And for fellow HN users from there, here's some great stuff: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://bitchat.free/
Just take a look at what happened to Libya, sometimes removing a "bad person" will cause a far worse situation to evolve. Like literal human slavery.
I will never cease to be amazed at the amnesia that arises when folks in power decide now is a good time to sell a war to the people.
It only takes about 30% of the population supporting the regime plus military intervention to hold onto power. For some time now it seems that they've been below the 30% mark.
I think their neighbor would disagree.
> sell a war to the people.
If you have to sell the war, then you have no business conducting it.
1. Even if removing <bad government> would be good for that country, that doesn’t give some other state the right to do it. We let these entities get away with murder because they are our friends and they have the biggest guns, that’s it.
2. Always interrogate the real reasons why a state is doing it.
Now only after that we get to the facts like all those times it ended horribly for the people that <state> was supposed to help.
As for the rest of what you said, no notes.
Iranians though, sure, things can change with or without the current govt
Which country is that? Last I checked, the Kurds were helping out the US a couple of years ago and got absolutely screwed.
How did that wirk out?
You need more of a plan than just get rid of a dictator.
I also fear that the looming, imminent war between Israel and Iran is going to make things works. I'm expecting Israel to start a conflict within the next 6 months (or sooner) with the aid of United States.
This is the weakest IRGC have been. Many of their allies have been crippled, they have water issues, economical issues and now protests.
I think that securing Venezuela's oil aids this, should IRAN attempt to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, it will allow Israel and United States to maintain reserves (to what extend, I don't know).
I think things are going to get difficult for Iranian people, no matter what.
Its also not a prevalent technology compared to general.internet/mobile phone.
Organising resistance with it is the pipe dream of those who play with chips and antennas, but its not something thats going to happen when crowds and mobs form up in a situation like this. Not least because the hardware is not accessible to your average citizen.
[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink....
Compare that to the number of cell phone users which is very close to 100%. All estimates of the number of mobile subscribers or number of mobile phone numbers are greater than the total population.
I don't know too much about starlink but is there a way that someone can pay for other person's usage and then build a starlink receiver or something from spare parts or like easy accesible parts from the world?
Because how would people get starlink device. I dont know the mecanism of startlink though or how it works
Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.
But its not about censorship in the usual sense really. Its about preventing peer to peer communication. With less than a percent of iranians having access to each other either locally or via foreign internet, they cut down their ability to organise significantly. Starlink doesnt offer a solution here. Starlink doesnt matter. Every starlink person could turn up to a protest and it would still be less impactful than previous protests.
The problem with starlink is when the taliban turn off the intenet, if you use it to concerning (tweet, talk to news channel, post a podcast), the governemt know.
You really think iran is going to bomb turkey (a nato country) over this?
The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.
Social media is such a narrow lens that I would be cautious accepting that analysis at face value.
Censorship, throttling, and (presumably) surveillance occurs at both layers. In some cases, also the region matters (Sistan and Baluchistan for example have experienced extended blackouts). In part that heterogeneity is because they still ideally want to keep businesses or VIPs online to mitigate the economic loss or logistical issues.
Consequently, the actual means of blocking tends to be on an ISP basis: some will simply drop packets, some will have left certain endpoints open, some will leave international DNS open, etc etc. All that changes when activists notice, exploit the opening, and then the ISP finds out. And then sometimes the TIC (the gateway) will impose blanket limitations or throttling.
My impression is that Iranian intelligence cares less about means than effectiveness, and ISP operators want to keep their license, livelihoods and lives, so they figure out how to meet the mandate. Given that this is something like the fourth blackout in recent years, they've gotten enough practice that there's few options out (that aren't Starlink).
Your international dns is interesting post, can dns over https still work like cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 (I don't think cf would work but still) or any other service?
Is there any iranian person in here hackernews who can test if international dns query works?
There are ways to send some very important data (although small so a little limited but I think in current time if it can help 1% it helps) that I saw that we can program dns to send each other arbitrary data as well
In fact there is a tool which can in fact run dns queries and create a sort of finger like protocol on it called dns.toys https://www.dns.toys/
Which can basically have some cli application like experience on top of dns and there msut be dns tools for communications as well.
Not just protests, it's to prevent foreign interference (like CIA) from fueling civil unrest and spreading AI deepfakes, as seen in Myanmar and Brazil
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
The article claims that the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar that kicked off in 2017 has been substantively fueled by Facebook propaganda efforts, with strong links to Myanmar's own "security forces" (military).
> it's to prevent foreign interference (like CIA) from fueling civil unrest and spreading AI deepfakes, as seen in Myanmar and Brazil
In contrast then, you seem to allege that it was actually a foreign interference campaign by the CIA? Or am I misunderstanding what you're proposing?
Because if I'm not, I fail to see how what you linked supports that at all. Even your mention of deepfakes seems very questionable, as those haven't been a thing until late 2017, by which point this cleansing effort was already long underway. I further see that the US has formally condemned these events, although of course that does not rule out involvement.
If anything its easier to spread rumours without the internet to let people compare notes
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2020/11/iran...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunication_Infrastructu...
One doesn't get to be the head of a business in a country like Iran without being a True Believer.
1.Talent pools in nation states are extraordinarily deep-- much deeper than they appear. Countries can suffer from brain drain for decades (or centuries!) but when conditions call for it, superbly talented people somehow manifest.
2. The correlation between talent and conscience is weak. Nation states always manage to find superbly talented people to work on problems many of us would recoil from.
About 2. also 100% true: intelligence/knowledge is totally independent of any other trait.
The same people who have unironically latched onto the idea of Meritocracy. A concept/idea that was literally conceived as a parody.
One characteristic of v4 is it's somewhat reasonable to do a straight forward block on a range of addresses to shut down access. This is still somewhat possible with v6, but harder as there's simply a much larger portion of ip addresses that can be all over the place. It's theoretically a lot easier for anyone that wants to bypass a simple filter to grab a new public IP address.
A lot of anti censorship organizations have trouble getting more IPv4 /24 for cost reasons or moving it around to different AS since they would go offline.
With IPv6, you can get IPv6 /40 from ARIN/RIPE no problem. You slice that up into /48 and just start bouncing it all over the place. When one /48 goes down, you move everything to another /48, switch providers if required and continue.
EDIT: They also tend to get multiple blocks as well for when ISP figures out to root /40.
I'd at least keep an open mind for a while.
Does everything stop or it's mostly business as usual minus some things?
I would imagine hospitals, tax offices etc need the internet to work?
"The internet was out. Everywhere. Across the entire country. No cell data, no wifi, no phone service, and as far as I could tell, there are no landlines in Afghanistan [...] But now the blackout was total. Our waiter was complaining to my guide that he couldn’t contact his mother in a western province. I saw other people in the crowded restaurant fiddling with their phones and looking annoyed. I asked my guide what he thought was going on. He shrugged."
"Without internet and phones, people can’t talk to loved ones, businesses can’t function, trade can’t function, and even government offices can’t function. Only the Taliban with their well-established network of short-wave radios can function. But still, if the internet remains off long enough in Afghanistan, the country’s economy and society may very well collapse. Afghans couldn’t get money from banks. Soon enough, would food stop being delivered to cities?"
they can censor IPv4 when they want, but they don't know how to censor IPv6. So they block it entirely.
This is the reason why they aren't blacking out IPv4
From my own experience, my ex gf was iranian. She was using discord via some psiphon vpn or something iirc idk how she got access to it but she had it.
I didn't trust psiphon that much so I asked her to install proton vpn and it did work. I wanted to play minecraft with her so prismlauncher but resources couldn't be downloaded so I made her download protonvpn so that she can play minecraft with me/install it (piracy was forced and also at that point necessary)
She was using tlauncher which somehow worked but tlauncher was russian spyware and prism launcher was open source
I talked to her about how she could use stablecoins crypto but crypto was illegal so ended up not suggesting it in the end to prevent inflation or talked to her about gold which is wild considering its like 3-4 months after we broke up but inflation is at 50% now.
Anyways the point being that protonvpn worked and other vpn worked too.
My question is, would things like protonvpn work after this blackout? I mean marco's and other comments in a thread explain to me that ipv4 can be blocked by them so I presume vpn's for ipv4 would shut down. And so vpns would most likely be using ipv6 which got blocked down
So does that mean that now Iranian people can't access vpns?
I also saw the other day some video about how when people called Iranian numbers from outside countries some random AI robot ass voice called and asked who are you and who are you talking to? And gave pause, and the most logical explaination to it was that the govt was recording these things so dont say anything to them. It was a creepypasta video.
Briar might help but Briar still leaks some metadata when I talked to their authors or heard about it online.
Instagram isn't blocked in Iran so are these social media apps still there after the blackout?
This raises so many questions and wtf is happening in the world
I'm curious why this is the case? As far as I know the primary benefits of v6 is just the increased address space. Does it provide any privacy benefits? What would prevent Iran from doing the same censorship?
Internet participation is voluntary between countries.
The discussion here assumes that the Iranian government is responsible for this blackout. I actually don't understand enough about network routing to undestand the OP dashboard linked to or be able to answer this question, but could it instead be the work of an opponent preparing to attack Iran?
The "regime" is a republic with regularly held presidential (8 presidents in 45 years) and parliamentary elections. What would you like to replace it with? Monarchy
I'd think the regime thing refers to the Supreme Leader of 36 years and his Guardian Council, no?
I would like the internet not to get shut down during the protest
Am I asking too much?
There was a recent post containing a (different) map of the protests that was flagged, but here goes
Is this the first country which genuinely effectively is able to ban tor?
Because even in China, tor can work through bridges or some other methods and even Chinese firewalls aren't so extreme as iran right now.
Edit: forgot that north korea exists so I guess the second country but even in north korea there was this chinese interviewer or japanese interviewer who contacted people in north korea ig and those north koreans then interviewed for the first time completely uncensored north korea and it was brutal (a girl saying both her parents died and she was so so skinny i think) , they then went and smuggled the tapes from north korea to china and then to japan and then the company/production company or something blurred the peoples faces involved for anonymity.
There's also this 1 steam connection in north korea so its just gonna be a mystery if we ever see a north korean person using a tor but I am 99% sure that it wont but north korea also got 1 steam connection so you never know.
The reason they didn't do this for ipv6 is because ipv6 obviously has a lot more addresses and so they just ended up blocking it whole.
Atleast that's what I read in one of the comment threads discussions in here
I don't think that in iran there would still be any available ipv4 entry nodes that they would allow. They would filter/block it as well?
Looking at IPv6 its not 0 exactly, looks like probably censorship, only some devices allowed online? Some other comment mentioned there's calls to protest again today.
Ah, well...
IPv6 is still blacked out
