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.
I there anything the outside world can do? Like are the people relying on https://snowflake.torproject.org/ and adding bandwidth there actually makes a difference?
I usually use snowflake as a last resort, and even that's not consistently working right now. However I've seen people recommend running Conduit[1] to friends overseas, which is an easy-to-use Psiphon proxy node. Psiphon is a popular circumvention tool here so that could be helpful.
If you're an American, demand radio free gets all it's funding back to 2024 levels, for a start. I read that people in Iran have relied on that service for a long time.
I use this same username everywhere and it's tied to my identity so let me keep it brief. I live in a small town and you wouldn't get much protesting or any political activity in those.
On the other hand, I'm currently serving in the police force (Which all able bodied men of age have to do and serve in one of the three armed forces of my country) and the bigger question since the start of the protests has been "What to do if I was put in a position against people?"
Thankfully that hasn't happened yet but still there is a feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The global cybersphere will split up, the west and other parties have shown they will use social media networks to organize regime change and take over legitimate protests.
Especially now that China is taking an ever increasing share of the global information streams. Given the increased panicked the US had about tiktok. Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in Gaza. They had to enforce ownership handover of tiktok US to a group of US based entities.
So i wouldn't be surprised US internet sphere will shrink over time now that China can go on the offensive in the cyber-realm.. The components are already in place just pull the switch so cloudflare has to regulate who gets in and who gets out.
When it comes to the internet, it seems to me that "the other parties" here carries a lot of weight when it comes to disinfo, polarizing propaganda, etc.
< The global cybersphere will split up, the west and other parties have shown they will use social media networks to organize regime change and take over legitimate protests.
It's interesting you focus on "the west" when we have solid proof about e.g. Russian interference in many an election and protest via social media. From paid propagandist (e.g. Tim Pool) to the Internet Research Agency. The only factual information we have about anything remotely similar from "the west" was that research about Facebook activity in the Central African Republic being roughly 40/40/20 split between Russians, French, and actual locals. And even that isn't comparable because the French online campaign was mostly combatting Russian disinformation propaganda, not trying to bring about a coup or stoking tensions to get to a civil war.
> Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in Gaza
The genocide in Gaza is not "sponsored" by the "west". US, maybe.
An even more apt analogy is France in New Caledonia. Back in 2024, the French territorial government used an anti-terrorism law to enforce DNS blocks in that overseas territory, for the express purpose of suppressing political protests (by New Caledonians angry at the French mainland government).
> "Philippe Gomes, the former president of New Caledonia's government, told POLITICO the decision aimed to stop protesters from "organizing reunions and protests" through the app."
The difference is that people in my country get to vote. A lot.
In the Netherlands GOVERNMENT=THE PEOPLE to a rather problematic degree (if only you knew how bad things really are).
If you want to start an argument "the Netherlands is just like Iran" I challenge it with 20 political parties in Parliament.
Including a pro Kremlin party lol.
Downvotes might happen because your comment reads one-sided.
What about Russia blocking sites?
As of late 2025 and early 2026, Russia has blocked numerous foreign communication, social media, and information services, restricting platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram (partially), Signal, Viber, FaceTime, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Many independent news, VPN services, and foreign websites (e.g., Chess.com) are also inaccessible
> Spain is blocking whole blocks of internet during football matches.
Lets make this clear: "Spain" is not blocking, some ISP companies which have many users ask the judge for permission to block IP ranges because they are streaming football matches. The judge agrees (they don't seem to know how Cloudflare works), so the ISPs are the ones that are blocking their own users to access sites behind Cloudflare. As they have millions of users, the block feels huge, but it is not issued by the government.
I am not a customer of those ISP, so my internet isn't disrupted at all during football matches. Some services, like annas-archive and torrent sites, are intermittently blocked, but you can easily avoid the blocks just by switching DNS server to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.
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.
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.
I don't see any drawbacks on this. Recent protests demonstrated that:
a) protests can and will be crushed by the government forces and people will be ultimately defeated;
b) people have no means to force government to enable back freedoms;
c) control is much easier with no internet available.
Russia is on the same path by providing white-list only internet access "during Ukrainian attacks" and a bit longer every time until ultimately internet will become whitelist only.
Also as we have seen specifically in russia, there is no shortage of senior software developers and network engineers truly putting in their best work to block VPNs better and deeper.
Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.
Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
Drawbacks are that your population loses contact with progress. Your people become less skilled for the modern world. That's fine if you want a country of agrarian peasants or factory-working drones, but it cripples your country if it's in a technological arms race.
I mean, North Korea does manage to produce rockets and nuclear warheads. They aren't exporting technology, though.
I wouldn't be so sure about this. I think people who don't give a shit about society or politics or human rights abuses and only care about advancing cool technology can participate in and drive progress.
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.
I guess by "Everybody I know who grew up in China" you mean those elites who speaks English and have already bypassed restrictions to talk to you online or travels to other countries. There's some selection bias here.
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.
North Korea is effectively an island. Iran has many neighbors and long borders. They have no choice but to be at least semi integrated into the world and strong enough to defend themselves.
I don’t think a lot of their economy depends on the internet. Even rich countries in the Middle East would continue to sell oil if the internet wasn’t functional. Might cause some logistical issues but nothing that can’t be done over the phone.
AFAIK they used GPS spoofing which confuses the Starlink terminals - they need to know where they are to properly connect to the satellites above.
This can be overriden to use "Starlink positioning" where the terminal ignores GPS signals and dtermines its position based on Starlink satellite signals. I think this is what is used in Ukraine where GPS is mostly jammed/spoofed to hell even far from the front.
The GPS positioning is the default as it is likely more user friendly/has quicker lock in normal circumstances.
Another venue of attack could be the Starlink WiFi AP included in the terminals- you could track that down.
So in general:
* switch the terminal to Starlink positioning
* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC address
Spoofing - ok, but how did they detect all the starlinks? Assuming that users were smart to not turn on WiFi on starlink. Do these antennas emit certain waves that a “scanner” can detect and with 99% certainty figure out that that point on a map is a starlink antenna ?
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.
The GPS jamming maps are based on commercial air traffic flying in the area.
While that gives some ideas of how widespread the jamming is, it won't give accurate information about the range (air traffic avoids areas with jamming) of the interference or any information from places where there is no commercial air traffic (war zones, etc).
Supposedly it's high packet loss but still available to at least some extent. Or at least it was initially? Really highlights the importance of low bandwidth P2P capable messaging systems that support caching messages for later delivery as well as multiple underlying transports.
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.
thats sad... this kind of blackout only works for china because china has a massive internal market and the gov has a way of check things like: "we know you are using VPN, but as long as you dont do or say terrible things about CCP, we dont care". so this model works.
but even with his, i still feel angry when i want to check something on google/ins...when i dont have a realiable VPN. i remeber when we start working on golang dev, and because its under google domain so many sub sites is blocked including golang ones, its very time consuming for chinese devs to develop golang projects, you have to figure out the VPN/goproxy... stuff..
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.
Prepare to go back to newsgroups with NNTP / UUCP. With today's uSD cards that should create a pretty decent, offline store and forward national discussion platform. No programming needed, it's all there already, just forgotten...
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 don't want to believe that a government so incompetent, corrupt and cruel can continue to function. I don't trust that the rest of the world will help militarily although it's a strong possibility, but I do trust that they will continue to isolate the country. It's possible that the regime will implode simply because there is no honor among thieves.
Unfortunately, they are extremely competent at holding on to power. Inflation has been oscillating between 20% and 50% since 2019 yet here we are.
It is hard to over throw the people who have all the guns.
I am usually pretty isolationist in my thinking but I really wish the US would have already invaded.
Millions of young Persians who are absolutely no different than you or I. It is now or never. If the regime can put down this uprising it is going to be hard to form another uprising for a long long time.
After many years of heavy censorship on 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, there are a lot of accounts on Chinese BBS who say all the footage "AI generated".
Untrue — there is a large market for Apple devices, iPhones are super popular in Iran. Fun fact, IRL stores use iMacs because it looks good but they install Windows on them to be able to use their legacy Windows accounting software :)
Fun fact - back in 2009, iPhone 3GS sold in China does not have WiFi feature. If that's possible, I can totally see a new iPhone model with restricted satellite feature selling in Iran and China.
There are a lot of words one could use to describe the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, but indiscriminate isn’t one that leaps to mind, particular when compared against other contemporary military strikes
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.
Firstly the protesters will be able to communicate in private.
And secondly, Iranians will continue to be reminded of the freedoms most other Muslims enjoy: As in free speech and free trade.
One of the reasons the Berlin wall fell was that East Europeans saw on TV that how prosperous Western Europe became.
One major difference is that it was extremely difficult to leave Eastern Europe. Borders with the West were fortified and even in the unlikely event of getting a visa issued, the government would make sure that your loved ones were left behind, forcing you to eventually come back.
The citizens of Iran, in turn, are free to leave the country as they wish. In fact, the official policy is that if you don't like it here, then you are are supposed to move out.
What good is the free Internet when the government can use it push false narratives and obvious lies and the people just believe it (talking about America in this case).
What? No. There are countless reasons why the wall fell but TV wasn't one of them. East Europeans didn't 'see' anything 'on TV' that would suggest anything other than what was endorsed by local authorities.
Trade was a big factor though. As the collective quality of life in the East was deteriorating, efforts were made by authorities to save the dire situation by opening trade and some degree of freedom of movement with the West. As this plan failed economically, a side effect was that it only became common knowledge across society how big the gap in quality of life really was.
The idea that free internet access will magically change the situation for Iranians on it's own is naive.
It should be possible to switch the terminal to use the satellites themselves for positioning (Starlink positioning) but it needs manually switching to that option.
I've seen unconfirmed reports of strange blocking patterns in Russian Federation that suggest individual profiling has at the very least been tested already. No need to wait a year.
There is active discussion on net4people about using DNSTT, but as more of these tunnels go up, I'm sure it will be blocked.
Given the denied environment the Iranian people see themselves in. I believe its worth mentioning asynchronous networks[1].
For example, they could use NNCP[2] in sneakernet style op[3].
Couriers could even layer steganography techniques on top on the NNCP data going in and out on USB drives. This can all be done now, and doesn't require new circumvention research or tools.
NNCPNET[4] is now active which provides email over NNCP and therefore can be done completely without internet. Once a courier gets to a location that isn't as denied, they can route it over the internet via a NNCP relay. Both for getting information out, and getting data back in.
For those wanting to get information to new agencies, you should consider SecureDrop. Here[5] is a list of securedrop locations.
Thanks for mentioning NNCP, it doesn’t get enough attention.
I am hoping more tools will be built on top of it, with good tolerance for asynchronous/offline networks, particularly for communication and social. We may need it soon elsewhere.
Mail over NNCP works well as you mentioned because mail is already asynchronous. Maybe Delta Chat over NNCP is worth a try.
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.
This has been the administration's response to such events for multiple times over the last 6 years (3 times to be exact, plus during the time of war with Israel) and the claim has always been Iran wants to shutdown internet forever. But in all those cases the access was re-enabled after a few or several weeks.
Right now the internet access is widening and some areas are already back to normal internet — but it hasn't been stable over the past week. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/ir
"In addition to the central bank, it seems as though regular Iranians are seeking the perceived safety of cryptocurrencies as unrest disrupts the country and the economy collapses."
I think that'd only further cause people to push back. I think this could only backfire.
Imagine if all the conveniences of the internet were taken from you. Not that you'd never had them, but that you'd come to rely on them and then they were gone. Feels like some palpable oppression to me. And it has nothing to do with your political views. Everyone will feel the squeeze and nobody is gonna be dismissive about it.
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.
That will make it so much easier for the regime to suppress all communication! They'll have more resources to focus on other goals, like killing all dissenters.
Is the idea to unblock their internet if they let everyone use the internet and not just the elite? It won't work. Their elites will find workarounds and they'll leave the internet completely blocked apart from that.
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.
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.
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.
There is some evidence to suggest that certain countries (Russia, China, Iran itself) have an incentive to use the Gaza conflict to cause disunity in the west - and hence keep it in the news cycle and public opinion.
If it is that easy for foreign governments to influence the very thoughts people have day-to-day, then something is extremely broken in your system and nearly all the blame is on your government for allowing that to happen.
All of America's failings are leveraged to sow political division by foreign actors. Abu Ghraib, SAVAK, Dimona - these are America's mistakes, not foreign fabrication.
The Scottish independence movement is a very strong, grass roots campaign that has been building for many decades ( pre-web never mind pre-twitter ), with the Scottish ambivalence to the Union having deep cultural roots.
What keeps Gaza and the wider actions of the current Israel government in the news is the constant killings and injustices. If they didn't want to be in the news perhaps they could stop killing people.
Next you will be telling me Minnesota is only in the news due to Russia bots - and nothing to do with the killing of civilians on the streets.
Nice try with the Hasbara, but in the end Netanyahu's gang, Iran crazies are Trumpists arent that different in the end. It's all about power, as 1984 stated. Ideology it's just marketing and bullshit for the people.
I think we can all agree that Iran shouldn't be massacring its own nationals even if as the government claims they are foreign-influenced, but don't use this as a platform to push an agenda that harms even your own cause.
Murdering 30,000 innocent people in three days of protests is indeed not in the ballpark of killing 30,000 militants in two years of a war, you're absolutely right.
There is a legal principal that comes into play when people are locked up for contempt of court. You can be locked up indefinitely or until the issue is moot. The the reasoning behind that is you hole the keys to your own cell.
The Israeli's demand was returning the hostages and the bodies of the people Hamas murdered. Hamas refused to do that for a year and a half.
Let me get this straight: If 60,000 people are killed in a war in 3 years, it's a genocide, but if 30,000 protesters are killed in 2 days, it's not? Not that either one is a genocide, but you're saying the difference is what percentage of the population died? Therefore, 10 people in Luxembourg are equal to 200 people in China?
Pallyweid [fake israelophobic buzzwords: apartheidgenocide] exposed.
Gaza war with genocidal [Hamas Charter, declaration and methods] "Palestine" Gaza regime. We all know Hamas/PIJ death cult methods (search 'dead baby strategy'. In fact, it was already by Egyptian born Arafat - Hitler's al-Husseini-mufti's family who began the 'human shields' tactics of ITS OWN PEOPLE already in early '80s in Lebanon) - to maximize casualties of both sides. Almost all who propagated "genocide" already paddled the "apartheid" slur years earlier. BTW The A slurs began by Ahmad Shukeiri in UN on 10.17.61, who rationalized the Holocaust months after WW2 [B'nai B'rith 7.12.46] and on 11.30.62 had promoted in UN Neonazi gang Tacuara, who guarded Eichmann and Mengele. Then you have UNCHR by Pillay Kothari "Jewish control" 2022 trope, or UN's "rappartour" Francesca Albanese infamous - dubbed modern 'Goebbeles', her antisemitic tweets from 2014 remembered; or the mocked $30 membership IAGS "experts" countered [T.O.I, 9.9.25] by 537 real experts denying the "genocide" lie. So are objecting major countries who are neither socialist or Muslim. All the propaganda Goliath machine nor hecklers who pressure pols. to utter the G word, don't change facts. Nor the 32 Wikipedia editors organized gang [see ADL, 3.18.25].
Numbers: even if one accepts the 60,000+ figure, but since over 25,000 Terrorists have been eliminated on Gaza, the combatants-to-none ratio is rather impressive. And yes, Hamas women are usually assistants... all that is in the course of 2 years.
VS Islamic Republic of Iran massacring some 60,000 in a few days.
[Journalist].Shirin Sadeghi @ShirinSadeghi Jan 22, 2026:
Thread on the scale of death, injury and devastation in Iran right now.
This Dr conservatively estimates 60,000 killed, 360,000 injured and at least 1 million directly affected.
----
Iran may have killed over 30,000 protesters in two days: Report.
By Brady Knox. Washington Examiner.
January 25, 2026. — Over two weeks, the Rapid Support Forces murdered thousands of civilians, with one estimate putting the kill count at over 60,000.
----
CBN News @CBNNews:
The Middle East is watching to see if the U.S. will strike the Iranian regime. As further reports of the violence inside Iran come in, the number of those killed by the regime is staggering.
Global terrorism expert Dr. Amir Hamidi said, "A physician-linked medical network has released what is described as a hospital-registered death toll of 40,274, emphasizing this does not cover all facilities and includes victims who never reached hospitals. Based on those gaps, the estimated toll may exceed 60,000. This is not crowd control. This is mass killing, disappearing chemical attacks, and black cloth to hide the evidence. This is a nationwide uprising met with state terror. And it fits the pattern of crime against humanity.”
It's a massacre on a scale that makes it one of the world's deadliest in a generation. The International Center for Human Rights adds that more than 350,000 have been injured and more than 10,000 blinded.
[Saman Rasoulpour @SamRasoulpour
Editor in Chief | Co-founder, Pulse Media | Covering Iran: news & analysis]
Saman Rasoulpour @SamRasoulpour:
In the early days of Iran’s nationwide internet shutdown, at least 30,000 to 60,000 people were killed on the streets. During this period, Mohammad Marandi was among a small, handpicked group of regime-approved individuals inside Iran who retained internet access , joining international media via live video from the state broadcaster Press TV’s studio in Tehran, while helping justify the regime’s narrative as the killings unfolded.
Jan 28, 2026.
----
Turlockers continue to show support for Iranian protesters.
Joe Cortez, Turlock Journal, Jan 28, 2026 — ... protesters in Turlock, with friends and family still in Iran, paint a far more harrowing picture.
“When I spoke to my friend (Saturday), he told me that it’s over 60,000 that have been killed,” said Turlock’s Raymon Galavan, who came to the U.S. from Iran in 2006. “People are protesting for freedom with nothing in their hands, and they’re being killed with (military-grade) bullets. And the people who are in hospitals, they take them out and they kill them on the street, and bury them in mass graves. This is the reality. This is not out of a movie.”..
“What they’re telling me right now is that there are absolutely two or three families in each street, and in each alley, that have had someone killed,” said Farhad. “The estimated number of killed in two nights is more than 40,000. Whoever says different … forget about it. It’s a massacre.”
Robert David, who co-organized the local protest with Charles Sharlou, added to those disturbing totals.
“The numbers we’re getting are more than 800,000 injured and over 300,000 who have been arrested by the regime,” said David, also a native of Tehran. “There is no freedom in Iran. Whatever the regime wants, they do in the name of Islam, and everybody is expected to follow.”
The way you just call them all militants using human shields is truly amazing. From reddit by same username I can see that you're an American living in Israel also so it matches up.
It's a beautiful thing when you can designate any male carrying objects in their hands as terrorists and get license to kill him and his human shields (guy went home).
I agree that it got appallingly little press, as do many large-scale human rights violations around the world. However, I feel like pitting it against "the rhetoric in Gaza" is wrong. Gaza is much more our war (where "we" is "the West"). Our governments directly provide the funds and weapons that are being used to commit the large-scale grave human rights violations by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. In plain English: we're funding the genocide with our tax money. In a democratic system of government, I would therefore expect and hope for these issues to take up a much larger part of public discourse.
Given the direct comparison and language of the parent comment, it's hard for me not to see an implied agenda here: Iran's regime is bad, they're islamists, just like Hamas, therefore Israel should be excused for having turned Gaza into a parking lot, or something along these lines. Our commitment to human rights should be strong enough to reject this sort of thinking and condemn every single one of these civilian deaths.
I don't think anyone really believes civilian deaths shouldn't be condemned. I think the main source of argument is who gets the blame. Hamas could've returned the hostages at any time, but they got rewarded by foreign money (and immensely successful anti Israel propaganda campaign by Qatar, Russia and China) to keep going.
The only real way to peace for gazans is to have a non Islamist government take over (like from the UAE) and re educate the population to not start training their children for intifada at the age of 3 or 4 and instead use some of the billions they've received in aid to build infrastructure and education.
A situation only gets press when people disagree about it[1].
George Floyd got a lot because he was a borderline case, an innocent man shot by police for some, a criminal who got what he deserved for others. That creates tension. That creates arguments. "local cop shoots innocent 80-year-old woman carrying groceries" is a story for a day at best, then the cop gets punished and we move on.
Gaza is the same. You have one side complaining about human rights abuses, and the pro-Israel side supporting Israle to the death. In Iran, there's no such tension, we all agree that this is bad, shrug and move on.
It's not just press. The actions of the world are to let Iran continue doing what it wants to its people and not interfere.
The reason isn't that no one disagrees, it's that Qatar, Russia and China don't think the issue is divisive and have not launched a multi billion dollar propaganda campaign about it. And the actual press couldn't care less if Israel isn't involved.
My GF and I rarely discuss news or politics, but she's a frequent NPR listener who gets most of her (ahem) "news" from there and Reddit. So the other night something came up about Israel and she casually said "well, but everyone hates Israel now". In that context, I said what do they think about the masses of unarmed people shot in the streets of Tehran. So imagine my total surprise when she said she had no idea there were any protests in Iran. None at all. Somehow, for a couple years of the war in Gaza, she was attuned to every video - real or fake - that was attributed to that war zone. Yet this completely passed without her noticing.
She said, "well, how would I know about it if it's not on the news?"
I said, "well, it was on the news." And then I went looking for articles about it. And y'know, I realized that unless you actually went looking, you probably wouldn't find those articles, even though they're only a few weeks old.
What is super disappointing about this is that when the US does take action against the Iranian regime again, the reasoning is not going to be legible to most Americans. I don't really understand how this was erased so quickly. That meme about Columbia's campus being totally protest-free was pretty much on point. It's startling to see a large portion of the population being manipulated so thoroughly into being rabid about one thing and totally blind to another at the same time. Is having consistent values no longer a value?
It's because Qatar, Russia and China launched a multi billion dollar propaganda campaign targeting Israel. Israel is so divisive it's the perfect way to divide a population.
Lots of worse things have happened in the past two years (Sudan, Nigeria, and now Iran). No Jews no news.
> Weeks after it was exposed that Hamas’ so-called “Gaza Health Ministry” has been circulating false casualty figures, much of the media are still reporting them without a hint of skepticism.
> In April, research by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, revealed that thousands of previously “identified” deaths — including more than 1,000 children allegedly killed in Israeli airstrikes — had quietly disappeared from Hamas’ own tallies.
> Aizenberg’s findings echoed a December report by the Henry Jackson Society, which documented how Hamas had systematically inflated civilian casualty numbers to suggest that Israel targets non-combatants.
Both Israel (Gaza), Iran (religious nuts) and the USA (ICE fascists and Trump's gang) can be declared as ruled by human turds, they aren't mutually exclusive.
Because the left love the islamists. Because Iran helps Palestine and Hezbollah. So Dropsite, Hasanabi and all of Reddit will not talk. It is that easy.
I think this comment is misguided enough / detached from reality enough to rightfully be flagged to death for being trite and not contributing anything to the discussion.
Iranians lost internet than 3 weeks ago. They are as aware now as they ever will be about how things are going outside their borders.
> 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.
A small price to pay, surely, to be rescued from the mind flaying less fortunate people in corporate hellholes must face daily.
Even with ublock Origin, these corporations will build a profile on me. Not so in Iran, where people can live without the watchful eye of Google looking at everything they do.
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.
I there anything the outside world can do? Like are the people relying on https://snowflake.torproject.org/ and adding bandwidth there actually makes a difference?
I usually use snowflake as a last resort, and even that's not consistently working right now. However I've seen people recommend running Conduit[1] to friends overseas, which is an easy-to-use Psiphon proxy node. Psiphon is a popular circumvention tool here so that could be helpful.
[1] https://conduit.psiphon.ca/
We can help resurrect Murmur via https://github.com/De-Novo-Group/rangzen-revival
Here’s Tamir’s call for action https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7419994...
Unfortunately if it's public the government can also see it and block it :(
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If you're an American, demand radio free gets all it's funding back to 2024 levels, for a start. I read that people in Iran have relied on that service for a long time.
Is there anything people outside Iran can spin up in order to get more routes out?
https://reticulum.network/ with LoRa-based directional antennas pointed toward Iran near the border?
Don't expect sending anything massive such as video recording, but should be enough for text-based communications.
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Glad to see you here.
I’m almost afraid to ask but how are you and everyone else?
I use this same username everywhere and it's tied to my identity so let me keep it brief. I live in a small town and you wouldn't get much protesting or any political activity in those.
On the other hand, I'm currently serving in the police force (Which all able bodied men of age have to do and serve in one of the three armed forces of my country) and the bigger question since the start of the protests has been "What to do if I was put in a position against people?"
Thankfully that hasn't happened yet but still there is a feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
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… while every other country waits to see how it goes while drafting plans to emulate this
The global cybersphere will split up, the west and other parties have shown they will use social media networks to organize regime change and take over legitimate protests.
Especially now that China is taking an ever increasing share of the global information streams. Given the increased panicked the US had about tiktok. Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in Gaza. They had to enforce ownership handover of tiktok US to a group of US based entities.
So i wouldn't be surprised US internet sphere will shrink over time now that China can go on the offensive in the cyber-realm.. The components are already in place just pull the switch so cloudflare has to regulate who gets in and who gets out.
When it comes to the internet, it seems to me that "the other parties" here carries a lot of weight when it comes to disinfo, polarizing propaganda, etc.
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< The global cybersphere will split up, the west and other parties have shown they will use social media networks to organize regime change and take over legitimate protests.
It's interesting you focus on "the west" when we have solid proof about e.g. Russian interference in many an election and protest via social media. From paid propagandist (e.g. Tim Pool) to the Internet Research Agency. The only factual information we have about anything remotely similar from "the west" was that research about Facebook activity in the Central African Republic being roughly 40/40/20 split between Russians, French, and actual locals. And even that isn't comparable because the French online campaign was mostly combatting Russian disinformation propaganda, not trying to bring about a coup or stoking tensions to get to a civil war.
> Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in Gaza
The genocide in Gaza is not "sponsored" by the "west". US, maybe.
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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.
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An even more apt analogy is France in New Caledonia. Back in 2024, the French territorial government used an anti-terrorism law to enforce DNS blocks in that overseas territory, for the express purpose of suppressing political protests (by New Caledonians angry at the French mainland government).
> "Philippe Gomes, the former president of New Caledonia's government, told POLITICO the decision aimed to stop protesters from "organizing reunions and protests" through the app."
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
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The difference is that people in my country get to vote. A lot.
In the Netherlands GOVERNMENT=THE PEOPLE to a rather problematic degree (if only you knew how bad things really are).
If you want to start an argument "the Netherlands is just like Iran" I challenge it with 20 political parties in Parliament. Including a pro Kremlin party lol.
> UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.
If you are going to post shit like that, at least get your fucking facts right.
Namely that you are three weeks out of date sushine.
The idea has been dropped: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3385zrrx73o
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Why during football matches?
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Downvotes might happen because your comment reads one-sided.
What about Russia blocking sites?
As of late 2025 and early 2026, Russia has blocked numerous foreign communication, social media, and information services, restricting platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram (partially), Signal, Viber, FaceTime, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Many independent news, VPN services, and foreign websites (e.g., Chess.com) are also inaccessible
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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. :-/
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> Spain is blocking whole blocks of internet during football matches.
Lets make this clear: "Spain" is not blocking, some ISP companies which have many users ask the judge for permission to block IP ranges because they are streaming football matches. The judge agrees (they don't seem to know how Cloudflare works), so the ISPs are the ones that are blocking their own users to access sites behind Cloudflare. As they have millions of users, the block feels huge, but it is not issued by the government.
I am not a customer of those ISP, so my internet isn't disrupted at all during football matches. Some services, like annas-archive and torrent sites, are intermittently blocked, but you can easily avoid the blocks just by switching DNS server to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.
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That would really boost productivity! Not gonna happen.
Which country cares about productivity, besides China?
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.
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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?
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I don't see any drawbacks on this. Recent protests demonstrated that:
a) protests can and will be crushed by the government forces and people will be ultimately defeated;
b) people have no means to force government to enable back freedoms;
c) control is much easier with no internet available.
Russia is on the same path by providing white-list only internet access "during Ukrainian attacks" and a bit longer every time until ultimately internet will become whitelist only.
Also as we have seen specifically in russia, there is no shortage of senior software developers and network engineers truly putting in their best work to block VPNs better and deeper.
Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.
Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
Do you have a different definition of 'drawback' than I do?
I'm speaking from the standpoint of an oppressive government. Freedom of internet access is something that they would rather never allow.
They presumably mean drawback from the government's perspective. For the average citizen it obviously sucks.
As in the total opposite meaning?
Drawbacks are that your population loses contact with progress. Your people become less skilled for the modern world. That's fine if you want a country of agrarian peasants or factory-working drones, but it cripples your country if it's in a technological arms race.
I mean, North Korea does manage to produce rockets and nuclear warheads. They aren't exporting technology, though.
> your population loses contact with progress
This is only a drawback if you think about your country's future.
Which oppressive regimes do not.
Thus it is an advantage, not a drawback.
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I wouldn't be so sure about this. I think people who don't give a shit about society or politics or human rights abuses and only care about advancing cool technology can participate in and drive progress.
It actually surprised me that they didn't do it before. China already achieved this in 2010s.
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.
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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-...
NO.
They can do unconditional blocking at any moment and suddenly you can experience Internet blackout. [1]
The censorship from GFW is ever evolving. See the endless cat-and-mouse games yourself. [2][3]
[1] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/511
[2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+state%...
[3] https://gfw.report/en/
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.
The question is what do you win when found using VPN?
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"bypass restrictions" meaning put on a list of people to closely watch.
Apparently they use traffic analysis now so it's difficult to bypass even with VPNs.
I suggest you take a look at the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall
I guess by "Everybody I know who grew up in China" you mean those elites who speaks English and have already bypassed restrictions to talk to you online or travels to other countries. There's some selection bias here.
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.
The regime does not even care about the capital having water in the next month. They are basically doing pre-emptive starvation culling at this point.
North Korea is effectively an island. Iran has many neighbors and long borders. They have no choice but to be at least semi integrated into the world and strong enough to defend themselves.
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.
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Some level of eonomic prosperity is necessary to keep the government's key supporters (e.g. the ruling class and the army) satisfied.
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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.
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Yes, just start small
No that is american propaganda. Glorious islamist economy is great! Look at ICE shootings instead.
And if you disagree you're a russian bot. But there wouldn't possibly be any middle-eastern bots spreading propaganda...
I don’t think a lot of their economy depends on the internet. Even rich countries in the Middle East would continue to sell oil if the internet wasn’t functional. Might cause some logistical issues but nothing that can’t be done over the phone.
Is the Iranian economy tied to individuals having internet access to the rest of the world much?
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.
AFAIK they used GPS spoofing which confuses the Starlink terminals - they need to know where they are to properly connect to the satellites above.
This can be overriden to use "Starlink positioning" where the terminal ignores GPS signals and dtermines its position based on Starlink satellite signals. I think this is what is used in Ukraine where GPS is mostly jammed/spoofed to hell even far from the front.
The GPS positioning is the default as it is likely more user friendly/has quicker lock in normal circumstances.
Another venue of attack could be the Starlink WiFi AP included in the terminals- you could track that down.
So in general:
* switch the terminal to Starlink positioning
* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC address
And it should be good to go.
Spoofing - ok, but how did they detect all the starlinks? Assuming that users were smart to not turn on WiFi on starlink. Do these antennas emit certain waves that a “scanner” can detect and with 99% certainty figure out that that point on a map is a starlink antenna ?
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.
The GPS jamming maps are based on commercial air traffic flying in the area.
While that gives some ideas of how widespread the jamming is, it won't give accurate information about the range (air traffic avoids areas with jamming) of the interference or any information from places where there is no commercial air traffic (war zones, etc).
https://gpsjam.org/
Supposedly it's high packet loss but still available to at least some extent. Or at least it was initially? Really highlights the importance of low bandwidth P2P capable messaging systems that support caching messages for later delivery as well as multiple underlying transports.
You can jam the satellites, you can jam the receivers and you can jam GPS.
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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?
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thats sad... this kind of blackout only works for china because china has a massive internal market and the gov has a way of check things like: "we know you are using VPN, but as long as you dont do or say terrible things about CCP, we dont care". so this model works.
but even with his, i still feel angry when i want to check something on google/ins...when i dont have a realiable VPN. i remeber when we start working on golang dev, and because its under google domain so many sub sites is blocked including golang ones, its very time consuming for chinese devs to develop golang projects, you have to figure out the VPN/goproxy... stuff..
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.
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Prepare to go back to newsgroups with NNTP / UUCP. With today's uSD cards that should create a pretty decent, offline store and forward national discussion platform. No programming needed, it's all there already, just forgotten...
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 don't want to believe that a government so incompetent, corrupt and cruel can continue to function. I don't trust that the rest of the world will help militarily although it's a strong possibility, but I do trust that they will continue to isolate the country. It's possible that the regime will implode simply because there is no honor among thieves.
Unfortunately, they are extremely competent at holding on to power. Inflation has been oscillating between 20% and 50% since 2019 yet here we are. It is hard to over throw the people who have all the guns.
I am usually pretty isolationist in my thinking but I really wish the US would have already invaded.
Millions of young Persians who are absolutely no different than you or I. It is now or never. If the regime can put down this uprising it is going to be hard to form another uprising for a long long time.
Nah, just for a year or so, after they will say all the footage is "AI generated".
Sadly, this already happens in China.
After many years of heavy censorship on 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, there are a lot of accounts on Chinese BBS who say all the footage "AI generated".
They likely try to find and remove a lot of these videos (and their owners) before turning on the internet.
They don't have to. In two weeks nobody will (pretend to) care anymore.
From the phones, computers, usb sticks and SD cards of millions of people?
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I really hope the next iPhone with Satellite connectivity not limited to SOS will help for that.
At the same time, I can see Apple caving to Iran governement - or China's - and restrict this feature to countries where it is legal.
Apple devices are pretty much unobtainable to most of the population of Iran due to a variety of reasons
Untrue — there is a large market for Apple devices, iPhones are super popular in Iran. Fun fact, IRL stores use iMacs because it looks good but they install Windows on them to be able to use their legacy Windows accounting software :)
Fun fact - back in 2009, iPhone 3GS sold in China does not have WiFi feature. If that's possible, I can totally see a new iPhone model with restricted satellite feature selling in Iran and China.
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.
There are a lot of words one could use to describe the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, but indiscriminate isn’t one that leaps to mind, particular when compared against other contemporary military strikes
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lol
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.
Firstly the protesters will be able to communicate in private.
And secondly, Iranians will continue to be reminded of the freedoms most other Muslims enjoy: As in free speech and free trade.
One of the reasons the Berlin wall fell was that East Europeans saw on TV that how prosperous Western Europe became.
One major difference is that it was extremely difficult to leave Eastern Europe. Borders with the West were fortified and even in the unlikely event of getting a visa issued, the government would make sure that your loved ones were left behind, forcing you to eventually come back.
The citizens of Iran, in turn, are free to leave the country as they wish. In fact, the official policy is that if you don't like it here, then you are are supposed to move out.
What good is the free Internet when the government can use it push false narratives and obvious lies and the people just believe it (talking about America in this case).
Starlink was also blocked by radio frequency interference.
Granted that can't possibly cover the entire area of the country.
What? No. There are countless reasons why the wall fell but TV wasn't one of them. East Europeans didn't 'see' anything 'on TV' that would suggest anything other than what was endorsed by local authorities.
Trade was a big factor though. As the collective quality of life in the East was deteriorating, efforts were made by authorities to save the dire situation by opening trade and some degree of freedom of movement with the West. As this plan failed economically, a side effect was that it only became common knowledge across society how big the gap in quality of life really was.
The idea that free internet access will magically change the situation for Iranians on it's own is naive.
Post Iranian protests to http://icemap.app anonymously.
If the weak link is GPS, could they not accept an override for the time and spherical coordinates to connect?
It should be possible to switch the terminal to use the satellites themselves for positioning (Starlink positioning) but it needs manually switching to that option.
This should not be possible in 2026...
This will be entirely possible in 2027 when AI will be able to individually profile each connection for "disident" risk.
I've seen unconfirmed reports of strange blocking patterns in Russian Federation that suggest individual profiling has at the very least been tested already. No need to wait a year.
This doesn't help. The prophet has seen what they did to their own people.
There is active discussion on net4people about using DNSTT, but as more of these tunnels go up, I'm sure it will be blocked.
Given the denied environment the Iranian people see themselves in. I believe its worth mentioning asynchronous networks[1].
For example, they could use NNCP[2] in sneakernet style op[3].
Couriers could even layer steganography techniques on top on the NNCP data going in and out on USB drives. This can all be done now, and doesn't require new circumvention research or tools.
NNCPNET[4] is now active which provides email over NNCP and therefore can be done completely without internet. Once a courier gets to a location that isn't as denied, they can route it over the internet via a NNCP relay. Both for getting information out, and getting data back in.
For those wanting to get information to new agencies, you should consider SecureDrop. Here[5] is a list of securedrop locations.
Like all operations, please consider your OPSEC.
Good luck
[1] www.complete.org/asynchronous-communications/
[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/
[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/
[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/
[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
Thanks for mentioning NNCP, it doesn’t get enough attention.
I am hoping more tools will be built on top of it, with good tolerance for asynchronous/offline networks, particularly for communication and social. We may need it soon elsewhere.
Mail over NNCP works well as you mentioned because mail is already asynchronous. Maybe Delta Chat over NNCP is worth a try.
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.
This has been the administration's response to such events for multiple times over the last 6 years (3 times to be exact, plus during the time of war with Israel) and the claim has always been Iran wants to shutdown internet forever. But in all those cases the access was re-enabled after a few or several weeks.
Right now the internet access is widening and some areas are already back to normal internet — but it hasn't been stable over the past week. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/ir
It not just information, but capital (crypto) - think prediction markets and their influence:
https://polymarket.com/event/khamenei-out-as-supreme-leader-...
"In addition to the central bank, it seems as though regular Iranians are seeking the perceived safety of cryptocurrencies as unrest disrupts the country and the economy collapses."
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/01/21/iran-s-central-...
>Good luck trying to take something back from the populace once already given for decades, even if it is in a limited form.
Like the right to not wear scarf? Seems they had the good luck with that one.
So Iran becomes a second North Korea...
I think that'd only further cause people to push back. I think this could only backfire.
Imagine if all the conveniences of the internet were taken from you. Not that you'd never had them, but that you'd come to rely on them and then they were gone. Feels like some palpable oppression to me. And it has nothing to do with your political views. Everyone will feel the squeeze and nobody is gonna be dismissive about it.
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.
Do not immediately jump to such disgusting accusations:
> Astroturfing much?
I have been involved in antiregime activities for years. You can easily find many posts of mine evangelizing the cause in the oddest places e.g.: https://www.themotte.org/post/2196/culture-war-roundup-for-t...
> I just want the regime to change
I run one of the biggest defense forums where I post about it a lot: https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/1q09y6q/ac...
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North Korea 2.0
Can we cut couple of undersea cables and make it properly permanent for elites too?
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.
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That will make it so much easier for the regime to suppress all communication! They'll have more resources to focus on other goals, like killing all dissenters.
Is the idea to unblock their internet if they let everyone use the internet and not just the elite? It won't work. Their elites will find workarounds and they'll leave the internet completely blocked apart from that.
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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.
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
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.
'Your analysis is as bad as Chomsky' is probably not the burn you think it is.
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There is some evidence to suggest that certain countries (Russia, China, Iran itself) have an incentive to use the Gaza conflict to cause disunity in the west - and hence keep it in the news cycle and public opinion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/israel-hamas-i...
Interestingly, during the last internet blackout in Iran, a lot of the pro Scottish independence X accounts went quiet too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_influence_operations_i...
I'm sure many Iranians are deeply concerned about that cause.
If it is that easy for foreign governments to influence the very thoughts people have day-to-day, then something is extremely broken in your system and nearly all the blame is on your government for allowing that to happen.
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All of America's failings are leveraged to sow political division by foreign actors. Abu Ghraib, SAVAK, Dimona - these are America's mistakes, not foreign fabrication.
Interesting, but also absurd.
The Scottish independence movement is a very strong, grass roots campaign that has been building for many decades ( pre-web never mind pre-twitter ), with the Scottish ambivalence to the Union having deep cultural roots.
What keeps Gaza and the wider actions of the current Israel government in the news is the constant killings and injustices. If they didn't want to be in the news perhaps they could stop killing people.
Next you will be telling me Minnesota is only in the news due to Russia bots - and nothing to do with the killing of civilians on the streets.
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Nice try with the Hasbara, but in the end Netanyahu's gang, Iran crazies are Trumpists arent that different in the end. It's all about power, as 1984 stated. Ideology it's just marketing and bullshit for the people.
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It's not even in the same ballpark.
0.03% of Iranians vs 3% of Gazans.
I think we can all agree that Iran shouldn't be massacring its own nationals even if as the government claims they are foreign-influenced, but don't use this as a platform to push an agenda that harms even your own cause.
>It's not even in the same ballpark.
>0.03% of Iranians vs 3% of Gazans.
"One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic"
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Murdering 30,000 innocent people in three days of protests is indeed not in the ballpark of killing 30,000 militants in two years of a war, you're absolutely right.
There is a legal principal that comes into play when people are locked up for contempt of court. You can be locked up indefinitely or until the issue is moot. The the reasoning behind that is you hole the keys to your own cell.
The Israeli's demand was returning the hostages and the bodies of the people Hamas murdered. Hamas refused to do that for a year and a half.
Let me get this straight: If 60,000 people are killed in a war in 3 years, it's a genocide, but if 30,000 protesters are killed in 2 days, it's not? Not that either one is a genocide, but you're saying the difference is what percentage of the population died? Therefore, 10 people in Luxembourg are equal to 200 people in China?
Pallyweid [fake israelophobic buzzwords: apartheidgenocide] exposed. Gaza war with genocidal [Hamas Charter, declaration and methods] "Palestine" Gaza regime. We all know Hamas/PIJ death cult methods (search 'dead baby strategy'. In fact, it was already by Egyptian born Arafat - Hitler's al-Husseini-mufti's family who began the 'human shields' tactics of ITS OWN PEOPLE already in early '80s in Lebanon) - to maximize casualties of both sides. Almost all who propagated "genocide" already paddled the "apartheid" slur years earlier. BTW The A slurs began by Ahmad Shukeiri in UN on 10.17.61, who rationalized the Holocaust months after WW2 [B'nai B'rith 7.12.46] and on 11.30.62 had promoted in UN Neonazi gang Tacuara, who guarded Eichmann and Mengele. Then you have UNCHR by Pillay Kothari "Jewish control" 2022 trope, or UN's "rappartour" Francesca Albanese infamous - dubbed modern 'Goebbeles', her antisemitic tweets from 2014 remembered; or the mocked $30 membership IAGS "experts" countered [T.O.I, 9.9.25] by 537 real experts denying the "genocide" lie. So are objecting major countries who are neither socialist or Muslim. All the propaganda Goliath machine nor hecklers who pressure pols. to utter the G word, don't change facts. Nor the 32 Wikipedia editors organized gang [see ADL, 3.18.25].
Numbers: even if one accepts the 60,000+ figure, but since over 25,000 Terrorists have been eliminated on Gaza, the combatants-to-none ratio is rather impressive. And yes, Hamas women are usually assistants... all that is in the course of 2 years.
VS Islamic Republic of Iran massacring some 60,000 in a few days.
[Journalist].Shirin Sadeghi @ShirinSadeghi Jan 22, 2026: Thread on the scale of death, injury and devastation in Iran right now. This Dr conservatively estimates 60,000 killed, 360,000 injured and at least 1 million directly affected.
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Iran may have killed over 30,000 protesters in two days: Report. By Brady Knox. Washington Examiner. January 25, 2026. — Over two weeks, the Rapid Support Forces murdered thousands of civilians, with one estimate putting the kill count at over 60,000.
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CBN News @CBNNews: The Middle East is watching to see if the U.S. will strike the Iranian regime. As further reports of the violence inside Iran come in, the number of those killed by the regime is staggering.
Global terrorism expert Dr. Amir Hamidi said, "A physician-linked medical network has released what is described as a hospital-registered death toll of 40,274, emphasizing this does not cover all facilities and includes victims who never reached hospitals. Based on those gaps, the estimated toll may exceed 60,000. This is not crowd control. This is mass killing, disappearing chemical attacks, and black cloth to hide the evidence. This is a nationwide uprising met with state terror. And it fits the pattern of crime against humanity.”
It's a massacre on a scale that makes it one of the world's deadliest in a generation. The International Center for Human Rights adds that more than 350,000 have been injured and more than 10,000 blinded. [Saman Rasoulpour @SamRasoulpour Editor in Chief | Co-founder, Pulse Media | Covering Iran: news & analysis]
Saman Rasoulpour @SamRasoulpour: In the early days of Iran’s nationwide internet shutdown, at least 30,000 to 60,000 people were killed on the streets. During this period, Mohammad Marandi was among a small, handpicked group of regime-approved individuals inside Iran who retained internet access , joining international media via live video from the state broadcaster Press TV’s studio in Tehran, while helping justify the regime’s narrative as the killings unfolded. Jan 28, 2026.
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Turlockers continue to show support for Iranian protesters. Joe Cortez, Turlock Journal, Jan 28, 2026 — ... protesters in Turlock, with friends and family still in Iran, paint a far more harrowing picture. “When I spoke to my friend (Saturday), he told me that it’s over 60,000 that have been killed,” said Turlock’s Raymon Galavan, who came to the U.S. from Iran in 2006. “People are protesting for freedom with nothing in their hands, and they’re being killed with (military-grade) bullets. And the people who are in hospitals, they take them out and they kill them on the street, and bury them in mass graves. This is the reality. This is not out of a movie.”.. “What they’re telling me right now is that there are absolutely two or three families in each street, and in each alley, that have had someone killed,” said Farhad. “The estimated number of killed in two nights is more than 40,000. Whoever says different … forget about it. It’s a massacre.” Robert David, who co-organized the local protest with Charles Sharlou, added to those disturbing totals. “The numbers we’re getting are more than 800,000 injured and over 300,000 who have been arrested by the regime,” said David, also a native of Tehran. “There is no freedom in Iran. Whatever the regime wants, they do in the name of Islam, and everybody is expected to follow.”
You treating human life as less worthy if a population has more of them?
It’s 30k in a week - all civilians vs 60k in 2 years - in a mixture of civilians and combatants.
The way you just call them all militants using human shields is truly amazing. From reddit by same username I can see that you're an American living in Israel also so it matches up.
Did you also see I was born in Baghdad and know first hand what actual ethnic cleansing is?
Qatar spent $20B on education alone in the US. China Russia and Qatar have collectively brainwashed millions of Americans and Europeans.
It's a beautiful thing when you can designate any male carrying objects in their hands as terrorists and get license to kill him and his human shields (guy went home).
> an American living in Israel
lmao, every. single. time.
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Half of killed in Gaza were kids. So the militants narrative is just untrue.
However, if someone pick and chooses where to apply human rights, it's unethical to say the least.
If you say so
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I agree that it got appallingly little press, as do many large-scale human rights violations around the world. However, I feel like pitting it against "the rhetoric in Gaza" is wrong. Gaza is much more our war (where "we" is "the West"). Our governments directly provide the funds and weapons that are being used to commit the large-scale grave human rights violations by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. In plain English: we're funding the genocide with our tax money. In a democratic system of government, I would therefore expect and hope for these issues to take up a much larger part of public discourse.
Given the direct comparison and language of the parent comment, it's hard for me not to see an implied agenda here: Iran's regime is bad, they're islamists, just like Hamas, therefore Israel should be excused for having turned Gaza into a parking lot, or something along these lines. Our commitment to human rights should be strong enough to reject this sort of thinking and condemn every single one of these civilian deaths.
I don't think anyone really believes civilian deaths shouldn't be condemned. I think the main source of argument is who gets the blame. Hamas could've returned the hostages at any time, but they got rewarded by foreign money (and immensely successful anti Israel propaganda campaign by Qatar, Russia and China) to keep going.
The only real way to peace for gazans is to have a non Islamist government take over (like from the UAE) and re educate the population to not start training their children for intifada at the age of 3 or 4 and instead use some of the billions they've received in aid to build infrastructure and education.
A situation only gets press when people disagree about it[1].
George Floyd got a lot because he was a borderline case, an innocent man shot by police for some, a criminal who got what he deserved for others. That creates tension. That creates arguments. "local cop shoots innocent 80-year-old woman carrying groceries" is a story for a day at best, then the cop gets punished and we move on.
Gaza is the same. You have one side complaining about human rights abuses, and the pro-Israel side supporting Israle to the death. In Iran, there's no such tension, we all agree that this is bad, shrug and move on.
[1] (funnily enough, this was cited today on HN in an entirely unrelated article) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
It's not just press. The actions of the world are to let Iran continue doing what it wants to its people and not interfere.
The reason isn't that no one disagrees, it's that Qatar, Russia and China don't think the issue is divisive and have not launched a multi billion dollar propaganda campaign about it. And the actual press couldn't care less if Israel isn't involved.
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My GF and I rarely discuss news or politics, but she's a frequent NPR listener who gets most of her (ahem) "news" from there and Reddit. So the other night something came up about Israel and she casually said "well, but everyone hates Israel now". In that context, I said what do they think about the masses of unarmed people shot in the streets of Tehran. So imagine my total surprise when she said she had no idea there were any protests in Iran. None at all. Somehow, for a couple years of the war in Gaza, she was attuned to every video - real or fake - that was attributed to that war zone. Yet this completely passed without her noticing.
She said, "well, how would I know about it if it's not on the news?"
I said, "well, it was on the news." And then I went looking for articles about it. And y'know, I realized that unless you actually went looking, you probably wouldn't find those articles, even though they're only a few weeks old.
What is super disappointing about this is that when the US does take action against the Iranian regime again, the reasoning is not going to be legible to most Americans. I don't really understand how this was erased so quickly. That meme about Columbia's campus being totally protest-free was pretty much on point. It's startling to see a large portion of the population being manipulated so thoroughly into being rabid about one thing and totally blind to another at the same time. Is having consistent values no longer a value?
It's because Qatar, Russia and China launched a multi billion dollar propaganda campaign targeting Israel. Israel is so divisive it's the perfect way to divide a population.
Lots of worse things have happened in the past two years (Sudan, Nigeria, and now Iran). No Jews no news.
Might have to do with the funding cuts to public broadcasting?
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It's all over American national news, competing for airtime with the domestic executions.
it's also being relentlessly flagged here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760329
That's because the "30k" number is bs
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https://honestreporting.com/message-to-the-media-stop-publis...
> Weeks after it was exposed that Hamas’ so-called “Gaza Health Ministry” has been circulating false casualty figures, much of the media are still reporting them without a hint of skepticism.
> In April, research by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, revealed that thousands of previously “identified” deaths — including more than 1,000 children allegedly killed in Israeli airstrikes — had quietly disappeared from Hamas’ own tallies.
> Aizenberg’s findings echoed a December report by the Henry Jackson Society, which documented how Hamas had systematically inflated civilian casualty numbers to suggest that Israel targets non-combatants.
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I get the feeling you don't want to hear it, but there is despicable thing called child soldiers.
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Both Israel (Gaza), Iran (religious nuts) and the USA (ICE fascists and Trump's gang) can be declared as ruled by human turds, they aren't mutually exclusive.
Because the left love the islamists. Because Iran helps Palestine and Hezbollah. So Dropsite, Hasanabi and all of Reddit will not talk. It is that easy.
How there is a marriage of convenience between western progressivism and ultra-conservative theocracy is still confusing and mysterious to me.
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> Iranians will be reminded
I think this comment is misguided enough / detached from reality enough to rightfully be flagged to death for being trite and not contributing anything to the discussion.
Iranians lost internet than 3 weeks ago. They are as aware now as they ever will be about how things are going outside their borders.
> 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?
UAE, Indonesia, Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey among many others.
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> 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.
A small price to pay, surely, to be rescued from the mind flaying less fortunate people in corporate hellholes must face daily.
Even with ublock Origin, these corporations will build a profile on me. Not so in Iran, where people can live without the watchful eye of Google looking at everything they do.
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trump could do similar in usa one day to stop drugs and illegals...what a tragic day that'd be!
Just imagine how much we'd all get done if the internet were switched off.
Switch off yours and see how well it works for you.
I do, often, and it works well.
You should try it.
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