I've been moderately happy this morning to find out I can open hackernews. Also Gmail is working. After attempting to get bridges using email and configuring an dozen of them I got 100% connection but then it disconnected without me being able to connect to anything.
I would assume some sort of tunneling must be possible cause the services available are varied and not limited to a few websites (We only had access to Google Search for about a week and nothing before that) now even Nintendo Store opened to my complete surprise.
> Then Iranians will be reminded how peaceful and prosperous the most other Muslim countries are.
This is factually incorrect. Top 10 majority-Muslim countries, sorted by population:
Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia
Now, the majority of those have problems with seeds in Western Imperialism, but the point is (a) the majority of those have problems (b) Iran's problems also have seeds in US interventions.
The gap between how peaceful and educated most people are, and how bad governments are, is a phenomenon almost unique here. Figuring out how to bridge that gap is the major challenge. The trick would be establishing a collective caliphate -- where the caliph isn't an individual but an institution -- and which spans the Muslim world.
Do they have something like intranet with some local services, like in DPRK&Cuba? is this the case of completely losing connection and devices practically bricked for anything other than displaying the time?
We do. It's not very good. As in, there isn't even a properly functioning domestic search engine that can match the quality of anything past AltaVista. The only local platforms worth a damn are the ones you'd be using anyway. (the local equivalents to Uber, Maps etc.)
All other platforms (instant messengers, social media, news) are massively unpopular for being horrid to use at best, and government spyware at worst.
To slow down the immediate damage the government has rolled back a few of the recent restrictions, hence why I can access HN. Among Google and a handful of other basic websites. But they are obviously experimenting and trying to figure out how much censorship they can get away with. There is talk of a planned "whitelisting" of the country's internet. Where almost all but a few big important services are blocked completely. This would have the bonus effect of making circumvention using VPNs and other methods even more difficult than it already is.
They already have uncensored unfiltered sim cards they issue to their own people, we found that out when X (Twitter) started showing which country you made the accout from and thousands of people had Iran which normal people can't access X without VPN. Its just that they shut off the internet for normal people now, which they hadn't done before.
In "normal" filtering situations, we can connect to most VPNs and do our stuff.
When blackouts like these happen, EVERYTHING is blocked. It gets almost impossible to connect to a VPN. They have advanced tech that detects and blocks all VPNS and proxies. The internet speed is also now at crawling speed so you really can't upload download anything.
Also, in each blackout, people find ways to work around the censorship. And each time, they detect them and patch them. We have almost ran out of ways to prevent the censorship now.
Good luck trying to take something back from the populace once already given for decades, even if it is in a limited form.
It's a desperate attempt, that really shows how cornered the administration is.
Any power that fears information, has to have a highly fine grained, high level control of information to maintain power. This is absolutely difficult, in a country as culturally diverse and with a long history as Iran.
Does the Iranian economy rely heavily on access to the global internet? They can’t trade with most of the world due to sanctions, so what in their internal economy grinds to a halt without global communications? I’m not saying I think that it wouldn’t, just that I don’t immediately grasp the mechanism.
They have limited service because they can't afford anything better, and the USA prevents installing additional undersea cables, but only a small number of sites are blocked by Cuba itself, such as a few Spanish language news sites run by Cuban-Americans.
Many more sites are unavailable in Cuba because their USA owners refuse access to Cuba, but that's not Cuba's fault.
That assumes the regime cares more about the economic prosperity of their people than about staying in power. So far they seem to care more about power. North Korea provides a model for how terrible the situation can get for every day people in that sort of arrangement.
My wild guess is that jamming is local. Major cities may be fully jammed. To get an idea about GNSS jamming range (different signal of course, probably much easier to jam), there are maps online where you can see which parts of Europe are currently GNSS-jammed. But I have the same question as you.
Definitely much easier to jam. Much higher orbits for gnss satellites, much lower signal intensity.
Also, starlink uses phased arrays with beamforming, effectively creating an electronically steerable directional antenna. It is harder to jam two directional antennas talking to each other, as your jammers are on the sides, where the lobes of the antenna radiation pattern are smaller.
Still, we're talking about signals coming from space, so maybe it is just enough to sprinkle more jammers in an urban setting.. I'm curious as well.
RF and GPS jamming has been a solved problem for decades. As a SWE, we are all expected to take Physics E&M, Circuits, and CompArch in our CS undergrad - think back to those classes.
There must be so much video footage from smartphones during the demonstations that show gruesome killings and masacres, the iranian elites have to make sure this footage never sees the rest of the world. They have to ban the internet forever.
Astroturfing much? I haven’t been able to talk to my family for three weeks. Friends who manage to connect are hopping from one workaround to another because IPs are routinely blocked.
You’re proposing a world wide agreement even by their allies? Like they can just tunnel their traffic through Russia or China.
You could try to bifurcate into allied and non allied, but even that would be flawed, especially in countries like the USA where it becomes a first amendment right to try to ban such connectivity. It’s very hard to kill the Internet in terms of connecting peers - that’s kind of the point of its design.
IPs owned by Iranian entities could be blocked straightforwardly by network operators at various levels. They could probably fudge the paperwork via Russian or Chinese entities and obfuscate the routes with cooperation from Russian/Chinese network operators, but that would take time.
If you get a chance to talk to an Iranian, try explaining them why it's fine that they're losing access to internet because the internet was brainwashing them to hate their government. Also tell them their government isn't killing or jailing protesters and these are just made-up by Israel and America.
While you're at it, you can try explaining Ukranians why it's fine that Russia is invading them because America is bad.
Pass on some of the worst analysis of Iran I've ever read...it's up there with Chomsky on Cambodia on the level of delusion just because 'US bad' or whatever biases the thinking.
I guess it's time to check "be accused of spreading psyops" off my internet bucket list.
Because I guess you're not interested in my own personal experience of witnessing said people get killed either. Or not exiting my home because I feared for my life. But you seem to have a loose definition of "unconfirmed" [1] so I won't dwell on that. Here's all I have to say:
> When the Israeli government claims that Iran needs to be toppled to protect the Iranian people, while they simultaneously commit genocide in Palestine, I have to stop and think about their real motives.
The Iranian government is evil.
The Israeli government is evil.
Both are, believe it or not, true. Conservative ruling systems often dislike other conservative ruling systems.
> Trump wants to bring democracy to Iran
_Iranians_ want to bring democracy to Iran. And as one of them, I sincerely don't give a shit about what Trump or Israel or anyone else outside of this fucking country wants.
This seems like a good idea. People often remark about the dangers of online advertising, social media, and AI. Now most Iranians will be protected from these horrific things.
Instead of being disconnected from each other and obsessed with technology perhaps they will now form pleasant relationships and have joyful interactions rather than being obsessed with TikTok.
I've been moderately happy this morning to find out I can open hackernews. Also Gmail is working. After attempting to get bridges using email and configuring an dozen of them I got 100% connection but then it disconnected without me being able to connect to anything. I would assume some sort of tunneling must be possible cause the services available are varied and not limited to a few websites (We only had access to Google Search for about a week and nothing before that) now even Nintendo Store opened to my complete surprise.
Here's crazy idea: Instead of the US spending all this money on restraining the Iranian government through military build ups and sanctions,
rather drop hundreds of thousands of Starlink kits by drones.
Then Iranians will be reminded how peaceful and prosperous the most other Muslim countries are.
One of the reasons the Berlin wall fell was that East Europeans saw on TV that how prosperous Western Europe became.
> Then Iranians will be reminded how peaceful and prosperous the most other Muslim countries are.
This is factually incorrect. Top 10 majority-Muslim countries, sorted by population:
Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia
Now, the majority of those have problems with seeds in Western Imperialism, but the point is (a) the majority of those have problems (b) Iran's problems also have seeds in US interventions.
The gap between how peaceful and educated most people are, and how bad governments are, is a phenomenon almost unique here. Figuring out how to bridge that gap is the major challenge. The trick would be establishing a collective caliphate -- where the caliph isn't an individual but an institution -- and which spans the Muslim world.
> how peaceful and prosperous the most other Muslim countries are.
Which coutries are those?
France, UK, Germany, Sweden.
1 reply →
UAE, Indonesia, Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey among many others.
… while every other country waits to see how it goes while drafting plans to emulate this
That would really boost productivity! Not gonna happen.
I mean... EU already blocks eg. some russian sites (some countries more effectively than others)... plus all the chat control pressures every year.
Spain is blocking whole blocks of internet during football matches.
UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.
But every such country likes pointing fingers at others, "hey, our censorship is not bad, they have more of it!".
edit: considering the downvotes, HN is not bothered by our censorship either
> UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.
There are no ID cards in the UK, so you actually have to get a special jerking off loicense.
5 replies →
Your downvotes are issued by
a) Frogs who are too scared to admit that the water has been warming up in their pots too;
b) Cook's henchfrogs (or automatic systems emulating their croaking and leg twitching) tasked with keeping the pot calm.
Why during football matches?
7 replies →
Yeah, you're right. It's totally fair to compare how the EU treats its people to how Iran is treating its people right now. Good job. :-/
5 replies →
Do they have something like intranet with some local services, like in DPRK&Cuba? is this the case of completely losing connection and devices practically bricked for anything other than displaying the time?
We do. It's not very good. As in, there isn't even a properly functioning domestic search engine that can match the quality of anything past AltaVista. The only local platforms worth a damn are the ones you'd be using anyway. (the local equivalents to Uber, Maps etc.)
All other platforms (instant messengers, social media, news) are massively unpopular for being horrid to use at best, and government spyware at worst.
To slow down the immediate damage the government has rolled back a few of the recent restrictions, hence why I can access HN. Among Google and a handful of other basic websites. But they are obviously experimenting and trying to figure out how much censorship they can get away with. There is talk of a planned "whitelisting" of the country's internet. Where almost all but a few big important services are blocked completely. This would have the bonus effect of making circumvention using VPNs and other methods even more difficult than it already is.
for someone with a tech background, how hard is it to setup your own tunnel? I'd assume cloud providers are whitelisted due to economic reasons?
3 replies →
They already have uncensored unfiltered sim cards they issue to their own people, we found that out when X (Twitter) started showing which country you made the accout from and thousands of people had Iran which normal people can't access X without VPN. Its just that they shut off the internet for normal people now, which they hadn't done before.
No, This is different.
In "normal" filtering situations, we can connect to most VPNs and do our stuff. When blackouts like these happen, EVERYTHING is blocked. It gets almost impossible to connect to a VPN. They have advanced tech that detects and blocks all VPNS and proxies. The internet speed is also now at crawling speed so you really can't upload download anything.
Also, in each blackout, people find ways to work around the censorship. And each time, they detect them and patch them. We have almost ran out of ways to prevent the censorship now.
LoRa Meshcore.
Good luck trying to take something back from the populace once already given for decades, even if it is in a limited form.
It's a desperate attempt, that really shows how cornered the administration is.
Any power that fears information, has to have a highly fine grained, high level control of information to maintain power. This is absolutely difficult, in a country as culturally diverse and with a long history as Iran.
It actually surprised me that they didn't do it before. China already achieved this in 2010s.
Have they though? Everybody I know who grew up in China has told me its trivial to bypass restrictions with VPNs
It’s a deliberate “pressure valve.” China tolerates access for productivity but retains a kill switch for sensitive periods: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-...
Depending on where you are, “everybody I know who grew up in China” may not be an unbiased sample w.r.t. ideology, forthcomingness, or truth-telling.
"bypass restrictions" meaning put on a list of people to closely watch.
The question is what do you win when found using VPN?
Hard to make it airtight without tanking the economy. Since the economy is already tanked, I guess they don’t care anymore.
Does the Iranian economy rely heavily on access to the global internet? They can’t trade with most of the world due to sanctions, so what in their internal economy grinds to a halt without global communications? I’m not saying I think that it wouldn’t, just that I don’t immediately grasp the mechanism.
1 reply →
If I were a betting man I'd wager that technological determinism wins in the end.
Do you think they have a better shot than any other country with an explicit firewall (Eritrea, China, NK, Cuba etc…)
I don't think Cuba belongs on that list.
They have limited service because they can't afford anything better, and the USA prevents installing additional undersea cables, but only a small number of sites are blocked by Cuba itself, such as a few Spanish language news sites run by Cuban-Americans.
Many more sites are unavailable in Cuba because their USA owners refuse access to Cuba, but that's not Cuba's fault.
1 reply →
No shot. The economy is already in the gutter. The productivity hit of a total internet cutoff would be a death sentence
That assumes the regime cares more about the economic prosperity of their people than about staying in power. So far they seem to care more about power. North Korea provides a model for how terrible the situation can get for every day people in that sort of arrangement.
You can only let that go so far, because at the end of the day you need to pay the military to keep you in power.
3 replies →
Some level of eonomic prosperity is necessary to keep the government's key supporters (e.g. the ruling class and the army) satisfied.
2 replies →
[dead]
North Korea unfortunately has given them a path forward. If you're willing to murder your own citizens en masse, you can get away with about anything.
North Korea has nukes though. Iran doesn't, and probably never will.
Yes, just start small
Spacex satellites blockage was the surprise. How did they do it? I thought it would be the best dooms day kind of insurance. Turns out not.
My wild guess is that jamming is local. Major cities may be fully jammed. To get an idea about GNSS jamming range (different signal of course, probably much easier to jam), there are maps online where you can see which parts of Europe are currently GNSS-jammed. But I have the same question as you.
> probably much easier to jam
Definitely much easier to jam. Much higher orbits for gnss satellites, much lower signal intensity.
Also, starlink uses phased arrays with beamforming, effectively creating an electronically steerable directional antenna. It is harder to jam two directional antennas talking to each other, as your jammers are on the sides, where the lobes of the antenna radiation pattern are smaller.
Still, we're talking about signals coming from space, so maybe it is just enough to sprinkle more jammers in an urban setting.. I'm curious as well.
You can jam the satellites, you can jam the receivers and you can jam GPS.
RF and GPS jamming has been a solved problem for decades. As a SWE, we are all expected to take Physics E&M, Circuits, and CompArch in our CS undergrad - think back to those classes.
Genuine question, is it that easy to deploy these tools over a country that big?
1 reply →
[flagged]
If the weak link is GPS, could they not accept an override for the time and spherical coordinates to connect?
There must be so much video footage from smartphones during the demonstations that show gruesome killings and masacres, the iranian elites have to make sure this footage never sees the rest of the world. They have to ban the internet forever.
I’m curious if it’s possible to somehow retrieve the whitelist to see who’s on it?
Mossad is curious as well. They might want to indiscriminately make people's devices blow up in public again.
But they unblocked it on Wed/Thur, I've been talking to friends normally since then.
Astroturfing much? I haven’t been able to talk to my family for three weeks. Friends who manage to connect are hopping from one workaround to another because IPs are routinely blocked.
Can ROTW sanction Iran by giving it zero internet access even to "elites" by refusing to peer.
You’re proposing a world wide agreement even by their allies? Like they can just tunnel their traffic through Russia or China.
You could try to bifurcate into allied and non allied, but even that would be flawed, especially in countries like the USA where it becomes a first amendment right to try to ban such connectivity. It’s very hard to kill the Internet in terms of connecting peers - that’s kind of the point of its design.
IPs owned by Iranian entities could be blocked straightforwardly by network operators at various levels. They could probably fudge the paperwork via Russian or Chinese entities and obfuscate the routes with cooperation from Russian/Chinese network operators, but that would take time.
2 replies →
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
If you get a chance to talk to an Iranian, try explaining them why it's fine that they're losing access to internet because the internet was brainwashing them to hate their government. Also tell them their government isn't killing or jailing protesters and these are just made-up by Israel and America.
While you're at it, you can try explaining Ukranians why it's fine that Russia is invading them because America is bad.
Pass on some of the worst analysis of Iran I've ever read...it's up there with Chomsky on Cambodia on the level of delusion just because 'US bad' or whatever biases the thinking.
I guess it's time to check "be accused of spreading psyops" off my internet bucket list.
Because I guess you're not interested in my own personal experience of witnessing said people get killed either. Or not exiting my home because I feared for my life. But you seem to have a loose definition of "unconfirmed" [1] so I won't dwell on that. Here's all I have to say:
> When the Israeli government claims that Iran needs to be toppled to protect the Iranian people, while they simultaneously commit genocide in Palestine, I have to stop and think about their real motives.
The Iranian government is evil.
The Israeli government is evil.
Both are, believe it or not, true. Conservative ruling systems often dislike other conservative ruling systems.
> Trump wants to bring democracy to Iran
_Iranians_ want to bring democracy to Iran. And as one of them, I sincerely don't give a shit about what Trump or Israel or anyone else outside of this fucking country wants.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
[flagged]
This seems like a good idea. People often remark about the dangers of online advertising, social media, and AI. Now most Iranians will be protected from these horrific things.
Instead of being disconnected from each other and obsessed with technology perhaps they will now form pleasant relationships and have joyful interactions rather than being obsessed with TikTok.
> perhaps they will now form pleasant relationships and have joyful interactions
You do understand what’s happening in Iran, right? Hard to take your comment seriously.