They already have uncensored unfiltered sim cards they issue to their own people, we found that out when X (Twitter) started showing which country you made the accout from and thousands of people had Iran which normal people can't access X without VPN. Its just that they shut off the internet for normal people now, which they hadn't done before.
Do they have something like intranet with some local services, like in DPRK&Cuba? is this the case of completely losing connection and devices practically bricked for anything other than displaying the time?
We do. It's not very good. As in, there isn't even a properly functioning domestic search engine that can match the quality of anything past AltaVista. The only local platforms worth a damn are the ones you'd be using anyway. (the local equivalents to Uber, Maps etc.)
All other platforms (instant messengers, social media, news) are massively unpopular for being horrid to use at best, and government spyware at worst.
To slow down the immediate damage the government has rolled back a few of the recent restrictions, hence why I can access HN. Among Google and a handful of other basic websites. But they are obviously experimenting and trying to figure out how much censorship they can get away with. There is talk of a planned "whitelisting" of the country's internet. Where almost all but a few big important services are blocked completely. This would have the bonus effect of making circumvention using VPNs and other methods even more difficult than it already is.
Lol. That was _before_ these new restrictions. And don't assume that you could setup a simple wireguard server and be done with it. No, it had to be a proper low fingerprint method (e.g., you had to hide the tls-in-tls timing pattern and do traffic shaping). Now, something like dnstt sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. You may be able to open gmail in 10 minutes if it does, and you explicitly have to block the fonts.
That assumes the regime cares more about the economic prosperity of their people than about staying in power. So far they seem to care more about power. North Korea provides a model for how terrible the situation can get for every day people in that sort of arrangement.
Their economic prosperity is more linked to Oil than Internet.
Plus, the elites economic prosperity is also linked to their not being protests and for the toppling of govt to not occur and they might be willing to offset some losses to keep the average population in check
Which sucks for the average iranian but we saw how their protests were cracked down with 20-30 THOUSAND people killed and Iran hiding bodies etc.
I have heard that all shops are either shut down or running at the most minimum capacity. Economic prosperity just isn't a question now in Iran.
RF and GPS jamming has been a solved problem for decades. As a SWE, we are all expected to take Physics E&M, Circuits, and CompArch in our CS undergrad - think back to those classes.
Astroturfing much? I haven’t been able to talk to my family for three weeks. Friends who manage to connect are hopping from one workaround to another because IPs are routinely blocked.
it's a very weird kind of propaganda I see a lot of lately.
Everything is the same and comparable never mind how hyperbolic. Doubt it? be showered with cherry picked micro facts that on the surface are similar.
This rests on the fact that in order to establish a big picture you have to take small facts and agree on the big picture, and that leap from small and verifiable to large and analytic is the place you can inject faith and emotion
I live in EU and I oppose internet cenorship, privacy invasion and many other bad things the governments have been doing for years now.
I can't do anything about iran, i don't live there, neither does anyone else commenting here it seems... but many of us do live in EU, and are bothered by EU doing the same thing as iran, even if it's on a smaller scale (for now). You can't support censorship at home and then act outraged when someone else just implements more of it... even though some do, as long as the censored things are the things they personally don't like.
To be fair, i'm more worried about UK, since it's a "test ground" to see how things work before the bad thing are implemented elsewhere, but either way, in my small country we have a saying, that "people should first sweep infront of their own doorways", and yeah, EU and our censorship is my doorway in this case.
TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.
A company using legal action to protect their IP rights is so different from a theocratic dictatorship shutting down the entire Internet to prevent their overthrow.
Perhaps you don't follow the news about Iran but these comments are incredibly daft.
Iran is not a dictatorship, but a republic with thousands of MPs since 1905 and 8 elected presidents since 1979. It subsidize basic needs of its poorer citizens, such as fuel, bread, housing, education and healthcare.
Perhaps, you prefer Arabia, UAE or Israel's internet and find it more to your liking
A republic with a supreme religious leader who actually decides everything, that fakes elections and has a council of religious leaders that can disqualify any candidate
that's without even talking about killing 30,000-40,000 citizens for wanting their rights
> It subsidize basic needs of its poorer citizens, such as fuel, bread, housing, education and healthcare.
I'd start with supplying basic needs like water and electricity.
The actual subsidizing is for the IRGC which steal whatever they can get their hands on so they can be called to mass slaughter the people
But that's even worse... Iran is a stuck up country with huge political issues, internal and external pressures, outside countries attacking it while internally they're at the cusp of a civil war. Of course they'll shut down the internet, what else do you expect them to do? It's not like they have many options, nor the government trying to stay in power and crush a coup, even if that means blocking the internet, nor the people who are protesting against it and risking their lives.
But EU countries should be a bastion of freedom, free speech, free access to information, democracy, human rights, rights to this, rights to that... Why do we, the EU countries have to use the same playbook? Yes, banning the whole internet is in one way worse and in other easier, than just banning a list of sites where people can find a way around it, but again, the difference is just in the quantity, the censorship factor is the same. The government gets scared people will see some other propaganda from the other side, and censors it... and even that is done very selectively (daily mail is still accessible from over here, so are fox news and cnn)
With spain it's even worse, because it's not even the government doing it, but the government giving the right of censorship to a private company which clearly abuses that right and the government tolerates this... no court orders, no judges, no way to complain, no fair use, no nothing, a private company decides and the government gives them a blank stamped paper to aprove that.
Yes, i know iran has it much worse, but there's nothing we can do about it here, assuming the internet is banned for iranians and they can't read this or comment here. But EU is doing the same, and we've been tolerating it for years... a site here, a site there,... not everything, but censorship is still censorship, no matter how many sites are censored, and there are people from EU here that should argue against censorship, even if it's just a few sites and not all of them.
You’re proposing a world wide agreement even by their allies? Like they can just tunnel their traffic through Russia or China.
You could try to bifurcate into allied and non allied, but even that would be flawed, especially in countries like the USA where it becomes a first amendment right to try to ban such connectivity. It’s very hard to kill the Internet in terms of connecting peers - that’s kind of the point of its design.
They already have uncensored unfiltered sim cards they issue to their own people, we found that out when X (Twitter) started showing which country you made the accout from and thousands of people had Iran which normal people can't access X without VPN. Its just that they shut off the internet for normal people now, which they hadn't done before.
Do they have something like intranet with some local services, like in DPRK&Cuba? is this the case of completely losing connection and devices practically bricked for anything other than displaying the time?
We do. It's not very good. As in, there isn't even a properly functioning domestic search engine that can match the quality of anything past AltaVista. The only local platforms worth a damn are the ones you'd be using anyway. (the local equivalents to Uber, Maps etc.)
All other platforms (instant messengers, social media, news) are massively unpopular for being horrid to use at best, and government spyware at worst.
To slow down the immediate damage the government has rolled back a few of the recent restrictions, hence why I can access HN. Among Google and a handful of other basic websites. But they are obviously experimenting and trying to figure out how much censorship they can get away with. There is talk of a planned "whitelisting" of the country's internet. Where almost all but a few big important services are blocked completely. This would have the bonus effect of making circumvention using VPNs and other methods even more difficult than it already is.
for someone with a tech background, how hard is it to setup your own tunnel? I'd assume cloud providers are whitelisted due to economic reasons?
Lol. That was _before_ these new restrictions. And don't assume that you could setup a simple wireguard server and be done with it. No, it had to be a proper low fingerprint method (e.g., you had to hide the tls-in-tls timing pattern and do traffic shaping). Now, something like dnstt sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. You may be able to open gmail in 10 minutes if it does, and you explicitly have to block the fonts.
No shot. The economy is already in the gutter. The productivity hit of a total internet cutoff would be a death sentence
That assumes the regime cares more about the economic prosperity of their people than about staying in power. So far they seem to care more about power. North Korea provides a model for how terrible the situation can get for every day people in that sort of arrangement.
You can only let that go so far, because at the end of the day you need to pay the military to keep you in power.
In the long run we're all dead. In the meantime, NK is still standing.
Some level of eonomic prosperity is necessary to keep the government's key supporters (e.g. the ruling class and the army) satisfied.
Their economic prosperity is more linked to Oil than Internet.
Plus, the elites economic prosperity is also linked to their not being protests and for the toppling of govt to not occur and they might be willing to offset some losses to keep the average population in check
Which sucks for the average iranian but we saw how their protests were cracked down with 20-30 THOUSAND people killed and Iran hiding bodies etc.
I have heard that all shops are either shut down or running at the most minimum capacity. Economic prosperity just isn't a question now in Iran.
North Korea unfortunately has given them a path forward. If you're willing to murder your own citizens en masse, you can get away with about anything.
Yes, just start small
It's actually surprised me that they didn't do it before. China already achieved this in 2010s.
Hard to make it airtight without tanking the economy. Since the economy is already tanked, I guess they don’t care anymore.
Have they though? Everybody I know who grew up in China has told me its trivial to bypass restrictions with VPNs
The question is what do you win when found using VPN?
If I were a betting man I'd wager that technological determinism wins in the end.
Do you think they have a better shot than any other country with an explicit firewall (Eritrea, China, NK, Cuba etc…)
Spacex satellites blockage was the surprise. How did they do it? I thought it would be the best dooms day kind of insurance. Turns out not.
RF and GPS jamming has been a solved problem for decades. As a SWE, we are all expected to take Physics E&M, Circuits, and CompArch in our CS undergrad - think back to those classes.
But they unblocked it on Wed/Thur, I've been talking to friends normally since then.
Astroturfing much? I haven’t been able to talk to my family for three weeks. Friends who manage to connect are hopping from one workaround to another because IPs are routinely blocked.
… while every other country waits to see how it goes while drafting plans to emulate this
That would really boost productivity! Not gonna happen.
I mean... EU already blocks eg. some russian sites (some countries more effectively than others)... plus all the chat control pressures every year.
Spain is blocking whole blocks of internet during football matches.
UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.
But every such country likes pointing fingers at others, "hey, our censorship is not bad, they have more of it!".
edit: considering the downvotes, HN is not bothered by our censorship either
> UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.
There are no ID cards in the UK, so you actually have to get a special jerking off loicense.
What if someone is not a certified wanker?
Head down to your local Tory office and prove it.
If all else fails, ask for BJ
Yeah, you're right. It's totally fair to compare how the EU treats its people to how Iran is treating its people right now. Good job. :-/
it's a very weird kind of propaganda I see a lot of lately.
Everything is the same and comparable never mind how hyperbolic. Doubt it? be showered with cherry picked micro facts that on the surface are similar.
This rests on the fact that in order to establish a big picture you have to take small facts and agree on the big picture, and that leap from small and verifiable to large and analytic is the place you can inject faith and emotion
I live in EU and I oppose internet cenorship, privacy invasion and many other bad things the governments have been doing for years now.
I can't do anything about iran, i don't live there, neither does anyone else commenting here it seems... but many of us do live in EU, and are bothered by EU doing the same thing as iran, even if it's on a smaller scale (for now). You can't support censorship at home and then act outraged when someone else just implements more of it... even though some do, as long as the censored things are the things they personally don't like.
To be fair, i'm more worried about UK, since it's a "test ground" to see how things work before the bad thing are implemented elsewhere, but either way, in my small country we have a saying, that "people should first sweep infront of their own doorways", and yeah, EU and our censorship is my doorway in this case.
TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.
Why during football matches?
So people wouldn't stream the games ilegally... the private entity that owns the rights to broadcasting the games can arbitrarily ban whole subnets.
the end result is well... not good:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
A company using legal action to protect their IP rights is so different from a theocratic dictatorship shutting down the entire Internet to prevent their overthrow. Perhaps you don't follow the news about Iran but these comments are incredibly daft.
Iran is not a dictatorship, but a republic with thousands of MPs since 1905 and 8 elected presidents since 1979. It subsidize basic needs of its poorer citizens, such as fuel, bread, housing, education and healthcare.
Perhaps, you prefer Arabia, UAE or Israel's internet and find it more to your liking
A republic with a supreme religious leader who actually decides everything, that fakes elections and has a council of religious leaders that can disqualify any candidate
that's without even talking about killing 30,000-40,000 citizens for wanting their rights
> It subsidize basic needs of its poorer citizens, such as fuel, bread, housing, education and healthcare.
I'd start with supplying basic needs like water and electricity.
The actual subsidizing is for the IRGC which steal whatever they can get their hands on so they can be called to mass slaughter the people
But that's even worse... Iran is a stuck up country with huge political issues, internal and external pressures, outside countries attacking it while internally they're at the cusp of a civil war. Of course they'll shut down the internet, what else do you expect them to do? It's not like they have many options, nor the government trying to stay in power and crush a coup, even if that means blocking the internet, nor the people who are protesting against it and risking their lives.
But EU countries should be a bastion of freedom, free speech, free access to information, democracy, human rights, rights to this, rights to that... Why do we, the EU countries have to use the same playbook? Yes, banning the whole internet is in one way worse and in other easier, than just banning a list of sites where people can find a way around it, but again, the difference is just in the quantity, the censorship factor is the same. The government gets scared people will see some other propaganda from the other side, and censors it... and even that is done very selectively (daily mail is still accessible from over here, so are fox news and cnn)
With spain it's even worse, because it's not even the government doing it, but the government giving the right of censorship to a private company which clearly abuses that right and the government tolerates this... no court orders, no judges, no way to complain, no fair use, no nothing, a private company decides and the government gives them a blank stamped paper to aprove that.
Yes, i know iran has it much worse, but there's nothing we can do about it here, assuming the internet is banned for iranians and they can't read this or comment here. But EU is doing the same, and we've been tolerating it for years... a site here, a site there,... not everything, but censorship is still censorship, no matter how many sites are censored, and there are people from EU here that should argue against censorship, even if it's just a few sites and not all of them.
I’m curious if it’s possible to somehow retrieve the whitelist to see who’s on it?
Can ROTW sanction Iran by giving it zero internet access even to "elites" by refusing to peer.
You’re proposing a world wide agreement even by their allies? Like they can just tunnel their traffic through Russia or China.
You could try to bifurcate into allied and non allied, but even that would be flawed, especially in countries like the USA where it becomes a first amendment right to try to ban such connectivity. It’s very hard to kill the Internet in terms of connecting peers - that’s kind of the point of its design.