Here’s Tamir’s call for action https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7419994...
Don't expect sending anything massive such as video recording, but should be enough for text-based communications.
I’m almost afraid to ask but how are you and everyone else?
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.
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.
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.
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
There are no ID cards in the UK, so you actually have to get a special jerking off loicense.
> "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://www.politico.eu/article/french-tiktok-ban-new-caledo...
This is the only example I'm aware of (are there others?) of a Western government effecting internet censorship to suppress protests. (Though the article also mentions Macron considering (but rejecting) the same idea in France, to suppress protests following a police shooting. See also[1])
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36599726 ("Macron floats social media cuts during riots", 105 comments)
edit: There was also an incident in San Francisco way back in 2011,
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, North Korea does manage to produce rockets and nuclear warheads. They aren't exporting technology, though.
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.
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%...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Granted that can't possibly cover the entire area of the country.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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-...
Like the right to not wear scarf? Seems they had the good luck with that one.
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 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...
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.
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.
