Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it [1] to no avail. Using these terminals activists and journalists continue to upload videos of demonstrations to social media which has enabled analyses that show demonstrations are very wide spread [2] and continue to grow.
Yes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.
The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.
Bouncing signals off of the ionosphere is most definitely not an option here. The bandwidth of the signals that Starlink needs in order to provide service are far wider than the range of frequencies that bounce off any layer of the ionosphere. If you could get a 10GHz signal to bounce off of the F layer, you'd have a lot of very excited amateur radio operators who would start using that instead of the moon as their reflector.
Beamforming is essentially yet another way to achieve gain, just like one does with a directional antenna. The Starlink terminal achieves a gain of roughly 33 dB, which means it talks (and also listens) in the peak direction at power levels that are around 2000x higher than what one would achieve with isotropic antennas. 2000x sounds like a lot, but it is actually not impossible to reach. Consumer electronics sends at most a few Watts of RF power, but serious jammers of the type used by militaries can run kilowatts. If you consider the peak power used for brief moments of time then you can get as high as megawatts - the famous AWACS aircraft briefly flash half a continent at somewhere around 1 MW, with average TX power of ~single digit kilowatt.
This assumes you're jamming very close to the dish. The trouble with jamming is you have to deal with the inverse square law so you really can't deny very much area. If they have a fleet of hundreds of high power modern directional jammers they could degrade this or other networks, but they're just not going to have that kind of sophistication.
Huge idiot here with an honest question: with starlink, could a rogue actor just point a bunch of high-powered lasers at the satellites and brick them?
In short, likely no(unless the satellites are really sensitive). Otherwise lasers would have negated the fear of ICBMs long ago.
Because the atmosphere absorbs a lot of energy of the laser beam and focusing the laser beam to such a distant target is not easy. So you cannot just use some high powered lasers, as it would be just a bright spot at most. It would be different, if the laser would be space based, but that is out of reach of Iran's capabilities. They might have anti satellite rockets, but using them against US property in space would create other problems for them.
There are 9400 active Starlink satellites & they can be launched 28 at a time on a partially reusable rocket. The orbit they operate on is largely self cleaning due to being quite low. The satellites operate in many planes and bands + form a mesh network with laster interconnects.
Sure, if you want to try that and bankrupt Iran even more via its militarry rocket program, you can do that and maybe destray a handfull satellites, provided you can actually hit them and the rocket/s does not fail. And you might even get a nice casus belli as a free extra.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but I guess even a single lunch in the retrograde direction should be enough. You lunch a box of ball bearings with a plastic explosive to spread them out, and then just wait. The cloud will pass over Iran every 12h or and will stay in orbit for quite a few weeks, since the orbit is even higher than ISS reboosting once a month, and balls are highly aerodynamic compared to the Starlink flat sails. The cloud won't be very big, but it will repeatedly swipe through quite a lot intersecting prograde orbits. I guess the chance would be quite high. Iran can also split payload into smaller boxes and "deploy" then in sequence while the second stage is firing, then detonate them, to spread out even more.
I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.
The article you linked contains literally nothing supporting your accusation. Instead, it talks about an investigation targeting the aid recipient:
>The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine. Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals
I guess it is to a degree unavoidable - ukrainian units are using a lot of crowdfunded starlink terminals on the front, so even if you geo fenced usage only to the virtual cells outside of Russia controlled territory, you would also disable ukrainian sets at the front. So if Russians smuggle sets from other countries, they might not be really easy to tell from the "good" sets crowdsourced by the ukrainians and used at the front.
As for use in long range strike UAVs I'm sure ukrainian units have specially registered units that will work anywhere but again, Russian long range kamikaze drones you have a smuggled unit that only activates once on ukrainian territory and be used for terminal guidance or reconnaissance. By the time the system spots a new terminal moving quickly in the wrong place the thing would have rammed into a civilian building somewhere.
I've got to think it's easy to find starlink receivers--I know they use a directed beam but they must give off a bunch of lateral noise, right? Or does Starlink use the same frequency bands as other common equipment such that it would be difficult to distinguish starlink signals from others? If the government was motivated they could surely start finding these receivers, right?
They don't have that many rockets that are capable of orbital flight let alone an ASAT capability.
Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car, except
Both cars are invisible most of the time.
They’re moving 17,000 mph.
The dart has no steering wheel only tiny nudges.
If you miss by a few feet, you miss by miles.
Countries that can do this reliably aren’t showing off missiles they’re showing off navigation, sensors, computing. The weapon is the least impressive part.
Um, no - if you do this on suborbital trajectory you totally obliterate a bunch of empty space for the <10 minutes until all your garbage falls back.
If you actually manage to make it into an orbit (with a much much bigger and much more expensive rocket) you will most likely do the same (eg. not hitting the intended satellite) with the added bonus of littering random orbits over time and hitting random satellites.
And if you want to say "they will deny orbit for everyone!" - well, good luck without far too many orbital class rockets for anyone of their size to have.
Not to mention Starlink orbits being (as alterady state so low they are self-cleaning), GPS orbits being far too high to even reach, let alone to saturate with garbage & same for GEO sats.
Ah yes, Kessler's space shredder, something to be feared by all satellites!
It appears that we are very close to an unstoppable runaway process of collisions in space.
On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets after ruining this one.
On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS, it would be chaos if that were to disappear...
> On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets
Kessler syndrome has little to no effect on trajectories only briefly transiting any given orbital shell. The collision probability of anything going straight "up"/"out" is negligible.
> On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS
GPS is in MEO, Starlink is in LEO. There's absolutely no chance any material will be propelled up to MEO via a series of even very unlucky LEO collisions, as far as I know.
GPS is in geosynchronous orbit, insanely far from the Earth's surface.
You can't get chain-reaction collisions to happen at such an outrageously high orbit. That amount of mass you'd have to put into orbit is just insane. It's like trying to crash the moon.
Where are the ground stations Iranian traffic is using?
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.
> 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.
You really think iran is going to bomb turkey (a nato country) over this?
No, because they arent trying to prevent all communication with the outside world, they are trying to prevent organisation within their country. Leaving 0.1% of users online is acceptable.
Now if they actually did want to censor the internet, Suicide McBombervest or a missile or something would find that ground station. They simply dont give a shit.
They are almost completely inaccessible to the average Iranian. A friend of mine who has come a long way to fight Iranian censorship told me that they essentially don't exist.
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.
How are there so many users, see my other comment but i will ask here as well but starlink's american company and sanctioned iran so how do the details really work?
And how do starlink recievers enter the country in the first place?
This is good that there is still a way to get censorship resistance even after all this perhaps joining it with other protocols which can work via bluetooth,wifi etc. and are more secure connecting to something like this, a secure internet access point could be developed but I don't know too much about it.
As long as starlink isn't forced to geofence an area, anyone can buy a terminal anywhere and smuggle it in as any other drug or contraband. The mini's are about the same size as a laptop
If black market's the only reason that activism/journalism/outside contact is even possible in the country
It doesn't seem much of a plan (very sadly, I wish there was) which could be uncensored that much, some other comment pointed this point too but if black market's the case, then they would just hide whoever is using this
They would also most likely be very less in amount, journalists etc.
But the average person, they are stuck without proper internet
I thought that there are materials which can build starlink and the only thing then you need is just subscription or something
It's just sad to see that black market is the only way.
As someone who grew up in late Communist Czechoslovakia, you underestimate the black market. Its capabilities were only comparable to the Secret Police itself (StB in our case).
People in unfree conditions are crafty. Same with information. Suppressed information spreads using underground channels quite quickly.
For example, we knew almost immediately that there was some nuclear disaster in Ukraine even though the official channels didn't say anything for days.
This is already assuming terminal and account sharing. I meant to link this story, the original source: https://www.iranintl.com/en/202501060034. The stat is based on 30,000 unique users. I don't know how many actual terminals there are, probably a few thousand.
They must be smuggled inside the country and the dictatorship can say anything they want and charge if they get caught so they must be very few in numbers
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 receivers are actually very complicated. They make use of a bunch of high-end FPGAs and a bunch of other expensive and uncommon components. See this teardown: https://youtu.be/h6MfM8EFkGg?si=m-sN6UW4nh8_HzPR.
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here's an web.archive.org link if anyone's interested which works
Edit: WTF forbes still gives me a popup even in archive, strange, but its less restrictive overall in the web archive version so I am able to still copy and read the version
> 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?
Starlink uses a pretty sophisticated phased array antenna, so not something you can easily build in your garage.
I wonder how easy is it to get contraband into the country. The country's huge, and with the current govt not being the most popular or financially well off, I guess there are quite a few border officers willing to make some extra money.
The discussion about Starlink is interesting, but with only ~0.1% of the population having access, the real story is the 99.9% who are cut off right now. The asymmetry between those who can broadcast to the world and those who can't is staggering — and even among that 0.1%, many are too afraid to broadcast anything, knowing the risks.
Theoretically this is true, but in practice it's not. Most p2p services rely on the global internet in some way. The BitTorrent DHT, for example, is unlikely so self-heal in the event of a completely inaccessible global internet.
Things like HolePunch have a lot of potential here, but you'd need an Iran-only DHT, and it's just not deployed at scale.
Can't wait for a certain dictator to get a cellmate, so that our Persian and Kurdish friends can have freedom, including free unrestricted internet access.
Sure, a US invasion of Iran would undoubtedly lead to good things. And how can you say the Kurds are friends of the USA (I'm presuming you mean friends of the USA) given how many times they've been abandoned?
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.
In Iran they have had several police forces join the protestors at this point. Hopefully its a theme that continues and includes the military.
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.
Panama was on 1989 and Venezuela situation it's closer to that, than the middle East countries, We are united in this, more than 80% are against the current government and we even voted him out. There is not religious divide as it happens in those countries, even by ethnicity most people are just mixed.
All correct. But something needs to be frontloaded.
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.
Yes, both Venezuela and (in your hypothetical) Iran would certainly be better and not worse after US intervention. How could they not, with such a great track record (Iraq, Lybia, Chile, Guatemala,...)!
It worked out poorly for America — we got stuck in a long expensive war that we got basically nothing from — but for the average Iraqi? I'd much rather be an Iraqi citizen than an Iranian one, and that wouldn't have been true in the 90s. Saddam was pretty evil — and a bad leader. Iraq's GDP per capita is 6x higher today than it was in 2002, a year before the invasion.
It worked out pretty poorly for the average Iraqi. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed (some estimates put it at around 1 million), and millions of people became refugees.
Citing the relative GDP per capita number is reductive and doesn’t give a good picture of the average person’s life.
The GDP should be banned as a metric for being a life quality proxy, it's insane how so many people still refer to it although proven to neglect so many parts of what counts into LQ. To OP: Go check out Doughnut Economics - the book does a good job clearing up economical fallacies & mismodelling of such things.
This is a pretty wild counter-factual. Reminds me of a report I saw about a hipster cafe existing in Baghdad 2025 as proof of success of the US invasion. What would the alternative have been? How do you factor in the loss of life? I suppose the real answer is asking Iraqis...
Iran can end up in a much more dire state. It can end up another Syria / Libya.. or worse another aggressive group like Taliban can take hold of the central government.
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.
Lora is fine if you want to send a very short message. Its not useful for much else.
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.
There are real-world examples of non-internet networks being created in authoritarian regimes. One example I've read about is in Cuba [1] but I presume there are others.
Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve curious if there are sneakernet things for communicating messages between passing mobile devices? Something that uses exist hardware and is actually used in practice.
There's no single mechanism. Iran's internet is diverse at the edge, and bottlenecked at the international gateway.
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).
> 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.
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.
I probably spent far too much time looking into why they'd set themselves up with that kind of name... but it just nerd sniped me too hard to pass up.
Translation tools claim (I don't know enough to verify) a literal translation is "Ministry of Communications and Information Technology". I.e. they handle telecoms & IT, or "communications technology and information technology" if fully expanded.
But why bother switching it around to "Ministry of Information and Communications Technology" then? Apparently because that's what the order we call it in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communications... which surprised me because I didn't even know that was a term and I've only ever worked in the IT and telecoms jobs - WHTMA (We Have Too Many Acronyms).
I doubt there are many true believers. Most of the top brass are probably driven from sf interest. But loyalty is beyond doubt. At least until the regime is winning
Russia's trying to censor some shit too by having outside ipv4 or something (dont know what its called) blocked and basically made a large intranet
But people could still buy vps and make it work somehow
So iran and russia are similar in that sense and this kinda puts things more into balance but I am sure that % of true believers/doing for self interest might vary or something
Wow its so nice this excuse just happens to shut down the internet when an astronomically unpopular regime faces vast protests after years of economic and political mismanagement
Apparently a lot of people in the west too are assuming that these protests are fueled by the west. At least that's the most likely explanation for why so many left leaning youth are not supporting Iranians while supporting Palestine. Apparently the fight is not about freedom but about (perceived) whiteness vs non-whiteness
While I don't think they're right that Iran is ignored because Iranian protesters and the Iranian government are both perceived as white by Americans (or both non-white, depending on the person), it's undeniable that they use the perceived non-whiteness of Palestinians and perceived whiteness of Israelis as rhetorical ammunition.
This rhetorical device is a rather effective as Americans have a tendency to view everything through their own lens of "race"/color so casting the conflict as white people oppressing non-white people because they are non-white is a powerful argument that is easily understood by Americans.
That said, personally, I think Iran is ignored more because Palestine is sucking all the air out of the room than anything else, especially with all the graphic videos/photos. Sudan on the other hand... there's really no excuse for ignoring that.
>Personally, I think Iran is ignored more because Palestine is sucking all the air out of the room than anything else, especially with all the graphic videos/photos.
>Sudan on the other hand... there's really no excuse for ignoring that.
Palestine has the focus because America tax dollars most directly fuel the conflict and it is the most one-sided.
Iran is an internal conflict and Sudan is a civil war - neither of which are as directly funded by the US. Also neither has a perceived clear solution. In the case of Israel, the US should have significant leverage that it does not have in those other conflicts.
Definitions of race are very culturally dependent. A few decades ago South Asians were regarded as caucasian (I have an American encyclopedia published in the 1950s that says so), a century earlier so were some East Africans (Somalis IIRC). The current western definition of white does not include them.
Similarly the current American definition of black includes people most of the rest of the world would not consider black - we sometimes have to be told that some people identify as "black" (what Americans call passing as white).
Yeah of course none of this makes sense. And yet it all has real world consequences. It's all incredibly partisan. If one just manages to take a step back and watch this dynamic from outside it all seems so weird: the islamist Iran backs Hamas, Hamas are Palestinians, Palestinians are victimized by Jews, Jews have money, capitalists have money, america is capitalist, america is imperialist, ergo .... Islamist Iran is against capitalist imperialism. The protests are against islamist Iran ergo they are against the fight against capitalist imperialism and thus they don't deserve solidarity, or something like this.
I would really love to hear from somebody who is not supporting the Iran protests to honestly tell me if I misrepresented their position and in which way
No, they're just better educated about Iran than are you.
Iran provides substantial food, fuel, education and healthcare subsidies to the average citizen and has a very effective state bureaucracy which functions independent of political appointees. Pensioners' checks are issued regularly and social services are delivered by charitable "Bonyads", which are run by local mosques, which don't report to any government ministries.
My ex was iranian and we frequently talked about iran and you are so wrong.
She had frequent black outs with complete electricity downage for many hours a day and she was in a major city
One of the largest problems is that Iran's average income is so poor and the rising inflation and rising prices.
They didn't even have a battery or something which could store electricity while it came because the batteries were so expensive that one of them cost like 1 month of salary of average iranian.
Things were really tough, she told me about the education system and she had to recently move to govt school and she said that there were just not any books available.
She really disliked the regime. She was liberal and I asked her about hijab and she said that she was forced to wear in schools and that the only contacts that they usually did was with their brothers. The society is extremely strict to a point of no return.
The average Iranian person either barely scrapes by or was/is actively being suffered by authoritarian brutality from the ground reality of extremist islamist radicalism that their govt put them on.
Dude you got scammed by her deceit and married her for Green Card! Iranian diaspora, and in particular, women are very conniving and manipulative, and make up sad stories of how they'll be persecuted and oppressed in Iran, in order to get nerds and geeks to marry them.
> "extremist islamist radicalism" in Iran graduates more women than men from universities and produces more engineers and scientists annually, than the rest of Middle East combined.
Just go there, live there if you think that's true. It isn't it's the same argument that communist believers do about Venezuela, Cuba and North corea they will support those government but they won't move there or even ask the people there how they actually live.
Internet shut downs are really common in authoritarian countries. India used to shut the Internet down in Kashmir every other day, and in random states for random reasons some as seemingly trivial as high school students taking their board exams
Kashmir has such a bloody history with its kashmiri pandits and wars and even recent events that really shock its nation.
Kashmir has been the most unstable part of India and Article 370 although with flaws wanted to give Kashmir the stability it deserves but Kashmir had even its own flags and state etc. and thats why it got really messy and why the internet used to be shut down
Kashmir still requires people to specifically get a sim just for Kashmir. But you can get any large carrier to do such. There are even ways of generating e-sim and such, but there is genuinely lots of concerns and complaints in doing so and its very time consuming in a way but internet access has stabilized for the most part, you just require a special sim verification again to do such or perhaps buying a new sim specifically for kashmir but you can port the number as well but as I said, its really time consuming but possible to even do this without entering kashmir itself
I gave this a skim and a keyword search. Note that I'm not familiar with the matter.
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.
CIA and Amnesty's claims aside, focus on how social media fuels civil unrest, the real concern is foreign interference, Iran has been a target for a very long time
The US wants a regime change, that's a fact, Trump has been very vocal on the matter, and the NSA has the tools to do what ever it pleases on the internet (e.g., PRISM)
People can focus on a lot of things and make any arbitrary narrative emerge. My problem is exactly that I do not find this angle compelling so far, especially in light of the to-me-obvious alternative.
You started off by listing a bunch of things that did not pass my smell test (and you have now walked back on), then followed it up by what's essentially a scattershot of vague gesturings. Why would I focus on what you tell me to? Not only is any of these not compelling, I do not find you a reliable narrator so far at all.
You know what else fuels unrest - potentially not having basic needs met by society. There is a major economic crisis in Iran. There is an impending water crisis.
Social media is a new thing, but protests are old. People protested in despotic regimes prior to social media, and the triggering factors were basically the same as what is happening in Iran right now.
> Social media is a new thing, but protests are old. People protested in despotic regimes prior to social media, and the triggering factors were basically the same as what is happening in Iran right now.
In fact, Social medias can make the co-ordination of protests and other information rather quickly. Its one of the few benefits of social medias. Social media with all its flaws still helps protests
Matt Lakeman's recent "Notes on Afghanistan" actually covers this as he first-hand experienced a similar situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban had shut off the internet:
"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?"
Russia has been systematically shutting down the Internet for a long time now, to disrupt Ukrainian drones. The effects were very painful intially, especially re payment systems; people were encouraged to withdraw and carry cash. Now they are shifting more and more towards a "whitelisting" approach where a handful of services continue to function while everything else is turned off. As usual in Russia, people complain but adapt.
In recent years they have been trying to build a nation-wide Intranet that can function while international gateways are blocked. It is not perfect and every time they block the Internet, many issues happen but for the most port critical network services (such as payments) continue to function.
Seems like it would be an easy target for the government (or really anyone) to DOS, right? Presumably there's no good way for the nation-wide intranet to exclude government actors? I'm just thinking out loud; I'm glad to hear something is being done and I wish the Iranian people the best.
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?
Seems more likely that an authoritarian regime is suppressing protests. Unless there has been a troop buildup of which I am unaware, there's no imminent invasion.
marcosdumay's comment of here explained situation (giving it more attention)
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
> they can censor IPv4 when they want, but they don't know how to censor IPv6
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?
Seems like v4s zeroed out for a tiny bit too, but even now they are substantially lower than normal. Odd behavior, I don't know if its a precursor to an attack or some infra issue
for context: There is a call to action from an opposition leader for people to join the protests today. They normally cutoff internet infrastructure on purpose in these cases so people cannot communicate
An attack would probably undermine the protests. From a strategy perspective, probably the last thing Israel/USA want to do is give the Iranian regime a common enemy to rally around in the midst of a protest that might plausibly over throw the Iranian regime.
> From a strategy perspective, probably the last thing Israel/USA want to do is give the Iranian regime a common enemy to rally around in the midst of a protest that might plausibly over throw the Iranian regime.
They attacked Iran a little while ago. But now they are playing it cool like a cucumber?
There wasn't really any sort of plausible protest movement going on at the time, and the strikes did result in an upswell of regime support in the short term.
It was advantagous for them to strike when they did, so they did. Its much less advantageous in this moment, so it seems less likely they will now. Or at least not overtly.
> But now they are playing it cool like a cucumber?
Well yes. Countries tend to do things they think will make them more powerful. Sometimes that means blowing shit up, but that is not always the right play.
I just spent the better part of an hour, trying to track down anomalies, in one of my servers (Iran feeds us a lot of data), only to find DNS (IPv4) is not resolving. It worked fine, just a bit earlier.
Do people not realize how many American services block IPv6 only requests? This is an aggressively worded response. If Israel had done the same thing, people on here would applaud their cybersecurity.
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.
> 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?
That's what bridges are for.
Blocking is a cat and mouse game. It depends how heavy handed they are about it, but unless they totally cut off the external internet, its unlikely tor is 100% blocked, although it might be effectively blocked for most people.
Right, I should have written "IPv4 bridges" (which can be obfuscated and distributed out of band), not "IPv4 entry nodes": https://bridges.torproject.org/
But you can reach the IPv6 internet through those too.
How many conspiracy theories can people suggest instead of accepting that peaceful Iranians want to live and not be concerned that they won't have water or food to eat
I'd go with reticulum using also loras bridges. You can get data over multiple kilometers, route them to the internet easily, and with a much smarter routing scheme than meshtastic.
I'm an Iranian and this protest is very different because it's not about a specific government policy ... It's about the totality of the regime. Unfortunately, government has been following the same old brutal playbook by killing protesters and cutting off the Internet.
that would make it much more suspicious the protests are being orchestrated from outside by CIA/Mossad...
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
Two counterintuitive/surprising lessons I've come to appreciate:
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.
This is so much true! Indeed you can find absolutely everywhere absolutely incredible brilliant people in any area you want. The reason for the 1st and 3rd world is that is difficult to come by enough people and then coordinate them: is about critical mass and alignment.
About 2. also 100% true: intelligence/knowledge is totally independent of any other trait.
Right-- talent isn't that useful in a vacuum. You need economic and legal infrastructure that talented people can plug into to be productive. That infrastructure (a) takes a very long time to build and (b) depends on cultural norms that take a long time to evolve and don't find fertile ground everywhere.
I tend to agree with most of what you said regarding all governments and countries. What may not be widely known is that some authoritarian regimes have been accused by expatriates of identifying and indoctrinating intellectually gifted children into their state-sponsored organizations for use by these entities for unmentionable purposes. Of course, it's next to impossible to find written documentation, with specific details since detailed evidence in such states are understandably hard to retrieve. Most of these accounts arrive through word of mouth.
>What may not be widely known is that some authoritarian regimes have been accused by expatriates of identifying and indoctrinating intellectually gifted children into their state-sponsored organizations
Literally every country does this. It's just perspective whether an individual thinks it's okay or not.
If you're on the side doing the indoctrination, you probably agree with it, or are indoctrinated yourself. We all are to some degree.
That is true. But I refer to those parents that sent their children to other countries because they knew the state or gov would not have allowed them to prevent the indoctrination of their children. But yes, we all are to some degree, unfortunately.
Counter-intuitive? The primary motivation for fretting about Brain Drain (whether it is true or not is secondary) is because the people who fret about it are educated professionals, precisely the people who are prone to build their identity around the idea that society thrives and succumbs based on their own existence.
The same people who have unironically latched onto the idea of Meritocracy. A concept/idea that was literally conceived as a parody.
IDK for sure, but might be harder to maintain, monitor, and block.
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.
Otoh, ipv6 address assignment tends to be much more contiguous. My (small) residential ISP has one v6 prefix but several v4 prefixes. If you block the whole prefix for services you don't like, it's far less prefixes for v6.
But, it is a new skill, and you can turn off v6 at small cost if you're already ok with heavily restricting v4.
Additionally to the much larger IP space, you also have larger headers and additionally extension headers which make deep packet inspection computationally much more expensive if you consider the scale
>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.
no its not, its easier to block IPv6 ranges than IPv4 ones.
if someone want be block my ISP, they only need a single /32 rule with v6.
A lot of the Starlink and other contraband uplinks are using ipv6, allowing connectivity for people the regime doesn't want to have contact with the rest of the world. They don't want the revolution broadcast or popularized.
Because v6 IPs are cheap, expendable and routing it over encrypted tunnels does not look suspicious. Anyone can buy a block and with little help announce them from multiple locations including home, mobile, uni wifi, and route further from there.
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.
No it isn't. Nobody is blocking ranges as they roll in, they're blocking whole ASNs at once. That's just as trivial with v6 as v4, actually v6 can be simpler because ISPs tend to have fewer large blocks in v6land.
There are plenty of providers that when you BYOIP, they will broadcast out of their ASN, I know Azure does, Google appears to, no clue on AWS. Plenty of colo providers including $LastCompanyProvider will fold your IP block under their ASN as well. That's how it worked at last job.
Sure, Iran government may just decide to block that specific ASN but if it's they want to remain somewhat on the internet, they are stuck with "Smack entire broad ASNs and lose large chucks of internet" or "Block specific IP spaces."
Is this an attempt at a joke, or do you actually seriously believe a country capable of enriching uranium isn't capable of hiring competent network engineers?
Reading through their comment history, it doesn't seem like a good-faith comment. Not sure what they thought HN stood to gain from their contribution here.
Reading through their comment history, it doesn't seem like a good-faith comment. Not sure what they thought HN stood to gain from their contribution here.
Stuxnet v2? Speculation I know, but wow, IPv4 came back up, but IPv6 is completely out, looks like 48 million devices? Compared to IPv4's 47 thousand (wow that's insane).
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.
Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it [1] to no avail. Using these terminals activists and journalists continue to upload videos of demonstrations to social media which has enabled analyses that show demonstrations are very wide spread [2] and continue to grow.
[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink....
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre28d2j2zxo
Probably the goal of the blackouts is to hinder organizing on social media, discord, whatsapp, etc, not to prevent news getting out.
Isn't it possible to jam the starlink receiver?
Yes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.
The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.
Bouncing signals off of the ionosphere is most definitely not an option here. The bandwidth of the signals that Starlink needs in order to provide service are far wider than the range of frequencies that bounce off any layer of the ionosphere. If you could get a 10GHz signal to bounce off of the F layer, you'd have a lot of very excited amateur radio operators who would start using that instead of the moon as their reflector.
Thanks for your comment, I know the ionosphere is used in Electronic Warfare but I didn't realize it was so limited in frequency.
Is there really is no way to reflect signals off the ionosphere out of phase so after reflecting they interfere into a higher frequency?
Just to add more details.
Beamforming is essentially yet another way to achieve gain, just like one does with a directional antenna. The Starlink terminal achieves a gain of roughly 33 dB, which means it talks (and also listens) in the peak direction at power levels that are around 2000x higher than what one would achieve with isotropic antennas. 2000x sounds like a lot, but it is actually not impossible to reach. Consumer electronics sends at most a few Watts of RF power, but serious jammers of the type used by militaries can run kilowatts. If you consider the peak power used for brief moments of time then you can get as high as megawatts - the famous AWACS aircraft briefly flash half a continent at somewhere around 1 MW, with average TX power of ~single digit kilowatt.
This assumes you're jamming very close to the dish. The trouble with jamming is you have to deal with the inverse square law so you really can't deny very much area. If they have a fleet of hundreds of high power modern directional jammers they could degrade this or other networks, but they're just not going to have that kind of sophistication.
Oh, I was thinking of jamming the receivers of the satellites. Should have written it explicitly, it is indeed not clear.
Huge idiot here with an honest question: with starlink, could a rogue actor just point a bunch of high-powered lasers at the satellites and brick them?
In short, likely no(unless the satellites are really sensitive). Otherwise lasers would have negated the fear of ICBMs long ago.
Because the atmosphere absorbs a lot of energy of the laser beam and focusing the laser beam to such a distant target is not easy. So you cannot just use some high powered lasers, as it would be just a bright spot at most. It would be different, if the laser would be space based, but that is out of reach of Iran's capabilities. They might have anti satellite rockets, but using them against US property in space would create other problems for them.
Cheaper to launch a barrel of metal trash to the Starlink orbits. Or a few barrels. Iran has rockets for that.
There are 9400 active Starlink satellites & they can be launched 28 at a time on a partially reusable rocket. The orbit they operate on is largely self cleaning due to being quite low. The satellites operate in many planes and bands + form a mesh network with laster interconnects.
Sure, if you want to try that and bankrupt Iran even more via its militarry rocket program, you can do that and maybe destray a handfull satellites, provided you can actually hit them and the rocket/s does not fail. And you might even get a nice casus belli as a free extra.
you might be able to hit one but it'd be pretty impressive, like firing a bullet and hitting someone in another country impressive
I'm not a rocket scientist, but I guess even a single lunch in the retrograde direction should be enough. You lunch a box of ball bearings with a plastic explosive to spread them out, and then just wait. The cloud will pass over Iran every 12h or and will stay in orbit for quite a few weeks, since the orbit is even higher than ISS reboosting once a month, and balls are highly aerodynamic compared to the Starlink flat sails. The cloud won't be very big, but it will repeatedly swipe through quite a lot intersecting prograde orbits. I guess the chance would be quite high. Iran can also split payload into smaller boxes and "deploy" then in sequence while the second stage is firing, then detonate them, to spread out even more.
Possible, yes, but the Iranian government almost certainly isn't capable of doing so, much less across the entire country.
Even Russians don't seem to be able to jam Starlink on the Ukrainian battlefields.
China, maybe.
Multibeam too, right?
>targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam
And good luck targeting enough Starlink satellites...
I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.
> Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming.
Musk proved quite good at blocking Ukrainian Starlink access too, supporting Russia.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66752264
The Russians are themselves heavy users of starlink.
Can you provide a source for this claim?
Not the person you asked, but here's a couple of sources that back that claim:
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-starlink-ukraine-gur-elon-mu...
https://kyivindependent.com/nearly-half-of-usaid-starlink-te...
Also, as I understand it, a big part of the reason USAID was fed "into the woodchipper" was because they were investigating SpaceX over Russian use of Starlink - see https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-enemy-usaid-was-investigating...
>Also, as I understand it, a big part of the reason USAID was fed "into the woodchipper" was because they were investigating SpaceX over Russian use of Starlink - see https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-enemy-usaid-was-investigating...
The article you linked contains literally nothing supporting your accusation. Instead, it talks about an investigation targeting the aid recipient:
>The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine. Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals
Thx for posting the USAID article. The brazenness of it all is astonishing.
Thank God for the incompetence. It's like we're doing "Clown Show Mussolini".
Here, have a video of the russian cavalry with a Starlink attached to a horse. Yes, you have read that right. 2026 btw. https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1q7i... Also: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/01/08/russia-sat...
Start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
Scroll down to Russian use.
Starlink receivers have been found in use in drones by both sides in the war.
There's a lot of Open Source intel on this.
I guess it is to a degree unavoidable - ukrainian units are using a lot of crowdfunded starlink terminals on the front, so even if you geo fenced usage only to the virtual cells outside of Russia controlled territory, you would also disable ukrainian sets at the front. So if Russians smuggle sets from other countries, they might not be really easy to tell from the "good" sets crowdsourced by the ukrainians and used at the front.
As for use in long range strike UAVs I'm sure ukrainian units have specially registered units that will work anywhere but again, Russian long range kamikaze drones you have a smuggled unit that only activates once on ukrainian territory and be used for terminal guidance or reconnaissance. By the time the system spots a new terminal moving quickly in the wrong place the thing would have rammed into a civilian building somewhere.
It doesnt matter where starlink terminals came from, all end up registered with Ukrainian MOD. Btw Poland pays subscription on ~50K of those.
Just the latest one
https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/2009240533944947050
Twitter is a good source for this sort of evidence. Its Musk, all the way down.
Yes, with the caveat that you'll need decent line of sight to it.
I've got to think it's easy to find starlink receivers--I know they use a directed beam but they must give off a bunch of lateral noise, right? Or does Starlink use the same frequency bands as other common equipment such that it would be difficult to distinguish starlink signals from others? If the government was motivated they could surely start finding these receivers, right?
Well the better your beam is directed, the less lateral noise there is.
A simple 3 element yagi has <1% of the power to the sides. It has more of the power straight behind it, but still 1% or so of the main lobe.
Is 1% still quite a lot louder than other things in the same band?
From what I read, the Russians were targeting Starlink terminals based on the built-in wifi access point not the Starlink frequencies.
I read the satellite has an omnidirectional antenna?
Destroy the satellites? I mean all that have to do is screw up the trajectory of some of the satellites to cause exponential collisions...
Iran does not have that capability. But that would also be an act of war.
Flinging spacejunk pollution into orbit is extremely simple if you have rockets.
Iran has lots of rockets.
Iran also has basically zero of their own satellites in orbit that they care about.
Spacejunk is a highly asymmetric tactic.
They don't have that many rockets that are capable of orbital flight let alone an ASAT capability.
Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car, except Both cars are invisible most of the time. They’re moving 17,000 mph. The dart has no steering wheel only tiny nudges. If you miss by a few feet, you miss by miles.
Countries that can do this reliably aren’t showing off missiles they’re showing off navigation, sensors, computing. The weapon is the least impressive part.
> Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car
Um no. Imagine rendering a highway unusable by driving a semitruck full of tire spikes down it and dumping them out the back.
No precision required.
Um, no - if you do this on suborbital trajectory you totally obliterate a bunch of empty space for the <10 minutes until all your garbage falls back.
If you actually manage to make it into an orbit (with a much much bigger and much more expensive rocket) you will most likely do the same (eg. not hitting the intended satellite) with the added bonus of littering random orbits over time and hitting random satellites.
And if you want to say "they will deny orbit for everyone!" - well, good luck without far too many orbital class rockets for anyone of their size to have.
Not to mention Starlink orbits being (as alterady state so low they are self-cleaning), GPS orbits being far too high to even reach, let alone to saturate with garbage & same for GEO sats.
they do have satellites. I'm less sure about how much they care about them - but they are not cheap
That's my point. They have so few that sacrificing them would be irrelevant.
No, it wouldn’t be an act of war, it would be “a military operation”.
Ah yes, Kessler's space shredder, something to be feared by all satellites!
It appears that we are very close to an unstoppable runaway process of collisions in space. On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets after ruining this one. On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS, it would be chaos if that were to disappear...
> On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets
Kessler syndrome has little to no effect on trajectories only briefly transiting any given orbital shell. The collision probability of anything going straight "up"/"out" is negligible.
> On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS
GPS is in MEO, Starlink is in LEO. There's absolutely no chance any material will be propelled up to MEO via a series of even very unlucky LEO collisions, as far as I know.
Starlinks are in self cleaning orbits & are actually being moved even lower due to solar minimum & better capacity:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/spacex-lo...
And any weaponized junk schrapnel a DiY iranian ASAP missile would deploy would be sub-orbital and would all come down in a couple minutes.
GPS is in geosynchronous orbit, insanely far from the Earth's surface.
You can't get chain-reaction collisions to happen at such an outrageously high orbit. That amount of mass you'd have to put into orbit is just insane. It's like trying to crash the moon.
Nitpick, GPS is about halfway to geosync. Your point stands.
> social media which has enabled analyses
Social media is such a narrow lens that I would be cautious accepting that analysis at face value.
Where are the ground stations Iranian traffic is using?
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.
My starlink in Afghanistan downlinks in Sofia.
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.
> 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.
You really think iran is going to bomb turkey (a nato country) over this?
No, because they arent trying to prevent all communication with the outside world, they are trying to prevent organisation within their country. Leaving 0.1% of users online is acceptable.
Now if they actually did want to censor the internet, Suicide McBombervest or a missile or something would find that ground station. They simply dont give a shit.
yes
They are almost completely inaccessible to the average Iranian. A friend of mine who has come a long way to fight Iranian censorship told me that they essentially don't exist.
There are ~100,000 users, about 0.1% of the population: https://www.newsweek.com/starlink-usage-iran-skyrockets-brea...
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.
How are there so many users, see my other comment but i will ask here as well but starlink's american company and sanctioned iran so how do the details really work?
And how do starlink recievers enter the country in the first place?
This is good that there is still a way to get censorship resistance even after all this perhaps joining it with other protocols which can work via bluetooth,wifi etc. and are more secure connecting to something like this, a secure internet access point could be developed but I don't know too much about it.
Tools to evade state surveillance and censorship are explicitly exempted from US sanctions against Iran.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-expands-sanctions-exception...
As long as starlink isn't forced to geofence an area, anyone can buy a terminal anywhere and smuggle it in as any other drug or contraband. The mini's are about the same size as a laptop
Black market. We had satellite dishes in Eastern Europe during communism. Bribe some people, shell out some insane amounts of cash and it can be done.
If black market's the only reason that activism/journalism/outside contact is even possible in the country
It doesn't seem much of a plan (very sadly, I wish there was) which could be uncensored that much, some other comment pointed this point too but if black market's the case, then they would just hide whoever is using this
They would also most likely be very less in amount, journalists etc.
But the average person, they are stuck without proper internet
I thought that there are materials which can build starlink and the only thing then you need is just subscription or something
It's just sad to see that black market is the only way.
As someone who grew up in late Communist Czechoslovakia, you underestimate the black market. Its capabilities were only comparable to the Secret Police itself (StB in our case).
People in unfree conditions are crafty. Same with information. Suppressed information spreads using underground channels quite quickly.
For example, we knew almost immediately that there was some nuclear disaster in Ukraine even though the official channels didn't say anything for days.
Stop worrying. You don't have to liberate everyone. The Iranian regime will screw itself up by attacking Israel.
It's usually smuggled parts if they're small enough. Someone outside of the country usually makes the subscription and they get paid somehow.
Possibly the number of users is even larger, if people can share a terminal. Wifi 802.11s Mesh with Batman routing scales very well to huge sizes.
This is already assuming terminal and account sharing. I meant to link this story, the original source: https://www.iranintl.com/en/202501060034. The stat is based on 30,000 unique users. I don't know how many actual terminals there are, probably a few thousand.
They must be smuggled inside the country and the dictatorship can say anything they want and charge if they get caught so they must be very few in numbers
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 receivers are actually very complicated. They make use of a bunch of high-end FPGAs and a bunch of other expensive and uncommon components. See this teardown: https://youtu.be/h6MfM8EFkGg?si=m-sN6UW4nh8_HzPR.
Yes, there are NGOs and organizations that sponsor these and pay for them. Here is an example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/12/18/inside-...
Forbes asking me to pay
Elevate Your Journey Invest in your success with unlimited access to trusted, in-depth journalism for less than $1/week. Become a member today to continue.
here's an web.archive.org link if anyone's interested which works
https://web.archive.org/web/20250301050041/https://www.forbe...
Edit: WTF forbes still gives me a popup even in archive, strange, but its less restrictive overall in the web archive version so I am able to still copy and read the version
No problem using uBO and FF
> 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?
Starlink uses a pretty sophisticated phased array antenna, so not something you can easily build in your garage.
I wonder how easy is it to get contraband into the country. The country's huge, and with the current govt not being the most popular or financially well off, I guess there are quite a few border officers willing to make some extra money.
Starlink receivers aren't built out of common readily available components. It's fancy RF stuff.
Those who have one surely keep that fact secret.
in 2019 internet shutdown happened just before crackdown on protests
The discussion about Starlink is interesting, but with only ~0.1% of the population having access, the real story is the 99.9% who are cut off right now. The asymmetry between those who can broadcast to the world and those who can't is staggering — and even among that 0.1%, many are too afraid to broadcast anything, knowing the risks.
The key is that the 99% can transfer data and such internally to the country; the 0.1% can then leak it out.
How effectively can they share data domestically during blackouts?
Carrier pigeons.
And hamsters.
Don't underestimate the hamsters.
Especially ones in a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
But seriously?
There are mesh networks, but even so IPv4 isn't down, and people can share files p2p.
Theoretically this is true, but in practice it's not. Most p2p services rely on the global internet in some way. The BitTorrent DHT, for example, is unlikely so self-heal in the event of a completely inaccessible global internet.
Things like HolePunch have a lot of potential here, but you'd need an Iran-only DHT, and it's just not deployed at scale.
but, regrettably, at a trickle
Can't wait for a certain dictator to get a cellmate, so that our Persian and Kurdish friends can have freedom, including free unrestricted internet access.
And for fellow HN users from there, here's some great stuff: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://bitchat.free/
Sure, a US invasion of Iran would undoubtedly lead to good things. And how can you say the Kurds are friends of the USA (I'm presuming you mean friends of the USA) given how many times they've been abandoned?
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.
In Iran they have had several police forces join the protestors at this point. Hopefully its a theme that continues and includes the military.
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.
You also forget how panama Germany, Japan, South Korea are better now after removing their authoritarian regimes.
You're conveniently leaving out the other 80% of cases, which were failures.
Unfortunately, that was 75+ years ago and all the more recent examples were disasters as of my knowledge.
Panama was on 1989 and Venezuela situation it's closer to that, than the middle East countries, We are united in this, more than 80% are against the current government and we even voted him out. There is not religious divide as it happens in those countries, even by ethnicity most people are just mixed.
> a US invasion of Iran would undoubtedly lead to good things.
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.
Not sure if you read the full parent comment, but they are agreeing with you in case you didn't realize.
Even as we speak Kurds are getting attacked near Aleppo by US-backed ex-Al-Qaeda president of Syria.
Sadly for the Kurds I’d say they are still pretty good friends to the US, as poorly as it’s been reciprocated.
As for the rest of what you said, no notes.
All correct. But something needs to be frontloaded.
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.
More likely Asad will get another buddy to play Sounter Strike with - both he and Yanukovich must be bored to death by now in 2 people.
how does Yggdrasil work if ipv6 is dead?
Yggdrasil uses exclusively IPv6 for routing on its own overlay network, but not on the Internet. See https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/faq.html#does-yggdrasil-...
aha! Thanks
It forms its own IPv6 network separate from the internet. It can peer over any IPv4 or IPv6 network, including the internet, LAN, or PTP.
Yes, both Venezuela and (in your hypothetical) Iran would certainly be better and not worse after US intervention. How could they not, with such a great track record (Iraq, Lybia, Chile, Guatemala,...)!
The Kurdish separatists and militants allied with the wrong country and they have very little chance of a state of their own.
Iranians though, sure, things can change with or without the current govt
>The Kurdish separatists and militants allied with the wrong country
Which country is that? Last I checked, the Kurds were helping out the US a couple of years ago and got absolutely screwed.
MbS? MbZ?
Like when the US removed Saddam?
How did that wirk out?
You need more of a plan than just get rid of a dictator.
It worked out poorly for America — we got stuck in a long expensive war that we got basically nothing from — but for the average Iraqi? I'd much rather be an Iraqi citizen than an Iranian one, and that wouldn't have been true in the 90s. Saddam was pretty evil — and a bad leader. Iraq's GDP per capita is 6x higher today than it was in 2002, a year before the invasion.
It worked out pretty poorly for the average Iraqi. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed (some estimates put it at around 1 million), and millions of people became refugees.
Citing the relative GDP per capita number is reductive and doesn’t give a good picture of the average person’s life.
The GDP should be banned as a metric for being a life quality proxy, it's insane how so many people still refer to it although proven to neglect so many parts of what counts into LQ. To OP: Go check out Doughnut Economics - the book does a good job clearing up economical fallacies & mismodelling of such things.
The whole mess led to ISIS and they claim victims in multiple countries.
This is a pretty wild counter-factual. Reminds me of a report I saw about a hipster cafe existing in Baghdad 2025 as proof of success of the US invasion. What would the alternative have been? How do you factor in the loss of life? I suppose the real answer is asking Iraqis...
Iran can end up in a much more dire state. It can end up another Syria / Libya.. or worse another aggressive group like Taliban can take hold of the central government.
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.
We have a pro this time
Who?
Professional means getting payed
I'm also curious about LoRA / sneakernet applications. Have those been widely used in cases of censorship?
Lora is fine if you want to send a very short message. Its not useful for much else.
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.
There are real-world examples of non-internet networks being created in authoritarian regimes. One example I've read about is in Cuba [1] but I presume there are others.
[1] https://restofworld.org/2020/the-life-and-death-of-snet-hava...
Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve curious if there are sneakernet things for communicating messages between passing mobile devices? Something that uses exist hardware and is actually used in practice.
There are things like Briar, Scuttlebutt, Berty, Serval, probably more I don't know of.
Government enacted shut down due to protests. I'd like to hear more about how they actually do this. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-cutting-internet-amid-dead...
There's no single mechanism. Iran's internet is diverse at the edge, and bottlenecked at the international gateway.
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).
> 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.
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.
The term you're looking for is "dns tunneling".
You might then enjoy this story that was on the front page a couple of days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505352
Most likely they just go to the head of the ISP (I bet there's only one) and say turn the internet off or else.
Yep, everything connecting to the Internet goes through the TIC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunication_Infrastructu...
Ministry of Information is a name with a certain feel
I probably spent far too much time looking into why they'd set themselves up with that kind of name... but it just nerd sniped me too hard to pass up.
Translation tools claim (I don't know enough to verify) a literal translation is "Ministry of Communications and Information Technology". I.e. they handle telecoms & IT, or "communications technology and information technology" if fully expanded.
But why bother switching it around to "Ministry of Information and Communications Technology" then? Apparently because that's what the order we call it in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communications... which surprised me because I didn't even know that was a term and I've only ever worked in the IT and telecoms jobs - WHTMA (We Have Too Many Acronyms).
You assume threats need to be made.
One doesn't get to be the head of a business in a country like Iran without being a True Believer.
I doubt there are many true believers. Most of the top brass are probably driven from sf interest. But loyalty is beyond doubt. At least until the regime is winning
It's enough to be a True Obeyer.
Iran is kind of like russia thinking about it.
Russia's trying to censor some shit too by having outside ipv4 or something (dont know what its called) blocked and basically made a large intranet
But people could still buy vps and make it work somehow
So iran and russia are similar in that sense and this kinda puts things more into balance but I am sure that % of true believers/doing for self interest might vary or something
they don't need to say the or else part since they control the whole country including the ISP.
> Government enacted shut down due to protests
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...
Wow its so nice this excuse just happens to shut down the internet when an astronomically unpopular regime faces vast protests after years of economic and political mismanagement
Apparently a lot of people in the west too are assuming that these protests are fueled by the west. At least that's the most likely explanation for why so many left leaning youth are not supporting Iranians while supporting Palestine. Apparently the fight is not about freedom but about (perceived) whiteness vs non-whiteness
These people treat geopolitics as if they are watching an avengers movie.
>Apparently the fight is not about freedom but about (perceived) whiteness vs non-whiteness
But the Iranians are white. The name Iran is literally derived from "Aryan".
I believe that was the point they were making.
While I don't think they're right that Iran is ignored because Iranian protesters and the Iranian government are both perceived as white by Americans (or both non-white, depending on the person), it's undeniable that they use the perceived non-whiteness of Palestinians and perceived whiteness of Israelis as rhetorical ammunition.
This rhetorical device is a rather effective as Americans have a tendency to view everything through their own lens of "race"/color so casting the conflict as white people oppressing non-white people because they are non-white is a powerful argument that is easily understood by Americans.
That said, personally, I think Iran is ignored more because Palestine is sucking all the air out of the room than anything else, especially with all the graphic videos/photos. Sudan on the other hand... there's really no excuse for ignoring that.
>Personally, I think Iran is ignored more because Palestine is sucking all the air out of the room than anything else, especially with all the graphic videos/photos.
>Sudan on the other hand... there's really no excuse for ignoring that.
Palestine has the focus because America tax dollars most directly fuel the conflict and it is the most one-sided.
Iran is an internal conflict and Sudan is a civil war - neither of which are as directly funded by the US. Also neither has a perceived clear solution. In the case of Israel, the US should have significant leverage that it does not have in those other conflicts.
Aryan does not equal white.
Definitions of race are very culturally dependent. A few decades ago South Asians were regarded as caucasian (I have an American encyclopedia published in the 1950s that says so), a century earlier so were some East Africans (Somalis IIRC). The current western definition of white does not include them.
Similarly the current American definition of black includes people most of the rest of the world would not consider black - we sometimes have to be told that some people identify as "black" (what Americans call passing as white).
Yeah of course none of this makes sense. And yet it all has real world consequences. It's all incredibly partisan. If one just manages to take a step back and watch this dynamic from outside it all seems so weird: the islamist Iran backs Hamas, Hamas are Palestinians, Palestinians are victimized by Jews, Jews have money, capitalists have money, america is capitalist, america is imperialist, ergo .... Islamist Iran is against capitalist imperialism. The protests are against islamist Iran ergo they are against the fight against capitalist imperialism and thus they don't deserve solidarity, or something like this.
I would really love to hear from somebody who is not supporting the Iran protests to honestly tell me if I misrepresented their position and in which way
Iran comes from the word rougly translating to the word noble, and noble in sanskrit translates to the word Arya
Aryans aren't necessarily white or black especially in the sanskrit context of things.
No, they're just better educated about Iran than are you.
Iran provides substantial food, fuel, education and healthcare subsidies to the average citizen and has a very effective state bureaucracy which functions independent of political appointees. Pensioners' checks are issued regularly and social services are delivered by charitable "Bonyads", which are run by local mosques, which don't report to any government ministries.
My ex was iranian and we frequently talked about iran and you are so wrong.
She had frequent black outs with complete electricity downage for many hours a day and she was in a major city
One of the largest problems is that Iran's average income is so poor and the rising inflation and rising prices.
They didn't even have a battery or something which could store electricity while it came because the batteries were so expensive that one of them cost like 1 month of salary of average iranian.
Things were really tough, she told me about the education system and she had to recently move to govt school and she said that there were just not any books available.
She really disliked the regime. She was liberal and I asked her about hijab and she said that she was forced to wear in schools and that the only contacts that they usually did was with their brothers. The society is extremely strict to a point of no return.
The average Iranian person either barely scrapes by or was/is actively being suffered by authoritarian brutality from the ground reality of extremist islamist radicalism that their govt put them on.
> my ex was Iranian...
Dude you got scammed by her deceit and married her for Green Card! Iranian diaspora, and in particular, women are very conniving and manipulative, and make up sad stories of how they'll be persecuted and oppressed in Iran, in order to get nerds and geeks to marry them.
> "extremist islamist radicalism" in Iran graduates more women than men from universities and produces more engineers and scientists annually, than the rest of Middle East combined.
Iran GDP (PPP) ~ $2T (same as Australia) about 1% of world economy GDP/cap (PPP) ~ $22K, (twice as much as India) which puts Iran in top 25 economies and an upper-middle income country! https://www.imf.org/en/countries/irn#countrydata https://www.imf.org/en/countries/aus
Just go there, live there if you think that's true. It isn't it's the same argument that communist believers do about Venezuela, Cuba and North corea they will support those government but they won't move there or even ask the people there how they actually live.
Internet shut downs are really common in authoritarian countries. India used to shut the Internet down in Kashmir every other day, and in random states for random reasons some as seemingly trivial as high school students taking their board exams
Kashmir has such a bloody history with its kashmiri pandits and wars and even recent events that really shock its nation.
Kashmir has been the most unstable part of India and Article 370 although with flaws wanted to give Kashmir the stability it deserves but Kashmir had even its own flags and state etc. and thats why it got really messy and why the internet used to be shut down
Kashmir still requires people to specifically get a sim just for Kashmir. But you can get any large carrier to do such. There are even ways of generating e-sim and such, but there is genuinely lots of concerns and complaints in doing so and its very time consuming in a way but internet access has stabilized for the most part, you just require a special sim verification again to do such or perhaps buying a new sim specifically for kashmir but you can port the number as well but as I said, its really time consuming but possible to even do this without entering kashmir itself
I gave this a skim and a keyword search. Note that I'm not familiar with the matter.
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.
CIA and Amnesty's claims aside, focus on how social media fuels civil unrest, the real concern is foreign interference, Iran has been a target for a very long time
The US wants a regime change, that's a fact, Trump has been very vocal on the matter, and the NSA has the tools to do what ever it pleases on the internet (e.g., PRISM)
People can focus on a lot of things and make any arbitrary narrative emerge. My problem is exactly that I do not find this angle compelling so far, especially in light of the to-me-obvious alternative.
You started off by listing a bunch of things that did not pass my smell test (and you have now walked back on), then followed it up by what's essentially a scattershot of vague gesturings. Why would I focus on what you tell me to? Not only is any of these not compelling, I do not find you a reliable narrator so far at all.
You know what else fuels unrest - potentially not having basic needs met by society. There is a major economic crisis in Iran. There is an impending water crisis.
Social media is a new thing, but protests are old. People protested in despotic regimes prior to social media, and the triggering factors were basically the same as what is happening in Iran right now.
> Social media is a new thing, but protests are old. People protested in despotic regimes prior to social media, and the triggering factors were basically the same as what is happening in Iran right now.
In fact, Social medias can make the co-ordination of protests and other information rather quickly. Its one of the few benefits of social medias. Social media with all its flaws still helps protests
TikTok playbook: if a foreign power controls an influential platform, it's a national security threat, if the US controls it, it's just social media
Pretty sure the CIA is perfectly capable of doing that without the internet.
If anything its easier to spread rumours without the internet to let people compare notes
or alternatively to shutdown information flowing out just before the killing begins
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2020/11/iran...
Map of protests:
https://pouyaii.github.io/Iran/
Can you please re-share this as a separate link? It deserves it's own attention
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547303
There was a recent post containing a (different) map of the protests that was flagged, but here goes
Why was it flagged? What the fuck?
Mods this is not okay. Don't abuse your power flagging posts about maps of protests. This is not okay.
The mods here seem to definitely have an agenda… but they can’t silence us
Not specific to this IPv6 event, but I was wondering what happens to public services during these Internet shutdowns?
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?
Matt Lakeman's recent "Notes on Afghanistan" actually covers this as he first-hand experienced a similar situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban had shut off the internet:
"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?"
https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/#
Russia has been systematically shutting down the Internet for a long time now, to disrupt Ukrainian drones. The effects were very painful intially, especially re payment systems; people were encouraged to withdraw and carry cash. Now they are shifting more and more towards a "whitelisting" approach where a handful of services continue to function while everything else is turned off. As usual in Russia, people complain but adapt.
Ironically, their long history of shutoff and censorship probably mean they're more resilient to stuff like this.
In recent years they have been trying to build a nation-wide Intranet that can function while international gateways are blocked. It is not perfect and every time they block the Internet, many issues happen but for the most port critical network services (such as payments) continue to function.
Seems like it would be an easy target for the government (or really anyone) to DOS, right? Presumably there's no good way for the nation-wide intranet to exclude government actors? I'm just thinking out loud; I'm glad to hear something is being done and I wish the Iranian people the best.
I remember reading about how Venezuela had an internet blackout preceding US attack, presumably the blackout was an attack by US "cyber". Ah, here we are. https://securitybrief.co.uk/story/us-cyber-attack-on-venezue...
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?
Seems more likely that an authoritarian regime is suppressing protests. Unless there has been a troop buildup of which I am unaware, there's no imminent invasion.
Iran has shut down the internet nationwide several times before, this is nothing new when there are protests.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538001
marcosdumay's comment of here explained situation (giving it more attention)
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
> they can censor IPv4 when they want, but they don't know how to censor IPv6
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?
Just DPI hardware not supporting IPv6.
Most of what's happening in the word can be boiled down to either someone craving power, or someone in power desperately struggling to hold on to it.
It depends on how they do it, but you can shut down the router ports that connect to the rest of the world easily if they want.
Internet participation is voluntary between countries.
Seems like v4s zeroed out for a tiny bit too, but even now they are substantially lower than normal. Odd behavior, I don't know if its a precursor to an attack or some infra issue
for context: There is a call to action from an opposition leader for people to join the protests today. They normally cutoff internet infrastructure on purpose in these cases so people cannot communicate
Probably more likely a internet blackout to counter the protests.
Yeah I am suprised everyone thinks this is necessarily internal. Could equally be related to IL/USA incoming aggression.
I'd at least keep an open mind for a while.
An attack would probably undermine the protests. From a strategy perspective, probably the last thing Israel/USA want to do is give the Iranian regime a common enemy to rally around in the midst of a protest that might plausibly over throw the Iranian regime.
> From a strategy perspective, probably the last thing Israel/USA want to do is give the Iranian regime a common enemy to rally around in the midst of a protest that might plausibly over throw the Iranian regime.
They attacked Iran a little while ago. But now they are playing it cool like a cucumber?
There wasn't really any sort of plausible protest movement going on at the time, and the strikes did result in an upswell of regime support in the short term.
It was advantagous for them to strike when they did, so they did. Its much less advantageous in this moment, so it seems less likely they will now. Or at least not overtly.
> But now they are playing it cool like a cucumber?
Well yes. Countries tend to do things they think will make them more powerful. Sometimes that means blowing shit up, but that is not always the right play.
For IPv4 the graph does not start at zero, but at around 45K.
Correct, click the "Min/Max scale" toggle to get a zero-based graph that shows the v4 reduction in context.
Considering the recent events going on, it’s definitely sus.
I just spent the better part of an hour, trying to track down anomalies, in one of my servers (Iran feeds us a lot of data), only to find DNS (IPv4) is not resolving. It worked fine, just a bit earlier.
Ah, well...
I created a comment in here but does this mean that you cant do something like dns tunneling in iran?
Oh. Looks like they're not announcing V4 networks as well now.
Do people not realize how many American services block IPv6 only requests? This is an aggressively worded response. If Israel had done the same thing, people on here would applaud their cybersecurity.
Quick question but would tor work in this case?
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.
Tor can reach IPv6 destinations through IPv4 entry nodes, if that's what your asking.
IPv4 is sanctioned/heavily restricted in iran as well, I mean very high filtering
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?
> 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?
That's what bridges are for.
Blocking is a cat and mouse game. It depends how heavy handed they are about it, but unless they totally cut off the external internet, its unlikely tor is 100% blocked, although it might be effectively blocked for most people.
Tor is used relatively little in Iran - https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-country.html...
Other tools are much, much more popular, such as Psiphon, Lantern, MahsaNG, etc.
yes, my ex gf from iran also used Psiphon, I didn't trust psiphon that much but it seems that its decently well
In the end I had suggested her protonvpn as psiphon had some issues.
How does Psiphon work and how does it compare with protonvpn? I still trust protonvpn (which has free access as well) more than Psiphon fwiw.
Right, I should have written "IPv4 bridges" (which can be obfuscated and distributed out of band), not "IPv4 entry nodes": https://bridges.torproject.org/
But you can reach the IPv6 internet through those too.
How many conspiracy theories can people suggest instead of accepting that peaceful Iranians want to live and not be concerned that they won't have water or food to eat
Its for times like this briar or similar applications are super useful. Also memory sticks. To bad distributing is not to simple.
briar leaks some metadata from what I've heard (unconfirmed). Meshtastic seems a better alternative
I'd go with reticulum using also loras bridges. You can get data over multiple kilometers, route them to the internet easily, and with a much smarter routing scheme than meshtastic.
https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/
Free Iran from the terrorists
Teredo/Miredo would work on top of IPV4.
I'm an Iranian and this protest is very different because it's not about a specific government policy ... It's about the totality of the regime. Unfortunately, government has been following the same old brutal playbook by killing protesters and cutting off the Internet.
that would make it much more suspicious the protests are being orchestrated from outside by CIA/Mossad...
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
> The "regime" is a republic with regularly held presidential (8 presidents in 45 years) and parliamentary elections.
I'd think the regime thing refers to the Supreme Leader of 36 years and his Guardian Council, no?
I would like people not to get killed when they protest
I would like the internet not to get shut down during the protest
Am I asking too much?
No, it's just exactly what CIA/Mossad are asking for, too - you're in good company
You think I am CIA/Mossad for asking people not to get killed when they protest? I expected HN community to be better. Shame.
Can you blame us? We just want to protect you Persians from a constitutional monarchy /s
I sometimes feel like declaring a fatwa on IPv6 too, to be fair
We live in interesting times
I wish interesting times would come without the castrated internet
Soon free Coca-Cola for Iran.
A communications disruption could mean only one thing...
No competent network engineer wants to work in Iran, so government doesn't know how to block v6 properly. End result: just get rid of it entirely!
Two counterintuitive/surprising lessons I've come to appreciate:
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.
This is so much true! Indeed you can find absolutely everywhere absolutely incredible brilliant people in any area you want. The reason for the 1st and 3rd world is that is difficult to come by enough people and then coordinate them: is about critical mass and alignment.
About 2. also 100% true: intelligence/knowledge is totally independent of any other trait.
Right-- talent isn't that useful in a vacuum. You need economic and legal infrastructure that talented people can plug into to be productive. That infrastructure (a) takes a very long time to build and (b) depends on cultural norms that take a long time to evolve and don't find fertile ground everywhere.
I tend to agree with most of what you said regarding all governments and countries. What may not be widely known is that some authoritarian regimes have been accused by expatriates of identifying and indoctrinating intellectually gifted children into their state-sponsored organizations for use by these entities for unmentionable purposes. Of course, it's next to impossible to find written documentation, with specific details since detailed evidence in such states are understandably hard to retrieve. Most of these accounts arrive through word of mouth.
>What may not be widely known is that some authoritarian regimes have been accused by expatriates of identifying and indoctrinating intellectually gifted children into their state-sponsored organizations
Literally every country does this. It's just perspective whether an individual thinks it's okay or not.
If you're on the side doing the indoctrination, you probably agree with it, or are indoctrinated yourself. We all are to some degree.
That is true. But I refer to those parents that sent their children to other countries because they knew the state or gov would not have allowed them to prevent the indoctrination of their children. But yes, we all are to some degree, unfortunately.
Counter-intuitive? The primary motivation for fretting about Brain Drain (whether it is true or not is secondary) is because the people who fret about it are educated professionals, precisely the people who are prone to build their identity around the idea that society thrives and succumbs based on their own existence.
The same people who have unironically latched onto the idea of Meritocracy. A concept/idea that was literally conceived as a parody.
Why would they want to block IPv6 specifically?
IDK for sure, but might be harder to maintain, monitor, and block.
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.
Otoh, ipv6 address assignment tends to be much more contiguous. My (small) residential ISP has one v6 prefix but several v4 prefixes. If you block the whole prefix for services you don't like, it's far less prefixes for v6.
But, it is a new skill, and you can turn off v6 at small cost if you're already ok with heavily restricting v4.
Additionally to the much larger IP space, you also have larger headers and additionally extension headers which make deep packet inspection computationally much more expensive if you consider the scale
>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.
no its not, its easier to block IPv6 ranges than IPv4 ones.
if someone want be block my ISP, they only need a single /32 rule with v6.
n ipv4 /32 is roughly equivalent to an ipv6 /56 or /64
You'd typically block an AS - i.e. every IP originating from AS12345. That's just as easy on v6 as v4.
There are some pretty big protests happening right now: https://bsky.app/profile/chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3mbvphn4...
That doesn't explain why they would want to block IPv6 specifically, and not also block IPv4.
The OP's comment is that they can censor IPv4 when they want, but they don't know how to censor IPv6. So they block it entirely.
Thanks this really explains the situation.
A lot of the Starlink and other contraband uplinks are using ipv6, allowing connectivity for people the regime doesn't want to have contact with the rest of the world. They don't want the revolution broadcast or popularized.
I wouldn't think blocking terrestrial IPv6 links would have anything to do with blocking Starlink.
It could be as simple as their surveillance / censorship tools not fully supporting IPv6.
Because v6 IPs are cheap, expendable and routing it over encrypted tunnels does not look suspicious. Anyone can buy a block and with little help announce them from multiple locations including home, mobile, uni wifi, and route further from there.
It's much more difficult to block.
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.
> It's much more difficult to block.
No it isn't. Nobody is blocking ranges as they roll in, they're blocking whole ASNs at once. That's just as trivial with v6 as v4, actually v6 can be simpler because ISPs tend to have fewer large blocks in v6land.
There are plenty of providers that when you BYOIP, they will broadcast out of their ASN, I know Azure does, Google appears to, no clue on AWS. Plenty of colo providers including $LastCompanyProvider will fold your IP block under their ASN as well. That's how it worked at last job.
Sure, Iran government may just decide to block that specific ASN but if it's they want to remain somewhat on the internet, they are stuck with "Smack entire broad ASNs and lose large chucks of internet" or "Block specific IP spaces."
(going with recent ipv6 discussion) they probably failed to make it work properly and decided that it's easier to block it
Is this an attempt at a joke, or do you actually seriously believe a country capable of enriching uranium isn't capable of hiring competent network engineers?
Reading through their comment history, it doesn't seem like a good-faith comment. Not sure what they thought HN stood to gain from their contribution here.
Reading through their comment history, it doesn't seem like a good-faith comment. Not sure what they thought HN stood to gain from their contribution here.
Case in point.
i'll leave it as exercise to a reader
Stuxnet v2? Speculation I know, but wow, IPv4 came back up, but IPv6 is completely out, looks like 48 million devices? Compared to IPv4's 47 thousand (wow that's insane).
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.
They are almost certainly attempting to shut down communications due to the ongoing anti government protests.
No, it is the Iranian government shutting down the internet.