Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only
restofworld.orgI've been moderately happy this morning to find out I can open hackernews. Also Gmail is working. After attempting to get bridges using email and configuring an dozen of them I got 100% connection but then it disconnected without me being able to connect to anything. I would assume some sort of tunneling must be possible cause the services available are varied and not limited to a few websites (We only had access to Google Search for about a week and nothing before that) now even Nintendo Store opened to my complete surprise.
Is there anything people outside Iran can spin up in order to get more routes out?
Slightly off topic but I'm just amazed at how little press the 30k dead this last week in Iran get (mostly peaceful protestors) vs the rhetoric in Gaza even though they were mostly militants (using human shields).
It's just astounding and so incredibly disappointing.
There is some evidence to suggest that certain countries (Russia, China, Iran itself) have an incentive to use the Gaza conflict to cause disunity in the west - and hence keep it in the news cycle and public opinion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/israel-hamas-i...
Interestingly, during the last internet blackout in Iran, a lot of the pro Scottish independence X accounts went quiet too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_influence_operations_i...
I'm sure many Iranians are deeply concerned about that cause.
All of America's failings are leveraged to sow political division by foreign actors. Abu Ghraib, SAVAK, Dimona - these are America's mistakes, not foreign inventions.
Nice try with the Hasbara, but in the end Netanyahu's gang, Iran crazies are Trumpists arent that different in the end. It's all about power, as 1984 stated. Ideology it's just marketing and bullshit for the people.
It's all over American national news, competing for airtime with the domestic executions.
it's also being relentlessly flagged here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760329
> in Gaza even though they were mostly militants (using human shields).
You are severely misinformed or worse spreading misinformstion.
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/reported-impact-snapshot-gaz...
> Casualty numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health (MoH) and the Israeli authorities.
Estimated children killed: 20k.
Pray tell how children are "mostly militants". I'm not even mentioning the men/women killed here to really hammer home how utterly wrong this comment is.
That's because the "30k" number is bs
Both Israel (Gaza), Iran (religious nuts) and the USA (ICE fascists and Trump's gang) can be declared as ruled by human turds, they aren't mutually exclusive.
Prepare to go back to newsgroups with NNTP / UUCP. With today's uSD cards that should create a pretty decent, offline store and forward national discussion platform. No programming needed, it's all there already, just forgotten...
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.
Dam I feel so sorry for you :( At first I thought like gp, bypass it, then I realized you don't have the privilege to bypass it and leave trails behind. It's not like using a vpn to watch netflix of another country, as netflix won't knock on your door.
I wish you all the best. Stay safe my friend.
> 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).
Can anyone recommend a good book, video course or other material to learn more about these topics?
https://people.cs.umass.edu/~amir/papers/parrot.pdf
Here's an overview. Be warned, the conclusion is:
> We enumerate the requirements that a censorship-resistant system must satisfy to successfully mimic another protocol and conclude that “unobservability by imitation” is a fundamentally flawed approach.
sorry if it came out as patronizing, I was genuinely curious as to the difficulty of bypassing these
They already have uncensored unfiltered sim cards they issue to their own people, we found that out when X (Twitter) started showing which country you made the accout from and thousands of people had Iran which normal people can't access X without VPN. Its just that they shut off the internet for normal people now, which they hadn't done before.
No, This is different.
In "normal" filtering situations, we can connect to most VPNs and do our stuff. When blackouts like these happen, EVERYTHING is blocked. It gets almost impossible to connect to a VPN. They have advanced tech that detects and blocks all VPNS and proxies. The internet speed is also now at crawling speed so you really can't upload download anything.
Also, in each blackout, people find ways to work around the censorship. And each time, they detect them and patch them. We have almost ran out of ways to prevent the censorship now.
LoRa Meshcore.
… 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.
I remember giggling at those "oi you got a loicense for that m8??!" memes. Funny, maybe, but not to be taken seriously.
Fast forward less than ten years, and here we are.
One of my favorite Monty Python sketches, the fish license: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lXyup0De7Q
Did Kemal Ataturk really have a full menagerie all named abdul?
I remember a popular "greentext" specifically about this...
What if someone is not a certified wanker?
Head down to your local Tory office and prove it.
The wanker licensing board defected to Reform last week
If all else fails, ask for BJ
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:
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.
The problem itself is not IP protection…. They tried that, and were always chasing behind - servers changed week after week, ban after ban.
So, misteriously (suspicions of bribery abound) now they block full blocks of internet preventively, bringing down innocent and paying customers with them. From Law Enforcement to privatized Minority Report.
Thats what people dislike. If you are a private entity and loose money to piracy, use the legal framework to solve it. Don’t override it with lobbying
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.
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 steals whatever they can get their hands on so they can be counted on to mass slaughter the people
>Iran is not a dictatorship
lmao
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
This seems to happen a lot.
The UK is doing some shitty stuff and a man was arrested for wearing a “Plasticine Action” t-shirt a few weeks ago, “Palestine Action” being a proscribed group in the UK, and showing support being an offence. When the mistake was realised he was released after a few hours with an apology.
These things are objectively terrible, shouldn’t be happening. The UK government is under popular and legal pressure to un-proscribe the group as hundreds (thousands?) have been arrested and charged.
But it is not the same as someone being ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, where they would be taken and denied process for years if not killed outright. Yet people here drew that comparison. He was arrested for inconvenient speech! It’s the same! And then I came under fire for defending the actions of the UK, having done nothing of the sort.
It’s really weird to watch.
The people complaining probably live in the UK or are related to it somehow. Then it would make sense that they are more worried about authoritarianism in the UK rather than in South America.
And even if the man was wearing a proper "Palestine Action" shirt that'd still be pretty concerning. It is an insane stretch to say that wearing a shirt represents a matter for police action. How far the world has moved on from when the UK could be considered a forward-thinking bastion of liberalism.
The people complaining were American AFAICT and weren’t worried by either, they were just drawing hyperbolic equivalences between suppression of speech and state orchestrated mass kidnapping and murder.
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'.
If not for EU there would already be multiple states with privacy invasive systems seen in UK.. We are close of getting there and they keep on trying, but so far the blocking states are enough as majority.
Sure EU has some fkn horrible sides to it, such as the anonymous vote to get big stuff through when a majority should be enough as democracy depicts, but currently 2 states out of all EU states can block the big decisions...
Your downvotes are issued by
a) Frogs who are too scared to admit that the water has been warming up in their pots too;
b) Cook's henchfrogs (or automatic systems emulating their croaking and leg twitching) tasked with keeping the pot calm.
Your upvotes are issued by sheep and wolf in sheep's clothing telling you to not censor propaganda from a country that's been waging war against you.
It actually surprised me that they didn't do it before. China already achieved this in 2010s.
Hard to make it airtight without tanking the economy. Since the economy is already tanked, I guess they don’t care anymore.
Does the Iranian economy rely heavily on access to the global internet? They can’t trade with most of the world due to sanctions, so what in their internal economy grinds to a halt without global communications? I’m not saying I think that it wouldn’t, just that I don’t immediately grasp the mechanism.
Good points! I’m not an expert, so I’ll wait for people who know more to weigh in. But as far as I know: (1) they still need to import basic necessities like food and medicine, and (2) despite heavy investment, they haven’t managed to build an intranet that’s fully isolated from the internet.
Have they though? Everybody I know who grew up in China has told me its trivial to bypass restrictions with VPNs
It’s a deliberate “pressure valve.” China tolerates access for productivity but retains a kill switch for sensitive periods: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-...
The question is what do you win when found using VPN?
[delayed]
Depending on where you are, “everybody I know who grew up in China” may not be an unbiased sample w.r.t. ideology, forthcomingness, or truth-telling.
"bypass restrictions" meaning put on a list of people to closely watch.
This should not be possible in 2026...
This will be entirely possible in 2027 when AI will be able to individually profile each connection for "disident" risk.
If I were a betting man I'd wager that technological determinism wins in the end.
Do you think they have a better shot than any other country with an explicit firewall (Eritrea, China, NK, Cuba etc…)
I don't think Cuba belongs on that list.
They have limited service because they can't afford anything better, and the USA prevents installing additional undersea cables, but only a small number of sites are blocked by Cuba itself, such as a few Spanish language news sites run by Cuban-Americans.
Many more sites are unavailable in Cuba because their USA owners refuse access to Cuba, but that's not Cuba's fault.
The companies block access to Cube due to sanctions, which there because of Cuba's communist government, which is their fault.
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.
The rules are rather different when your economy is mostly oil - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrostate
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.
Yeah, foreign intervention is probably the best option at this point. If the elites are willing to murder tends of thousands of innocent people, then I see no moral issues with foreign intervention to get rid of IRGC and current government using any means necessary.
North Korea unfortunately has given them a path forward. If you're willing to murder your own citizens en masse, you can get away with about anything.
North Korea has nukes though. Iran doesn't, and probably never will.
Yes, just start small
Here's crazy idea: Instead of the US spending all this money on restraining the Iranian government through military build ups and sanctions,
rather drop hundreds of thousands of Starlink kits by drones.
Then Iranians will be reminded how peaceful and prosperous the most other Muslim countries are.
One of the reasons the Berlin wall fell was that East Europeans saw on TV that how prosperous Western Europe became.
> Iranians will be reminded
I think this comment is misguided enough / detached from reality enough to rightfully be flagged to death for being trite and not contributing anything to the discussion.
Iranians lost internet than 3 weeks ago. They are as aware now as they ever will be about how things are going outside their borders.
> Then Iranians will be reminded how peaceful and prosperous the most other Muslim countries are.
This is factually incorrect. Top 10 majority-Muslim countries, sorted by population:
Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia
Now, the majority of those have problems with seeds in Western Imperialism, but the point is (a) the majority of those have problems (b) Iran's problems also have seeds in US interventions.
The gap between how peaceful and educated most people are, and how bad governments are, is a phenomenon almost unique here. Figuring out how to bridge that gap is the major challenge. The trick would be establishing a collective caliphate -- where the caliph isn't an individual but an institution -- and which spans the Muslim world.
> how peaceful and prosperous the most other Muslim countries are.
Which coutries are those?
UAE, Indonesia, Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey among many others.
There must be so much video footage from smartphones during the demonstations that show gruesome killings and masacres, the iranian elites have to make sure this footage never sees the rest of the world. They have to ban the internet forever.
Nah, just for a year or so, after they will say all the footage is "AI generated".
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.
My wild guess is that jamming is local. Major cities may be fully jammed. To get an idea about GNSS jamming range (different signal of course, probably much easier to jam), there are maps online where you can see which parts of Europe are currently GNSS-jammed. But I have the same question as you.
> probably much easier to jam
Definitely much easier to jam. Much higher orbits for gnss satellites, much lower signal intensity.
Also, starlink uses phased arrays with beamforming, effectively creating an electronically steerable directional antenna. It is harder to jam two directional antennas talking to each other, as your jammers are on the sides, where the lobes of the antenna radiation pattern are smaller.
Still, we're talking about signals coming from space, so maybe it is just enough to sprinkle more jammers in an urban setting.. I'm curious as well.
You can jam the satellites, you can jam the receivers and you can jam GPS.
RF and GPS jamming has been a solved problem for decades. As a SWE, we are all expected to take Physics E&M, Circuits, and CompArch in our CS undergrad - think back to those classes.
Genuine question, is it that easy to deploy these tools over a country that big?
Yes in most population centers. Any country that has the ability to stand up a cellular network has the ability to deploy jamming at scale.
The components needed to build jammers and EW systems have been heavily commodified for a decade now (hell, your phone's power brick, car, and TV all have dual use components for these kinds of applications), and most regional powers have been working on compound semiconductors and offensive electronic warfare for almost a generation now.
I don't think it's as easy as you're suggesting. GPS L1 jamming has been done routinely enough but the satellite bands (X/Ku/Ka) appear to be much more difficult to pull off.
Iran was reported to have mobile units with a fairly short range that constantly roamed around, only hitting 2 of the 3 bands (Ku/Ka). They're also reported to have received mobile Russian military units capable of jamming all 3 (X/Ku/Ka) over a much wider area. (I'm not actually clear the extent to which X band is associated with either Starlink or Starshield. Starshield also reportedly operates to at least some extent in parts of the S band. [0])
So the technology clearly exists but it doesn't seem to be something you can trivially throw together in your basement. That's quite unlike (for example) a cell phone jammer which a hobbyist can cheaply and easily assemble at home. I assume the extreme directional specificity of the antennas plays a large part in that.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/10/17/nx-s1-5575254/spacex-starshie...
North Korea 2.0
If the weak link is GPS, could they not accept an override for the time and spherical coordinates to connect?
Good luck trying to take something back from the populace once already given for decades, even if it is in a limited form.
It's a desperate attempt, that really shows how cornered the administration is.
Any power that fears information, has to have a highly fine grained, high level control of information to maintain power. This is absolutely difficult, in a country as culturally diverse and with a long history as Iran.
It not just information, but capital (crypto) - think prediction markets and their influence:
https://polymarket.com/event/khamenei-out-as-supreme-leader-...
"In addition to the central bank, it seems as though regular Iranians are seeking the perceived safety of cryptocurrencies as unrest disrupts the country and the economy collapses."
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/01/21/iran-s-central-...
I’m curious if it’s possible to somehow retrieve the whitelist to see who’s on it?
Mossad is curious as well. They might want to indiscriminately make people's devices blow up in public again.
There are a lot of words one could use to describe the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, but indiscriminate isn’t one that leaps to mind, particular when compared against other contemporary military strikes
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.
Can ROTW sanction Iran by giving it zero internet access even to "elites" by refusing to peer.
You’re proposing a world wide agreement even by their allies? Like they can just tunnel their traffic through Russia or China.
You could try to bifurcate into allied and non allied, but even that would be flawed, especially in countries like the USA where it becomes a first amendment right to try to ban such connectivity. It’s very hard to kill the Internet in terms of connecting peers - that’s kind of the point of its design.
IPs owned by Iranian entities could be blocked straightforwardly by network operators at various levels. They could probably fudge the paperwork via Russian or Chinese entities and obfuscate the routes with cooperation from Russian/Chinese network operators, but that would take time.
they're fudging the paperwork with oil tankers that everybody can see https://www.reuters.com/graphics/IRAN-OIL/zjpqngedmvx/
They said "tunnel"
This seems like a good idea. People often remark about the dangers of online advertising, social media, and AI. Now most Iranians will be protected from these horrific things.
Instead of being disconnected from each other and obsessed with technology perhaps they will now form pleasant relationships and have joyful interactions rather than being obsessed with TikTok.
> perhaps they will now form pleasant relationships and have joyful interactions
You do understand what’s happening in Iran, right? Hard to take your comment seriously.