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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's see the governments try to ban iPhone. What a nice revolution trigger.
Most Iranians can't afford iPhones.
Slight OT: When I was in Monaco recently the Monaco Telecom network prevented me making or receiving WhatsApp calls. I could message, but no calling. Presumably therefore it is something that the network provider can interfere with effectively.
Starlink iPhones can’t come soon enough.
Yeah, authoritarian governments will just allow that to happen, let alone the cost of such a device is out of reach for most of these people.
Interesting contrast to Arab Spring. I wonder if blockage has to do with Iran govt or US Intel agencies. My assumption is that the latter is more influential. If Iran is inducing the blockage, the spies agree for some reason.
I'm a little surprised Whatsapp even works (worked) in Iran, given the US sanctions against the country.
A couple of takeaways. First, holy shit. Communications software is powerful enough to put fear in the hearts of political rulers! Second, insofar as sanctions are designed as punitive measures against a government who's actions our government doesn't support, it makes no sense to restrict their access to goods and services their government finds disruptive. In fact, we'd probably want to give them extra.
Google pulling out of China instead of catering to censorship was a principled move, but fairly obviously did not lead to more freedom of speech in China. It helped kickstart a domestic, government-obedient tech industry. I don't know what the right move here is. Nobody who thinks there's an obvious right answer is worth listening to.
It is and always has been the intersection of realpolitik and greed.
That would be MY back-of-the-envelope approach to doing internet censorship in a totalitarian dictatorship. But I'm not convinced it's the best way.
I’ve seen many tweets from people in Germany, USA, Turkey etc. that they can’t access their WhatsApp account. Seems to be both Iranian government and Meta. Edit: can be a compromised CDN. See https://twitter.com/roozbehp/status/1572841090910388225?s=46... Edit 2: Videos are being removed too https://twitter.com/youranonstory/status/1572747450368290816... Edit 3: from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/protests-i…
I don't see mention of a CDN in the link or the conversation around it, the closest being "artifact of its infrastructure". Was it the correct link?
I'm not seeing how a CDN exploit would result in Instagram replying with "your post has been removed". That said I'm only inferring how Meta uses its CDNs (e.g storing static user posted video/image assets)
I'm a little surprised Whatsapp even works (worked) in Iran, given the US sanctions against the country.
Iran seems to think Whatsapp & Instagram are destabilizing such that turning them off can help quell domestic unrest. A couple of takeaways. First, holy shit. Communications software is powerful enough to put fear in the hearts of political rulers! Second, insofar as sanctions are designed as punitive measures against a government who's actions our government doesn't support, it makes no sense to restrict their acces…
Well, yes, is this a surprise? Did you miss the "Arab Spring?" Or the Rohingya massacres?
It's a double-edged sword. It can give you a revolution whether you need it or not or whether it's justified or not.
Does anyone know how this works in Iran? All the way from the decision making to the question of: who do you call? What commands do they execute? I would naively start with physical ingress points and add routing rules that stop traffic to service IP blocks (obtained by examining DNS records). Depending on how DNS is deployed (like, is there a national law to only use government run name servers?) you could freeze DN…
But really for a company like FB you could just blackhole their entire IP range(s) and/or AS (AS32934?) which would take everything offline very quickly.