A Time source is alleging hundreds of protestor deaths in Tehran[0]. It's a repeat of 2019 [1]; the network blocks aren't incidental, it's their purpose to create cover for coordinating massacres.
> "A Tehran doctor told TIME on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital had recorded at least 217 protester deaths, “most by live ammunition.”"
How they exfiltrated footage of the 1989 massacre is an interesting story in its own right. The AP photojournalist who captured (among others) Tank Man couldn't safely walk the streets, so he recruited a random tourist to smuggle his film rolls, in his underwear, from the hotel to the AP's press office.
> [Jeff Widener] "I had earlier accomplished my mission of photographing the occupied Tiananmen Square so I gave all my rolls of film to Kurt/Kirk who smuggled it back to the A.P. office in his underwear. The long-haired college kid was wearing a dirty Rambo T-shirt, shorts and sandals. Security would never suspect him of being a journalist."
From the AP office, it was scanned (?) and exfiltrated with a dial-up modem, over copper telephone landlines (unsure of the technology. 1980's gadgets).
Well, they can probably skip conscription/draft by ensuring that the poorest people cannot afford food and housing unless they sign up for active service. (c.f. ICE recruitment)
I'd guess you can also easily track down star link terminals via drones (fly high up until you find a signal, then go lower while keeping the signal active)
I've always thought the world needs a project to provide guerrilla internet connectivity to a large area using cheap, common hardware like a Raspberry Pi for situations like these which are increasingly common.
Basically a 12V battery-powered Wifi+3G(+Wimax maybe) antenna for clients and an outbound Ethernet port to plug to some illegal internet socket. Make it open-source, able to be built with a little ingenuity and low cost.
Surely the real cost of such a device is not the hardware or the software but the organizational effort required to install it and make it useful without anyone involved getting caught.
The target audience is people fighting for their lives. When you've lost connectivity and everything around you is on fire, you don't have much time to faff about with designing such a system. This is why I believe it should be a premade and tested open-source kit for preppers and people in high-risk areas.
perhaps it needs to be tech that is useful in daily life, with the ability to switch channels automatically when the main isp is unavailable. An example is the HNT helium network - an alternative data transport mechanism. Not saying that is what should be used - that's a crypto thing - but the principle is the same.
thinking about it in terms of "getting caught" might be the less ideal way to approach it - think of it in terms of building a more reliable system, which is a goal everyone can get behind.
Anything persistent at all is downright unusable - they'll be tracked and destroyed, people near them arrested etc.
We're basically talking attritable devices being needed and protocols which make them useful - i.e. something you can release that stands a chance of getting information out before its destroyed and where the users are nowhere near it when it's launched.
EDIT: I mean realistically you basically would want to just toss a handful of cheap USB memory sticks out across a city.
So if we're being realistic it's just more USB-C OTG devices. Ideally what you want is it to become standard for USC-C memory sticks to have a USB-C port on them so they can be daisy chained and copied stick to stick if given a power source so they're easy to copy and spread.
> Anything persistent at all is downright unusable - they'll be tracked and destroyed, people near them arrested etc.
That's a really good point. Maybe the tech needs to be in reasonably widespread use prior to when it's needed, then it becomes harder to strangle in the moment. A product in everyone's home and office.
Wi-fi routers with long-range capabilities and automatic mesh fallback in case of isp outage?
I assume that these are blocked by sanction-following CDN firewalls? The first link paused to “check if I’m a bot” and I’m sure they check if I’m from Iran too
Surely governments will not see any issues with this project whatsoever.
Though in US I think you can try publishing the code and blueprints as a book and claim the First Amendment, following the PGP story. May or may not work.
Don't get me wrong, but somebody has to operate an exit node and somehow there needs to be a consensus on the protocol + routing.
If the network is only earth bound fixed wireless, the distance might be small enough that the state comes for the operator itself...
This raises the cost of running this network from just money to life threat.
Getting many open source satellites up in orbit might not be feasible.
Agreed that nothing is fully trustless on Earth. The point isn’t eliminating operators, it’s avoiding single points of coercion and failure. One exit can be shut down but many exits and type of networks (includong more alternative infra like the Guifi.net’s meshnetworks in Spain for example) across jurisdictions raise the cost from “call a CEO” to sustained political pressure or directly a CEO that has control over an entire network and its also a billionaire CEO with a messiah complex, far-right leanings and tendency to drug abuse.
Absolute decentralization is impossible. Reducing capture and increasing resilience is not. That’s a meaningful difference.
Said that, I’m happy with Starlink as an extra actor for a healthy mix of ISPs and networks that brings resilience.
That’s a false dichotomy. Saying Starlink isn’t sovereign doesn’t imply support for state-controlled networks. Criticizing corporate centralization ≠ endorsing government control.
The goal is systems where authority is fragmented enough that capture (by states or corporations) is structurally hard
A government may introduce a list of identifiers of devices allowed to operate in their territory. With relatively frequent verification to prevent the use of captured devices.
It’s great that starlink is there, but it can still be shut down on the whim of its owner as seen in the past. So hurray for starlink! (unless the opportunistic tides of politics change)
I know you hate it, but X and Starlink are the only channels giving us information on Iran right now. If X was censored (like many leftists are advocating), we wouldn't know anything about those riots.
People rising against a regime that the left sympathizes with, obviously.
Iranians describing how Isam destroyed their country within one decade (the UK establishment is very unconfortable with that truth, for some reaslon...).
Iranians calling on Trump and thanking Elon. That tends to make leftists mad.
Being mad is one thing, but demanding X censor that speech is another. I'm not really involved in this debate so I haven't seen anything like that. Can you provide some examples of any prominent people on the left calling for X to censor that speech?
Starmer, T.Breton (former EU commissioner, the one who got denied VISA to the US going forward), google them with "X ban" and you'll have all the results you want.
Similar with many other EU political figures.
I see news articles about Starmer wanting to ban X for allowing deepfakes and sexualized images of children, which seems reasonable to me. Presumably if X took steps other companies have to prevent those images, the ban would be off the table.
As for T. Breton, it seems they're wanting X to abide by the EU's Digital Services Act, which requires transparency in how a company tries to combat disinformation among other things (protection of children's exposure to dangerous content being one of them).
You know, not everyone on this site has an absolutist binary opinion on the Elon. Some people can give him credit for what he gets right, while simultaneously calling bullshit on his bullshit.
You need Musk to play ball. Starlink worked fine when Afghanistan turned off the internet. There’s a lot of rhetoric about the evil musk internet there - the government don’t care about things like vsat, it’s very specifically framed as anti America and anti Musk
Remember the people enforcing it (going to businesses and checking their connections) are thick as two short planks.
Iran I expect has a more effective enforcement than the taliban, but the principal is the same - starlink works fine in these countries and downlinks elsewhere (Europe in the case of Afghanistan). GEO providers like Inmarsat downlink in places like the Netherlands.
It’s all rather meaningless as only a tiny number of people have access to these systems, compared to access to the Internet via phones.
He took a very public approach to navigating that and while that would be on brand, it’s wild. He seem to have been directly communicating with Putin.
Disconnecting Ukraine at key points in battles would fit with the current administration’s flip flopping approach, but again he is at the front of it and on Twitter slagging off supposed American allies.
There is a case to be made that overcoming oppression is extremely hard to achieve in populations over 50 million. Are there any successful examples where this has happened?
The Soviet Union had a population larger than the United States' at the time of its collapse. North of 100 million people were liberated virtually overnight from direct Russian rule, from USSR states (over 50 million in Ukraine alone); and another 100+ million from Russian-backed communist governments in Warsaw Pact states (40 million in Poland alone).
British India (three modern states) had a population of 400 million at the time of its independence from Britain. That was famously a coordinated, nation-wide movement.
Indonesia was around 200 million people at the end of the Suharto dictatorship and its transition towards democracy.
Soviet Union - was that really opposition to oppression that succeeded or the state collapsed internally - disintegrated?
British India could be good example - but there's a case to be made that it was overthrow of an external colonial rule that never integrated with the local population, so not sure there is a good parallel with the Iran situation.
Indonesia - this appears to be a really good example, along with Phillipines (1986). So what's different about Iran - why the repeated failures there?
I think this is one of the arguments for the 2nd amendment that too often gets overlooked. Overthrowing the government is a lot easier if the populace is legally armed AND the government doesn't know who owns what or how many guns. Which is why it is that way specifically here in the US.
That old maxim - the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it - no longer true unfortunately.
Larger and larger swathes of the world population are coming under the purview of governments and corporations that are technologically strangling the free flow of information over the intertubes. China, Russia, India, Iran, UK, US (corporations a.t.m.) are the prominent examples.
Just having a resilient software stack is no longer sufficient. An open source hardware stack AND infrastructure is critical.
Eventually there will be need for an open source manufacturing base as well. Even if it is only at the level of 1980s computing, that is better than nothing.
The world needs some big thinkers to start working on this yesterday. A civ resilient project to avoid the dystopian futures or something like the dark ages coming back.
It's a blackout! meaning "IP" doesn't work any more. IP aside, even cell network and landline barely work and people can not call each other or send a SMS!
X have clips and videos posted as the few social networks that have it. This content is not suitable for instagram or facebook.
SVT (my swedish news) have had segments on this with reporters, not in the country, but she is in Lebanon. She is arab biased, but they are reporting on it.
Asmongold (worlds largest youtuber right now and an Elon fan) is one of the few having long 45min-2h segments about the Iran protests on his stream right now?
But you are so blind your kneejerk reaction is to blame Elon Musk lmao
You misunderstood my message. I am genuinely thanking Elon, because without X and now Starlink, we indeed would have 0 knowledge of what's going no. At best, we would have the BBC and Skynews echoing Khamenei's statements.
Sorry, I assumed you were sarcastic. That type of Reddit-tier “kindness” is so common and annoying across the internet that I just assume people are sarcastic now. Sorry =￣ω￣=
So we are censoring comments we don't like? Iran? No, right here in the West
Comment in question:
It's ironic to watch the contradictions unfold
On one hand, nobody actually knows what's happening in Iran, yet everyone has a rock solid opinion, complete with intricate details, as if they'd just left a classified briefing
On the other hand, those same confident voices all want the same thing: a leader who'll privatize Iran's oil for Western companies, align with US policy, open markets to Western finance, and prioritize defense contracts over local development
Funny how that works
Some random farmer from Ohio is obsessed with Iran for some reason
It's as simple as: Iranians don't want a theocratic dictatorship that oppresses women and funds terrorism worldwide. Almost anything is better than Iran's current government so anyone who loves freedom even a tiny bit should cheer them on.
The vast majority of people cheering on Iranian protesters don’t know anything about Ian’s oil. The see people in the street protesting their theocratic regime and they cheer them on. To imagine that these voices are all just oil puppets is the stuff of leftist group think.
Your comment wasn’t censored, your fellow readers flagged it because they thought it was bullshit.
Iran was executing women for not wearing hats. That is what the flyover people around me know about Iran and is enough for them to think they'd be OK with the theocratic regime gone.
Riiiiiiiiight. It's fine for the US to be opposed to what ICE is doing, but Iranians cannot oppose their government for doing similar and worse things to them? They can't decide they've had enough on their own, without the CIA telling them they should be mad?
And why not? Do you think they're too dumb to figure out that they should be mad? Or that they deserve to live in such conditions?
Do you realize how patronizing you're being? How much you're denying them agency?
I remember hearing a report that Iran was making real progress towards safety and freedom before the war on terror led them to appoint strong men to keep them safe.
Do you have sources for everything you heard a decade ago? I was hoping someone could have pointed to a balanced analysis, rather than looking for malign intent in what I said
I'm going to add what I have found to answer my own question. I have found that this appears to be so divisive a subject that an internet discussion is impossible without immediate mud-slinging. The articles I have found are overtly biased in one direction or another. So I turned to wikipedia...
Read for yourself and decide 1) was Khatami a reformer, helping to make Iran a better place. I mean relatively better of course!
If you don't think he was, exit now. Now assuming you think he was, the question is did the war on terror hinder him. I'm not an academic but when the sources are obviously biased it can be instructive to see what one side is prepared to concede about the other.
Here is paper written for the US National Intelligence Committee that warns this may be an outcome
"Two tentative, and partly contradictory, projections suggest themselves: (a) the more
intense and widespread our counter-terror campaign within the Middle East, the more
ammunition will the conservatives have to stoke anti-US sentiment within Iran and siphon
support away from the reformist camp; "
And here is an article trying to refute that Khatami was hampered by the war on terror, by the Washington Institute for Near East policy which wikipedia says, "is a pro-Israel American think tank"
Which firmly establishes that American politicians and media people were pushing the line that the Axis of Evil speech had hampered Khatami in reforming Iran. Therefore I deduce that some people were indeed stating this as a truth at the time from within mainstream America, and it is not just an anti-american conspiracy. The article tries to refute it of course, but in doing so acknowledges that it is an opinion held at the time. You read, you decide.
You may be referring to Khatami’s Reforms, nevertheless. Conservative factions in Iran, including the Revolutionary Guard and unelected institutions like the Guardian Council, resisted Khatami’s reforms. They shut down reformist newspapers, jailed activists, and blocked progressive legislation. The reformist movement was gradually smothered, and by 2005, the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president, reversing many of Khatami’s policies.
The loopback to "its all the wests fault anyhow" is so tiresome from people like you.
"appoint" lmao
You think since the revolution in 1979 any election has been real? Yes in b4 the Shaha was bad too. etc. waah waah.
At some point, you grow up and pick a side. Ruissia, Iran, China and rouge states, vs The West, EU and USA.
Iran is the world’s top state sponsor of terror, per the US State Department. The IRGC and Quds Force fund, arm, and direct groups like Hezbollah ($700M/year), Hamas, Houthis, and Iraqi militias. They’ve been linked to assassinations (e.g., 2011 Saudi ambassador plot), bombings (Bulgaria 2012), and cyberattacks on US/EU infrastructure. Even during economic crises, Tehran spends ~$1B annually on proxies. Recent examples: UK arrested Iranians in 2025 for plotting attacks on Israeli sites (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2wqy5ejdjo); Houthis’ Red Sea strikes use Iranian drones/missiles. Sanctions and court rulings (Khobar Towers, 9/11 facilitation) confirm their role.
>The loopback to "its all the wests fault anyhow" is so tiresome from people like you
I most certainly said nothing of the sort. I watched a documentary that claimed that many years ago and I asked if it was true. Go and post your vile rubbish on Twitter
The assertions I’ve presented are substantiated by verifiable sources. It appears, however, that your intent is to obfuscate or sanitize the actions of an Islamist regime, rather than engage with the evidence at hand.
The assertion that I stated it was Americas fault is untrue. It appears nowhere in my comment. I asked if it was true because I don't know. Your answer would have been helpful without that Twitter style insertion of an intent that certainly wasn't there.
[0] https://time.com/7345092/iran-protests-death-toll-regime-cra...
> "A Tehran doctor told TIME on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital had recorded at least 217 protester deaths, “most by live ammunition.”"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–2020_Iranian_protests
> [Jeff Widener] "I had earlier accomplished my mission of photographing the occupied Tiananmen Square so I gave all my rolls of film to Kurt/Kirk who smuggled it back to the A.P. office in his underwear. The long-haired college kid was wearing a dirty Rambo T-shirt, shorts and sandals. Security would never suspect him of being a journalist."
https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/0...
From the AP office, it was scanned (?) and exfiltrated with a dial-up modem, over copper telephone landlines (unsure of the technology. 1980's gadgets).
By my count, Greenland, Mexico, Venezuela and Iran have all been threatened this year.
> Starlink was being jammed, Rashidi said, although the extent varied from one neighbourhood to another.
[0] https://x.com/WarMonitor3/status/2009729660792258805
Basically a 12V battery-powered Wifi+3G(+Wimax maybe) antenna for clients and an outbound Ethernet port to plug to some illegal internet socket. Make it open-source, able to be built with a little ingenuity and low cost.
thinking about it in terms of "getting caught" might be the less ideal way to approach it - think of it in terms of building a more reliable system, which is a goal everyone can get behind.
We're basically talking attritable devices being needed and protocols which make them useful - i.e. something you can release that stands a chance of getting information out before its destroyed and where the users are nowhere near it when it's launched.
EDIT: I mean realistically you basically would want to just toss a handful of cheap USB memory sticks out across a city.
So if we're being realistic it's just more USB-C OTG devices. Ideally what you want is it to become standard for USC-C memory sticks to have a USB-C port on them so they can be daisy chained and copied stick to stick if given a power source so they're easy to copy and spread.
That's a really good point. Maybe the tech needs to be in reasonably widespread use prior to when it's needed, then it becomes harder to strangle in the moment. A product in everyone's home and office.
Wi-fi routers with long-range capabilities and automatic mesh fallback in case of isp outage?
https://www.open-mesh.org/
https://briarproject.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_ad_hoc_network
The original but now defunct?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serval_Project
Seems similar to Briar but it has an iOS client.
Though in US I think you can try publishing the code and blueprints as a book and claim the First Amendment, following the PGP story. May or may not work.
If the network is only earth bound fixed wireless, the distance might be small enough that the state comes for the operator itself... This raises the cost of running this network from just money to life threat.
Getting many open source satellites up in orbit might not be feasible.
Absolute decentralization is impossible. Reducing capture and increasing resilience is not. That’s a meaningful difference.
Said that, I’m happy with Starlink as an extra actor for a healthy mix of ISPs and networks that brings resilience.
The goal is systems where authority is fragmented enough that capture (by states or corporations) is structurally hard
It’s weird there and seems to be running now.
Though Russian troops have been pictured with it too.
Like, decide.
I heard somewhere.
Iranians describing how Isam destroyed their country within one decade (the UK establishment is very unconfortable with that truth, for some reaslon...).
Iranians calling on Trump and thanking Elon. That tends to make leftists mad.
Being mad is one thing, but demanding X censor that speech is another. I'm not really involved in this debate so I haven't seen anything like that. Can you provide some examples of any prominent people on the left calling for X to censor that speech?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-x-elon-musk-grok-ai-sexualiz...
As for T. Breton, it seems they're wanting X to abide by the EU's Digital Services Act, which requires transparency in how a company tries to combat disinformation among other things (protection of children's exposure to dangerous content being one of them).
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/12/24/us-visa-ban-ta...
I still don't see where the Iranian protests or regime change there would factor into this.
The dishes can be found and disabled ofc.
If it could be "jammed" like that Russia would "jam" the Ukranian ones.
Remember the people enforcing it (going to businesses and checking their connections) are thick as two short planks.
Iran I expect has a more effective enforcement than the taliban, but the principal is the same - starlink works fine in these countries and downlinks elsewhere (Europe in the case of Afghanistan). GEO providers like Inmarsat downlink in places like the Netherlands.
It’s all rather meaningless as only a tiny number of people have access to these systems, compared to access to the Internet via phones.
Ideally Starlink wouldn’t be involved.
Now that the geopolitical situation has changed and funding concerns mostly alleviated, there are 200k terminals in use in Ukraine.
https://circleid.com/posts/starlink-in-ukraine-what-three-ye...
Disconnecting Ukraine at key points in battles would fit with the current administration’s flip flopping approach, but again he is at the front of it and on Twitter slagging off supposed American allies.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/why-is-elon-musk-talki...
This may all get weird again as the US seems to have blundered into conflict with Russia over Venezuela so maybe the Ukraine may see some support.
British India (three modern states) had a population of 400 million at the time of its independence from Britain. That was famously a coordinated, nation-wide movement.
Indonesia was around 200 million people at the end of the Suharto dictatorship and its transition towards democracy.
British India could be good example - but there's a case to be made that it was overthrow of an external colonial rule that never integrated with the local population, so not sure there is a good parallel with the Iran situation.
Indonesia - this appears to be a really good example, along with Phillipines (1986). So what's different about Iran - why the repeated failures there?
Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683
Larger and larger swathes of the world population are coming under the purview of governments and corporations that are technologically strangling the free flow of information over the intertubes. China, Russia, India, Iran, UK, US (corporations a.t.m.) are the prominent examples.
Just having a resilient software stack is no longer sufficient. An open source hardware stack AND infrastructure is critical.
Eventually there will be need for an open source manufacturing base as well. Even if it is only at the level of 1980s computing, that is better than nothing.
The world needs some big thinkers to start working on this yesterday. A civ resilient project to avoid the dystopian futures or something like the dark ages coming back.
https://snowflake.torproject.org/
Thanks Elon.
Elon?
How is this Elons fault?
Starlink is the only way to get internet in Iran.
X have clips and videos posted as the few social networks that have it. This content is not suitable for instagram or facebook.
SVT (my swedish news) have had segments on this with reporters, not in the country, but she is in Lebanon. She is arab biased, but they are reporting on it.
Asmongold (worlds largest youtuber right now and an Elon fan) is one of the few having long 45min-2h segments about the Iran protests on his stream right now?
But you are so blind your kneejerk reaction is to blame Elon Musk lmao
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v61Md-uIYQg
Comment in question:
It's ironic to watch the contradictions unfold
On one hand, nobody actually knows what's happening in Iran, yet everyone has a rock solid opinion, complete with intricate details, as if they'd just left a classified briefing
On the other hand, those same confident voices all want the same thing: a leader who'll privatize Iran's oil for Western companies, align with US policy, open markets to Western finance, and prioritize defense contracts over local development
Funny how that works
Some random farmer from Ohio is obsessed with Iran for some reason
Your comment wasn’t censored, your fellow readers flagged it because they thought it was bullshit.
And why not? Do you think they're too dumb to figure out that they should be mad? Or that they deserve to live in such conditions?
Do you realize how patronizing you're being? How much you're denying them agency?
Does anyone know enough to comment?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Khatami
Read for yourself and decide 1) was Khatami a reformer, helping to make Iran a better place. I mean relatively better of course!
If you don't think he was, exit now. Now assuming you think he was, the question is did the war on terror hinder him. I'm not an academic but when the sources are obviously biased it can be instructive to see what one side is prepared to concede about the other.
Here is paper written for the US National Intelligence Committee that warns this may be an outcome
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/warterror_2001.pdf
"Two tentative, and partly contradictory, projections suggest themselves: (a) the more intense and widespread our counter-terror campaign within the Middle East, the more ammunition will the conservatives have to stoke anti-US sentiment within Iran and siphon support away from the reformist camp; "
And here is an article trying to refute that Khatami was hampered by the war on terror, by the Washington Institute for Near East policy which wikipedia says, "is a pro-Israel American think tank"
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/khatami-...
Which firmly establishes that American politicians and media people were pushing the line that the Axis of Evil speech had hampered Khatami in reforming Iran. Therefore I deduce that some people were indeed stating this as a truth at the time from within mainstream America, and it is not just an anti-american conspiracy. The article tries to refute it of course, but in doing so acknowledges that it is an opinion held at the time. You read, you decide.
The loopback to "its all the wests fault anyhow" is so tiresome from people like you.
"appoint" lmao
You think since the revolution in 1979 any election has been real? Yes in b4 the Shaha was bad too. etc. waah waah.
At some point, you grow up and pick a side. Ruissia, Iran, China and rouge states, vs The West, EU and USA.
Iran is the world’s top state sponsor of terror, per the US State Department. The IRGC and Quds Force fund, arm, and direct groups like Hezbollah ($700M/year), Hamas, Houthis, and Iraqi militias. They’ve been linked to assassinations (e.g., 2011 Saudi ambassador plot), bombings (Bulgaria 2012), and cyberattacks on US/EU infrastructure. Even during economic crises, Tehran spends ~$1B annually on proxies. Recent examples: UK arrested Iranians in 2025 for plotting attacks on Israeli sites (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2wqy5ejdjo); Houthis’ Red Sea strikes use Iranian drones/missiles. Sanctions and court rulings (Khobar Towers, 9/11 facilitation) confirm their role.
That’s not a side anymore.
I most certainly said nothing of the sort. I watched a documentary that claimed that many years ago and I asked if it was true. Go and post your vile rubbish on Twitter