment violent unrest, but of course that is not what they are interested in. They want war. They want regime change. They want balkanisation.
Pretty easy actually. The only leverage we have over Iran is military action, which I think historical precedent shows will lead to worse outcomes for everyone involved.
The way I see it, any support for Iranians will be co-opted to start a war with Iran, which will be a disaster.
This isn't the case for Israel / Gaza, which is what I assume you're alluding to when you talk about activism.
Islam and Neoliberal wests are the strangest bedfellows. Thankfully people like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and many others pointed the oddities long before many others made it us vs them political. Palestinian cause is used to drown any other legitimate concerns about ideology
Richard Dawkins is a weirdo crank these days who's co-authoring questionable books woth sex offenders about transgender issues. And the one thing Christopher Hitchens was most right about was Israel, he was an anti-zionist.
And the neoliberal west has more in common with Israel than Iran, I don't quite understand why you choose to write broad political comments if you don't have the basic background knowledge that would be needwd in this discussion.
There's no activism because everybody agrees it's terrible. If your govt is already cutting out Iran and sanctioning them, there's no need to demand action.
This is very different from Israel, where our govts are actively supporting a genocide. That requires activism to change course.
Why would people demonstrate if everyone is aligned?
Protests were about US's inaction in Gaza as much as its support for Israel. Why no such protests now? Why aren't there thousands of people gathering demanding US doing something to help Iran's people?
Because Persians are fighting islam (they're burning down mosques).
and the islamic regime was a sponsor of previous pro-palestine movements.
leftists don't find this an appealing mix. they'd rather blame Israel for everything, but here we see Iranians siding with the Israelis because they've seen what islam does to their country.
I very much doubt they are fighting Islam. Most of them are Muslims. They are fighting fundamentalist Islam. DO you have any evidence they are doing this or "siding with the Israelis"? The fundamentalist Islamist Saudi's seem to get on with Israel fine these days.
I think its simpler. There is no one white involved. What is unique about Israel is that most of its population is white so its an issue worth covering (for people backing either side). The same with Ukraine. On the other hand what happens in Eritrea or Sudan or Myanmar or Xinjiang does not matter.
This is a straw man in my opinion. But regardless of that, your theory doesn't explain why conservative media isn't really covering this either - The Iran protests haven't exactly been front page material on Fox News or OAN or Breitbart
Nobody in the west actually cares about injustice. They just pretend to care when it's politically convenient.
Unfortunately, ABC and NBC haven't found a way to blame Trump for what's happening in Iran. Highlighting the atrocities perpetuated in the name of Islam is more likely to help Trump than hurt him, so this story must be minimized. It's just good, smart politics.
This article right here, and the countless that came before are telling people to be outraged. People aren't, partly because they don't know what to believe without really any reliable or unbiased reporting, partly because the Trump outrage machine has filled the news feeds with so much other stuff to be outraged about, and partly because the situation in the Middle East seems so futile and stupid that people don't want to care because nothing will change and no government with any say in the region will allow peace or democracy or self-determination to the people there.
I guess this will be a difficult question to ask. I have no doubt the numbers are high but there is something odd about the videos that leak out. The sound of the guns are enhanced for psychological effect? and in the cases where a gunner on a truck is moving down a road purportedly mowing people down there is no blood on the road where the protestors had been standing, no bodies and we never see the people being shot. It's not like I want to see people being shot but I've also seen a lot of fake mass shooting videos in the past decade. There's no shortage of real uncensored footage of killing in Ukraine. Why is everything censored for Iran?
Ukraine was historically more or less a free-for-all as far as front-line cinema is concerned.
I have to imagine the situation in Iran is more difficult for a few reasons:
1. Gen AI is much better today than it was in 2022. So, both sides can generate much more realistic fakes.
2. There was an article here on HN about Iran's internet slowly coming back on a whitelist basis. We're probably getting more pro-Government videos now than we were at the beginning of the current events.
3. Further crackdown on Starlink minimizes authentic leaks (I only heard about this and have no way to confirm how impactful this really is)
I'll add my own anecdotal agreement with your suspicion though - the footage coming out of Iran has been, for me, more difficult than other conflicts to piece together into a cohesive story. Western countries are claiming 30k+ dead, and while I don't necessarily reject the claim, the situation on the ground is still very blurry to me.
I don't like promoting gore websites but in watchpeopledie and search Iran you can count yourself at least hundreds of body from all the videos, often in a single location, usually the aftermath.
I feel like the period between 2019 through to today (2019-2026), human death tolls have paralleled prior twentieth century death tolls. Numbers that sound like tens of thousands, and even millions if you count Ukraine/Russia.
The simple absence of on the ground reports from a variety of independent sources tells me that these numbers should not be simply ignored.
If there’s nothing happening, then the obvious way for the authorities to prove that is to let observers in, and let independent information out. They do not do this, so I will take these reports of deaths more seriously.
They shouldn't be ignored, but they also should be taken with a massive grain of salt. This reporting has all the hallmarks of the US State Department manufacturing consent for yet another war.
After WMDs i honestly thought america learned to be a bit more skeptical of poorly sourced "pretext for war" stories which emerge in the context of a military build up.
E.g. like reading the sentence:
>TIME has been unable to independently verify these figures.
> >TIME has been unable to independently verify these figures.
> And going "hmmm".
Journalists couldn’t possibly independently verify large scale death counts, especially at this point.
That doesn’t mean they’re wrong or propaganda.
If you start “going hmmm” when journalists honestly report their own limitations then that’s just going to leave you more vulnerable to the psy-op peddlers who never give such disclaimers.
You can already see them in the videos raiding hospitals to "finish off" the wounded... Or you can watch videos of hundreds of bodies in plastic bags if you need further proof that this massacre is actually happening on that place on the earth.
Despite feeling deeply for Iranians living under this oppressive regime and in the aftermath of the protests, I can’t help but think about how current media coverage of Iran compares to the way major outlets amplified questionable claims in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003.
The Islamic clampdown on the Iranian people has gone on for too long. The younger generation is willing to die for their freedom. The internet is locked down, satellite comms jammed with Chinese tech. The streets smell of blood. Police and imported Arab thugs open fire into crowds of protestors. Hospitals are systematically raided to finish off the wounded.
It will be his greatest act as president if Trump sends real assistance, as the Iranian people are begging him. It will save countless lives. Either way, in the end, Persia will rise again, the lion will raise its head, the brutality of Islamic oppression will be cast off, and the world will come to know the true spirit of these people.
That's way higher than I thought. Is there any evidence? Dresden was 25,000, and the V2 and V1 campaigns had less numbers. So this is high even for an aerial bombing campaign.
[edit] I don't get why I'm getting downvoted. Are people making assumptions because I mentioned Dresden? Get a hold of yourself.
Aerial bombardments typically target areas with ~0.01 people/square meter, and those people are often in hardened shelters. A protest may have 1–4 people/square meter out in the open. Attacks targeting the latter cause orders of magnitude more casualties for the same amount of firepower.
And the crowd itself can be deadly if it gets too dense, due to panic or otherwise. For example, there have been at least two crowd collapse events with >1000 deaths in the Mecca pilgrimage.
I think it's just a stupid comparison. Aerial bombing campaign on a single city 80 years ago vs government coming down on protesters distributed in over 100 cities was the best reference you could find to doubt these numbers?
first: it's not in one day, it is over three weeks. Second, the 25000 is an extrapolation. Basically the Iran Islamic republic has a tendency to admit to 10-15% of the death toll, and they admit 3000 death.
At this point I don't believe anything about the situation unless I hear it firsthand from eyewitnesses. The amount of GenAI fakes circulating not just on insta and x but more importantly between iranian-born Boomers on Whatsapp that then gets recycled into: "My aunt in LA knows people in a Tehran Hospital and has seen videos of mass casualties amongst security forces/ protesters" is off the charts. Obviously until the internet gets turned on again the aunt has no privileged access to her sources in Tehran and can't have seen anything other then the same AI-slop everyone else has "seen" but for people who haven't been following the genAI developments closely its hard to understand how any of those videos could be anything other than authentic anyways. Even reputable Media have started to publish (and sometimes retract) those video and even if you don't care about Iran at all you should pay attention because this is a case study of something we'll be living with for a while. For the many Millions of people outside of Iran, like me, who for one reason or another have a personal interest in this clusterfruck of a Regime finally being EOLed, it's incredibly frustrating to witness the degree of incompetency at all levels of the US Gov in carrying out something the US used to lead the world in (regime change). While under Obama there was the consideration of plausible deniability at play constraining the work that could be carried out, the current admin has no such excuse. There seems to have been little to no contingency planning to aid the people we armed in case the Regime shut-off the internet (which they have done before) other than handing out easily tracked starlink terminal. Half of Tehran has a recent iPhone and satellite coms on these devices could easily have been enabled by the US Gov. Instead we have US officials on fox news producing clip after clip where they proudly detail the regime change operations they fail to carry out, which iranian state TV just have to translate for free pro-Regime Propaganda. Maybe the strategy is to scare all iranian propagandists that they'll be unemployed because their jobs have been outsourced to the US because otherwise you certainly would not have these same US officials on FOX to then explain why shooting peaceful protesters is great and totally a-OK and what democracy looks like.
What's the difference? they protested the government, got shot at. Then after a few month of getting killed while protesting, they chose to retaliate. Is it when the protesters retaliate that you call a protest an uprising?
Can You IMAGINE 30k deaths? A genocide happened in gaza and it took months, i think a year to reach 30k target and you are saying iran judt straight up killed 30k civilians in 1-2 days?
The Gaza numbers are confirmed deaths, with bodies and identities and all, it's not counting people they can't identify or who are missing and presumed dead (buried under rubble and the like). The confirmed death tolls are considered to be a vast undercount of actual total deaths. This 30k number is much less rigorous and we have no way to know it's accuracy.
The Gaza numbers that most Western media uncritically report are nonsense spewed out by Hamas whose agenda is aided by making that number as high as possible.
Without details to explain what aspects of the article are objectionable, this comment just leaves the original poster feeling bad, and other HN readers confused.
On what basis do you call it "slop"? I would agree that it's not much relevant to HN, but it seems to report that the number is at odds with most other figures.
The bar for submitting something to HN is quite low. (Just make an account. I think that's it - I don't think you need any particular karma level.) So, yes, you can get "slop" here - off topic, shilling, trolling, and just generally low-quality stuff. And lots of off topic.
And I generally oppose off topic stuff! But this story has kind of died out in the mainstream press, and I think it's a really important story. (But then, I suppose everybody who posts off topic stuff thinks that theirs is a really important story...)
Because innocent people are dying and western governments are capable of intervening but choose not to.
Your line of argument is an interesting one though. You're tacitly admitting that western protesters don't actually care about innocent Palestinians. They're just using Palestine as an excuse to undermine their governments.
Really, it is mysterious why would American students protest against something America actively does and supports, something their schools support rather then ... something another country not actively supported by America does.
It started like that though. It was a protest, then government military start killing people, again, and again, and once deadly violence is on the board, protester takes arms and shoot too. Then bystanders get killed, protesters get killed, some government military police get killed, and here if the government still has a bit of morality left, you get Euromaidan. If its the military, you get what happened in Nepal.
However, if none of that happen, you have a civil war.
On January 8, 2026, the digital sky went dark. I thought we are pushing the boundaries of the tech world and have super powers when needed. I was so wrong.
This is Iran's third total internet shutdown, but the methodology has evolved into something far more surgical. They didn't just block IP addresses; they severed BGP routes, killed mobile data, and effectively jammed Starlink signals into a dead zone thanks to Russian imports. When the signal itself is murdered, your Tor bridges and VPNs become expensive paperweights.
As builders, we are being out-engineered. We have grown complacent, assuming the "always-on" cloud is a fundamental constant of the universe. But if your software requires a remote handshake to function, it is a liability, not a tool, in a crisis zone. Every application built with heavy reliance on centralized APIs vaporizes the moment the backbone is cut.
We must stop designing for the "connected" illusion and start building for the darkness.
This is my plea to the HN community: stop treating "offline-first" as a niche feature and start treating it as a human right. We need robust, decentralized mesh networks that bypass state-controlled gateways entirely. We need isolated documentation tools and local-first databases that can sync via Bluetooth or physical handoffs.
Build for the 212 regions that went dark last year so that the next time a state pulls the plug, the people aren't left helpless.
a throwaway account for obvious reasons (they have also Chinese tech to track); make your code work when the world goes quiet.
> This is my plea to the HN community: stop treating "offline-first" as a niche feature and start treating it as a human right. We need robust, decentralized mesh networks that bypass state-controlled gateways entirely. We need isolated documentation tools and local-first databases that can sync via Bluetooth or physical handoffs.
I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of the problems in Iran, but switching to a world where tools are design first for syncing via Bluetooth and offline methods just isn’t going to make a better world for all of us.
You need specialized tools for specialized situations. Trying to get the whole world to pay the overhead of mesh networks and Bluetooth handoffs and all of the design choices that go along with it would be a mistake.
The software world is not monolithic. Pleas for everyone to stop building for the way the world works and start building for highly unusual and specific use cases isn’t reasonable.
Build specialized tools for specialized circumstances. They will always serve the purpose far better than if you try to get everyone to build their general purpose tools around extremely rare circumstances.
Expecting all apps to go offline-first is probably a nonstarter.
Expecting a robust ecosystem of offline-first apps, ideally compatible with everyone else's existing apps, would be awesome.
An opt-in facebook streaming offline mode where posts are queued and sent...
or an opt-in signal mode where p2p messaging is possible via transient connections (imagine the data mule movie that would be coming out in 2030). All this is technically possible, just not prioritized.
> The software world is not monolithic. Pleas for everyone to stop building for the way the world works and start building for highly unusual and specific use cases isn’t reasonable.
This expressed expectation of "how the world works" is the perception of a monolith, however. There is no divine right or reason for things to be designed online-first, except for incentives to the service providers. When somebody designs an app to be online-first, they are choosing to be a service provider, and not an app author. This distinction may not be clear to developers who came to be in a culture where online-first is a first order concern, but it is immediately clear to anybody who "owns" the "app" in question when the service is either neglected or decommissioned in a few years, or is otherwise made inaccessible via the internet.
> We need robust, decentralized mesh networks that bypass state-controlled gateways entirely.
Let's do a thought experiment: assume they're here and that we are talking about a dictatorship. What's next?
If it's something like Meshtastic — it requires standalone hardware. These devices will be outlawed. The entire country will stop importing them, confiscating these devices from whoever uses them, probably jailing people who own them.
Alright, then what if it's something like BitChat instead — you only need your phone. If it gets traction, police will stop you and force you to unlock your phone. They do this already in Russia.
It's not a technical problem and can't be solved like one.
A million years ago when I was in highschool, teachers would make us show them that we cleared our TI-83 calculators.
So there were of course various programs to simulate the experience of clearing the calculator. Plenty of ways through the police stop with our illicit digital goods, even then.
Generally just don't come here anymore, but with the US fascists now checking phones at borders, the idea of having low detectability digital "smuggling compartments" (digitally speaking) in our devices is becoming all too real. Some loopback filesystem that your phone can mount that has the rest of the phone, various systemd-sysext layers for bitchat.
With the UK joining the idiot races to maybe ban VPNs, we have another not so far off reason for needing protection versus the totalitarian. Sorry but if you believe tailscaling home is a crime you're the enemy of society, your rules are a joke, and declaration of Independence of cyberspace strongly is in detail about what a mockery of yourself you are making.
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I disagree. Build for your target audience and your targeted application. We don't need for every vehicle to be off-road-capable when you're expecting to deliver cargo on paved roads. We can do that, but it will make things more complex and more expensive.
I'm not saying that nobody should ever consider "the state cuts off the internet" as a criteria when deciding what to do, but making that a foundational requirement is like starting out with "handle google-scale" as a requirement when you have zero reason to believe you will.
There are plenty of good reasons for local first apps, but "build for darkness" is pretty far down the list for me.
In other words: "who's gonna pay for that?".
The sad thing about continuing development of existing technologies is that all reliability, robustness, and multi-purpose capabilities get optimized away over time. In the ideal world, companies wouldn't even sell you hardware or software, they'd just charge for magically doing the one thing you want at the moment, with no generality and no agency on your end.
It's a miracle we still have electric outlets in homes, and not just bunch of hard-wired appliances plugged in by vendor subcontractors.
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Shameless plug: start with https://comaps.app/ . Recently I helped a woman find an address because she told me there's some problem with her internet connection.
I think having an offline map of at least the region you live in can come in handy. In fact, I carry an old phone with impressive battery life (Samsung Galaxy A10) and offline maps installed on it so I don't get lost.
Paper maps (or printed) is mandatory when you are on track in mountains. Offline digital maps are useless in -30 when phone battery and powerbank are dead.
Great to see more offline map projects. Is this any different than Organic Maps currently? The about page indicated this project is a continuation of Organic Maps due to issues with that project, not sure if there are new features or if it will be the main project going forward.
There are lots of offline map apps. OSMAnd, for one.
Very useful in some areas. Not even that out of the way - I have needed offline maps in Cumbria, which is just rural and hilly.
definitely not what you have in mind here, but at least something going a different route: https://offbridge.net
of course nothing that would help iranians right now. even if, the numbers would be blocked quickly i guess. but also there doesnt seem to be features that would help in such a serious situation
> As builders, we are being out-engineered.
The funny part of engineers is that they always think that, at some point, they will reach perfect engineering.
The best engineering already exists and you do not need to do a thing. Code will not save you from the shtstorm that is coming.
> The funny part of engineers is that they always think that, at some point, they will reach perfect engineering.
This is the opposite of what I’ve observed. Most engineers know that everything is tradeoffs and compromises. They know there will always be a better way.
A lot of engineering management is getting engineering teams to accept good enough rather than endless iterations and refactoring.
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How would you communicate using an offline app?
By ‘offline’ they mean not connected to the internet. So peer to peer communication via wifi or bluetooth or USB or whatever else.
BitChat comes to mind.
Copy files onto Micro SD cards. Smuggle them out of the country or to a contact who has Internet access.
peer to peer RF like bluetooth or IEEE 802.15.4
With your mouth?
> As of Saturday, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said it had confirmed 5,459 deaths and is investigating 17,031 more.
The 30,000 number comes from the Ministry of Health. It seems the UN number also aligns with the new 30,000 number. This is much worse than the 3,000 that was reported earlier. But it also seems like the crackdown is over now, and we're still just counting deaths from Jan 8 and 9.
I compare this to the recent protests in Bangladesh, where Sheikh Hasina ordered the military to shoot the protesters and the military refused. The difference between these two countries is proof that people do have the ability to disobey orders from authoritarian leaders, and that decision can have a huge impact.
The difference is that IR didn’t use Artesh (it’s military) to suppress the protests. They bused in its proxy militias from Iraq, who doesn’t care much who to shoot.
I'm Iranian (diaspora from Canada), there are multiple branches of security forces in the regime:
1. The army (air, land, sea, etc)
2. IRGC (revolutionary guards)
3. Basij (a specialized militia within IRCG, often with their own chain of command)
4. Police (for civilian monitoring and control)
5. Guidance Patrol (specialized "morality" police for enforcing Islamic law)
6. Other (undercover, highly trained agents both inside and outside of country)
The reason why it's setup up this way, is to prevent mutiny within the regime.
After the revolution, they realized that they have to setup a system like this to protect themselves, if one of these is compromised.
Currently, Iran is in the process of preparing for a long war with Israel, United States (and their allies in the region). Khamenei has been moved to a secure location and is no longer appearing for "Friday prayers".
He will likely attempt to flee should the regime falls. I hope that he is captured alive and is forced to stand trial.
He has to answer for every single person he has harmed, both in Iran and elsewhere.
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Isn't HRANA funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a well-known CIA front?
IHR have around the same numbers, and isn't associated with the CIA. Valid concerns, but here you have multiple sources.
Is it really a gotcha that CIA is pushing money towards orgs that are in opposition to a US adversary? Is the French resistance during ww2 tainted because they received support from OSS?
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Main difference is that a good chunk do the crackdown was done by bringing in katib hezbollah from surrounding countries.
> The 30,000 number comes from the Ministry of Health.
Then why does the article say that they couldn't independently verify the number and that the only source is a German-Iranian eye doctor?
Have you given some thought to that question yourself, and what conclusion did you reach?
>The 30,000 number comes from the Ministry of Health.
It comes, allegedly, from people from that ministry who were talking to TIME.
I would imagine their contact was probably mediated by the state department - the same people currently gearing up for an Iraq-style invasion.
Later on TIME adds:
>TIME has been unable to independently verify these figures.
Which is not altogether unsurprising. TIME wasnt exactly the most careful magazine when it came to verifying state department supplied intelligence about WMDs back in 2003.
There are reports from Iranians and admissions from the US that they had people inside the protests to cause chaos.
“The Iranian regime is in trouble. Bringing in mercenaries is its last best hope,” Mr Pompeo wrote on X. “Riots in dozens of cities and the Basij under siege — Mashhad, Tehran, Zahedan. Next stop: Baluchestan," he added. At least ten killed in Iran protests as authorities issue warnings to demonstrators"
“Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them."
https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2026/01/03/mike-po...
What explains the silence from activists outside Iran on this particular issue? I see relatively limited coverage on global media. Iranians seem to be fighting this alone, and dying by the thousands.
Perhaps we know, but the reasons will be unpopular.
There's limited coverage of all global conflicts, certainly in American media, but quite likely in other Western media.
> What explains the silence from activists outside Iran on this particular issue?
What explains the silence from the media on all other conflicts. It's certainly not because lives are not being destroyed in Sudan [1] and Myanmar [2].
1. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/01/1166738
2. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1166004
> There's limited coverage of all global conflicts
Not exactly. There's a singular exception which has received torrential "coverage".
Lack of shock images, and lack of personnel for humanitarian orgs. Protests and killings are happening outside of the locations MSF is implanted, and even if we have stories from doctors prevented from helping shot protesters, we don't have videos (and in the last few years and especially the last two weeks, doctors finally understood no one cared if they were prevented to help, since it was acceptable in France and even in the US).
The only NGO looking for Iran exclusively is Iran Human Right (https://iranhr.net/en/) and depend on the UNHRC, which is not particularly media trained and not good at reacting (also, they lost US funding less than a year ago and are reorganizing as we speak).
In the end, it will be like Yemen or Sudan all over again: media hear of the massacre late, send journalists, journalists get refused, they send journalists to neighboring countries and infiltrate with local guide help, some journalist dies, and three month after the beginning of the trouble we will get images and information.
Probably the activists are hesitant because the US is rearing to start a war with Iran (that will certainly kill way more civilians) and they don’t want to contribute to that decision.
US activists against IDF wanted US to stop arming and funding and enabling genocide directly. Many IDF soldiers are also from the US or go back and forth.
US isn’t arming or funding or enabling Iran directly, so calls for US action would mean call to war, which US leadership has already been signaling.
Maybe you think US should go to war. Regardless that’s the biggest difference.
There are also frankly many who are confused about Iran - sympathizing with Iran leadership as enemies of IDF and not understanding who they are and what they do. Lack of video going around doesn’t help.
In America at least, we saw protests against some of the things Israel did in Gaza because the US government is supporting Israel. Since the US is not a supporter of Iran, and in fact has been strong adversary for decades, there is less reason to protest here. Plus, we’ve got some serious problems of our own that are keeping us occupied at the moment
But the protests weren’t limited to Ameica, there were protests all over the world, including in Muslim countries.
And the outrage wasn’t always directed at the government. We don’t see Iranian students in the US being attacked. We don’t see Iranian places of worship in the US being attacked. We don’t see as much outrage in the comments on HN - there were some event justifying it.
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It's true that the recipient of the protest might be different, but that's no reason to be quiet.
China in Tibet, China's treatment of the Uyghurs, Russia's war against Ukraine, Kony 2012 etc, there are lots of causes where the local government in whichever country you look at isn't actively involved, yet there was a lot more public noise and campaigns.
I don't know what the answer is, but "my government doesn't deliver weapons to them" hasn't been a reason before, so I don't see why it would be now.
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Quite possibly because they don't want to become the US and Israel's useful idiots - contributing to calls for war that could easily lead to the deaths of millions if past experience is anything to go by.
If the US were serious about the well-being of Iranian people they'd stop trying to screw the economy and foment violent unrest, but of course that is not what they are interested in. They want war. They want regime change. They want balkanisation.
Pretty easy actually. The only leverage we have over Iran is military action, which I think historical precedent shows will lead to worse outcomes for everyone involved.
The way I see it, any support for Iranians will be co-opted to start a war with Iran, which will be a disaster.
This isn't the case for Israel / Gaza, which is what I assume you're alluding to when you talk about activism.
Islam and Neoliberal wests are the strangest bedfellows. Thankfully people like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and many others pointed the oddities long before many others made it us vs them political. Palestinian cause is used to drown any other legitimate concerns about ideology
Richard Dawkins is a weirdo crank these days who's co-authoring questionable books woth sex offenders about transgender issues. And the one thing Christopher Hitchens was most right about was Israel, he was an anti-zionist.
And the neoliberal west has more in common with Israel than Iran, I don't quite understand why you choose to write broad political comments if you don't have the basic background knowledge that would be needwd in this discussion.
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Because for some strange reason majority of activist accounts stopped posting when Iran turned off internet
There's no activism because everybody agrees it's terrible. If your govt is already cutting out Iran and sanctioning them, there's no need to demand action.
This is very different from Israel, where our govts are actively supporting a genocide. That requires activism to change course.
Why would people demonstrate if everyone is aligned?
> If your govt is already cutting out Iran and sanctioning them, there's no need to demand action.
“Human beings are members of a whole
In creation of one essence and soul
If one member is afflicted with pain
Other members uneasy will remain
If you have no sympathy for human pain
The name of human you cannot retain”
—Saadi, Persian poet
Protests were about US's inaction in Gaza as much as its support for Israel. Why no such protests now? Why aren't there thousands of people gathering demanding US doing something to help Iran's people?
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Because Persians are fighting islam (they're burning down mosques).
and the islamic regime was a sponsor of previous pro-palestine movements.
leftists don't find this an appealing mix. they'd rather blame Israel for everything, but here we see Iranians siding with the Israelis because they've seen what islam does to their country.
I very much doubt they are fighting Islam. Most of them are Muslims. They are fighting fundamentalist Islam. DO you have any evidence they are doing this or "siding with the Israelis"? The fundamentalist Islamist Saudi's seem to get on with Israel fine these days.
I think its simpler. There is no one white involved. What is unique about Israel is that most of its population is white so its an issue worth covering (for people backing either side). The same with Ukraine. On the other hand what happens in Eritrea or Sudan or Myanmar or Xinjiang does not matter.
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This is a straw man in my opinion. But regardless of that, your theory doesn't explain why conservative media isn't really covering this either - The Iran protests haven't exactly been front page material on Fox News or OAN or Breitbart
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It doesn't erase Israel's genocide, but the question is still valid: why don't these crimes against Iran's own citizens evoke international outrage?
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Please define what you think Zionist means. I have no idea WTF it means since Israel exists as a Jewish state for 76 years.
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Nobody in the west actually cares about injustice. They just pretend to care when it's politically convenient.
Unfortunately, ABC and NBC haven't found a way to blame Trump for what's happening in Iran. Highlighting the atrocities perpetuated in the name of Islam is more likely to help Trump than hurt him, so this story must be minimized. It's just good, smart politics.
Religion and virtue signaling.
People are not being told to be outraged about it via whatever social media platform.
This article right here, and the countless that came before are telling people to be outraged. People aren't, partly because they don't know what to believe without really any reliable or unbiased reporting, partly because the Trump outrage machine has filled the news feeds with so much other stuff to be outraged about, and partly because the situation in the Middle East seems so futile and stupid that people don't want to care because nothing will change and no government with any say in the region will allow peace or democracy or self-determination to the people there.
I guess this will be a difficult question to ask. I have no doubt the numbers are high but there is something odd about the videos that leak out. The sound of the guns are enhanced for psychological effect? and in the cases where a gunner on a truck is moving down a road purportedly mowing people down there is no blood on the road where the protestors had been standing, no bodies and we never see the people being shot. It's not like I want to see people being shot but I've also seen a lot of fake mass shooting videos in the past decade. There's no shortage of real uncensored footage of killing in Ukraine. Why is everything censored for Iran?
Ukraine was historically more or less a free-for-all as far as front-line cinema is concerned.
I have to imagine the situation in Iran is more difficult for a few reasons:
1. Gen AI is much better today than it was in 2022. So, both sides can generate much more realistic fakes.
2. There was an article here on HN about Iran's internet slowly coming back on a whitelist basis. We're probably getting more pro-Government videos now than we were at the beginning of the current events.
3. Further crackdown on Starlink minimizes authentic leaks (I only heard about this and have no way to confirm how impactful this really is)
I'll add my own anecdotal agreement with your suspicion though - the footage coming out of Iran has been, for me, more difficult than other conflicts to piece together into a cohesive story. Western countries are claiming 30k+ dead, and while I don't necessarily reject the claim, the situation on the ground is still very blurry to me.
Regarding the whitelist: is anyone working on getting the list?
I am sure some people would like to know who’s on the whitelist.
Because the internet is out so it’s extremely difficult to get the footage out.
There is footage slowly trickling out.
I don't like promoting gore websites but in watchpeopledie and search Iran you can count yourself at least hundreds of body from all the videos, often in a single location, usually the aftermath.
Along that line 4chan is full of pictures and videos of all the MN shooting incidents and even memes already but not a single Iranian video.
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I feel like the period between 2019 through to today (2019-2026), human death tolls have paralleled prior twentieth century death tolls. Numbers that sound like tens of thousands, and even millions if you count Ukraine/Russia.
The simple absence of on the ground reports from a variety of independent sources tells me that these numbers should not be simply ignored.
If there’s nothing happening, then the obvious way for the authorities to prove that is to let observers in, and let independent information out. They do not do this, so I will take these reports of deaths more seriously.
As another comment said, they shouldn't be ignored, but they also should be taken with a massive grain of salt.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/iran-casualty-counts-us-funde...
They shouldn't be ignored, but they also should be taken with a massive grain of salt. This reporting has all the hallmarks of the US State Department manufacturing consent for yet another war.
After WMDs i honestly thought america learned to be a bit more skeptical of poorly sourced "pretext for war" stories which emerge in the context of a military build up.
E.g. like reading the sentence:
>TIME has been unable to independently verify these figures.
And going "hmmm".
> E.g. like reading the sentence:
> >TIME has been unable to independently verify these figures.
> And going "hmmm".
Journalists couldn’t possibly independently verify large scale death counts, especially at this point.
That doesn’t mean they’re wrong or propaganda.
If you start “going hmmm” when journalists honestly report their own limitations then that’s just going to leave you more vulnerable to the psy-op peddlers who never give such disclaimers.
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You can already see them in the videos raiding hospitals to "finish off" the wounded... Or you can watch videos of hundreds of bodies in plastic bags if you need further proof that this massacre is actually happening on that place on the earth.
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How many on the government side, I wonder. There are wars that haven't killed so many people. This seems like another revolution.
Somebody should traffic an 8bag of coke into the U.S. with the name of the Ayatollah on the bag.
Then I'm sure the full might and wrath of the U.S. military would be unleashed upon him and his regime...
Despite feeling deeply for Iranians living under this oppressive regime and in the aftermath of the protests, I can’t help but think about how current media coverage of Iran compares to the way major outlets amplified questionable claims in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003.
Very tragic. May the souls that gave their lives for freedom live in the memory of the people of Iran as a blessing.
Interestingly, someone like pg who is so outspoken about other things going on in the Middle East hasn’t said a word about the atrocities.
How come I wonder?
Who's pg?
Paul Graham - founder of YCombinator
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The Islamic clampdown on the Iranian people has gone on for too long. The younger generation is willing to die for their freedom. The internet is locked down, satellite comms jammed with Chinese tech. The streets smell of blood. Police and imported Arab thugs open fire into crowds of protestors. Hospitals are systematically raided to finish off the wounded.
It will be his greatest act as president if Trump sends real assistance, as the Iranian people are begging him. It will save countless lives. Either way, in the end, Persia will rise again, the lion will raise its head, the brutality of Islamic oppression will be cast off, and the world will come to know the true spirit of these people.
I hope you're right.
That's way higher than I thought. Is there any evidence? Dresden was 25,000, and the V2 and V1 campaigns had less numbers. So this is high even for an aerial bombing campaign.
[edit] I don't get why I'm getting downvoted. Are people making assumptions because I mentioned Dresden? Get a hold of yourself.
Aerial bombardments typically target areas with ~0.01 people/square meter, and those people are often in hardened shelters. A protest may have 1–4 people/square meter out in the open. Attacks targeting the latter cause orders of magnitude more casualties for the same amount of firepower.
And the crowd itself can be deadly if it gets too dense, due to panic or otherwise. For example, there have been at least two crowd collapse events with >1000 deaths in the Mecca pilgrimage.
To add to this, Dresden was just one city. We’re talking about nationwide protests in a country of 90 million people.
I think it's just a stupid comparison. Aerial bombing campaign on a single city 80 years ago vs government coming down on protesters distributed in over 100 cities was the best reference you could find to doubt these numbers?
You shouldn't think that everyone has a fine-tuned sense of scale for how many protesters a government can kill in a short amount of time.
first: it's not in one day, it is over three weeks. Second, the 25000 is an extrapolation. Basically the Iran Islamic republic has a tendency to admit to 10-15% of the death toll, and they admit 3000 death.
It is a fair question.
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> You can't ask that here.
Why?
I am curious why Iran protest news remain on front page but US protest news are immediately killed.
is isnt? there's a thread here that currently has 789 comments that isn't killed, and the previous two ICE deaths had comment threads even longer
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46745047
I saw another one that was killed and there was nothing else as far as I could see, Thanks for the link
At this point I don't believe anything about the situation unless I hear it firsthand from eyewitnesses. The amount of GenAI fakes circulating not just on insta and x but more importantly between iranian-born Boomers on Whatsapp that then gets recycled into: "My aunt in LA knows people in a Tehran Hospital and has seen videos of mass casualties amongst security forces/ protesters" is off the charts. Obviously until the internet gets turned on again the aunt has no privileged access to her sources in Tehran and can't have seen anything other then the same AI-slop everyone else has "seen" but for people who haven't been following the genAI developments closely its hard to understand how any of those videos could be anything other than authentic anyways. Even reputable Media have started to publish (and sometimes retract) those video and even if you don't care about Iran at all you should pay attention because this is a case study of something we'll be living with for a while. For the many Millions of people outside of Iran, like me, who for one reason or another have a personal interest in this clusterfruck of a Regime finally being EOLed, it's incredibly frustrating to witness the degree of incompetency at all levels of the US Gov in carrying out something the US used to lead the world in (regime change). While under Obama there was the consideration of plausible deniability at play constraining the work that could be carried out, the current admin has no such excuse. There seems to have been little to no contingency planning to aid the people we armed in case the Regime shut-off the internet (which they have done before) other than handing out easily tracked starlink terminal. Half of Tehran has a recent iPhone and satellite coms on these devices could easily have been enabled by the US Gov. Instead we have US officials on fox news producing clip after clip where they proudly detail the regime change operations they fail to carry out, which iranian state TV just have to translate for free pro-Regime Propaganda. Maybe the strategy is to scare all iranian propagandists that they'll be unemployed because their jobs have been outsourced to the US because otherwise you certainly would not have these same US officials on FOX to then explain why shooting peaceful protesters is great and totally a-OK and what democracy looks like.
If Trump continues to get his way, this will be the condition in the US.
Can we stop calling this a "protest" and start calling it a revolutionary uprising? Because that's what it is seems it is to me.
What's the difference? they protested the government, got shot at. Then after a few month of getting killed while protesting, they chose to retaliate. Is it when the protesters retaliate that you call a protest an uprising?
Someone from kashmir.
Can You IMAGINE 30k deaths? A genocide happened in gaza and it took months, i think a year to reach 30k target and you are saying iran judt straight up killed 30k civilians in 1-2 days?
The Gaza numbers are confirmed deaths, with bodies and identities and all, it's not counting people they can't identify or who are missing and presumed dead (buried under rubble and the like). The confirmed death tolls are considered to be a vast undercount of actual total deaths. This 30k number is much less rigorous and we have no way to know it's accuracy.
The Gaza numbers that most Western media uncritically report are nonsense spewed out by Hamas whose agenda is aided by making that number as high as possible.
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By now we should be able to determine the number by satellite imagery.
zero links, article states "unable to verify claims" standard regime change fake hype news from the psychos running the genocide
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Without details to explain what aspects of the article are objectionable, this comment just leaves the original poster feeling bad, and other HN readers confused.
On what basis do you call it "slop"? I would agree that it's not much relevant to HN, but it seems to report that the number is at odds with most other figures.
The bar for submitting something to HN is quite low. (Just make an account. I think that's it - I don't think you need any particular karma level.) So, yes, you can get "slop" here - off topic, shilling, trolling, and just generally low-quality stuff. And lots of off topic.
And I generally oppose off topic stuff! But this story has kind of died out in the mainstream press, and I think it's a really important story. (But then, I suppose everybody who posts off topic stuff thinks that theirs is a really important story...)
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Why US campus? Everyone can protest about something, did you do it?
Why would we protest? Our government isn’t supporting this action and in fact is considering direct intervention
It’s the latest talking point from ‘the Right’ to undermine US protests. You can see it multiple times in this very thread. Transparent and hollow.
Because innocent people are dying and western governments are capable of intervening but choose not to.
Your line of argument is an interesting one though. You're tacitly admitting that western protesters don't actually care about innocent Palestinians. They're just using Palestine as an excuse to undermine their governments.
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Interesting bad faith attempt.
Really, it is mysterious why would American students protest against something America actively does and supports, something their schools support rather then ... something another country not actively supported by America does.
Why would a US college student care about a revolution where the US is not involved in providing the weapons that are doing the killing?
You think that what is happening in Iran, and the genocide by the united states and Israel of the Palestinians is the same?
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Queue Hacker News deflecting/minimizing the situation in Iran and instead talking about the US/Israel.
It sucks that no one has morals or consistant stances anymore. Just political positions to push specific agendas.
12 instances of Israel already on a thread about 30 THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS murdered in Iran.
Can we stop calling it a "protest" and call it what it is: a revolutionary uprising.
Labeling it a "protest" is equating it to what a bunch of clustered people holding stupid billboards and yelling into microphones. This isn't that.
It started like that though. It was a protest, then government military start killing people, again, and again, and once deadly violence is on the board, protester takes arms and shoot too. Then bystanders get killed, protesters get killed, some government military police get killed, and here if the government still has a bit of morality left, you get Euromaidan. If its the military, you get what happened in Nepal.
However, if none of that happen, you have a civil war.
Lets not all change our word use because it doesn't align with your narrow definition of protest.