Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 261 posts

Re: As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp

#161

Post by eternalban »

danrocks wrote: post #143
amir734jj wrote: post #98

This protest is very different from previous protests. Look it up. Women in Iran are just tired of being oppressed and their movement is an embodiment of feminism. I'm an Iranian and unfortunately this protest hasn't received world wide attention in the news. This is a first time women taking the lead in protesting against this tyrannical regime.

Welcome news, for sure. It seems that Iranians are fierce people who are not afraid of protesting their government. Why do protests usually stall, though? Is it the virulence of the repression machine?

A legacy of social mistrust. USSR had the same exact feature. A variation on 'Everyone was dissatisfied, but no one trusted anyone else'. This is what keeps any regime in power even when the general population doesn't like them: fear of betrayals at personal and movement levels (in places reinforced by recent historic examples).

Re: As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp

#163

Post by throwaway894345 »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #122

Oppressive governments must be thankful to all BigTechs able to consolidate userbase and services around a handful of apps. It makes it really easy to switch things on/off when needed. The original purpose of the Internet as being a resilient p2p network for the people has been completely defeated in some nations.

It's not like ordinary people were running their own mail servers or other p2p tech in the pre-Big-Tech days, nor would it have been considerably harder for the government to disrupt email traffic than it is for them to block Facebook/etc. This isn't a pro-Big-Tech or pro-centralization message, only that we never actually lived in a golden age of ubiquitous decentralized communication that was robust against state actor censorship.

Re: As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp

#164

Post by jimbob45 »

amir734jj wrote: post #98

This protest is very different from previous protests. Look it up. Women in Iran are just tired of being oppressed and their movement is an embodiment of feminism. I'm an Iranian and unfortunately this protest hasn't received world wide attention in the news. This is a first time women taking the lead in protesting against this tyrannical regime.

Iran is geographically two countries away from Israel, the country that clandestinely fomented similar riots/insurrections in 10+ other countries that border Israel during the Arab Spring. Furthermore, Israel has been greatly outspoken in its hatred of Iran and Iran's nuclear program, going so far as to deploy the most sophisticated cyberattack in history[1]. It would hardly be a conspiracy theory to pin this on Israel rather than women suddenly waking up and deciding to riot after thousands of years of oppression.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

Re: As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp

#165

Post by KptMarchewa »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #122

Oppressive governments must be thankful to all BigTechs able to consolidate userbase and services around a handful of apps. It makes it really easy to switch things on/off when needed. The original purpose of the Internet as being a resilient p2p network for the people has been completely defeated in some nations.

You drastically underestimate power that those oppressive governments have in real world that some fancy decentralized solution would solve. They just take down the internet.

Re: As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp

#166

Post by mylons »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #163
rodolphoarruda wrote: post #122

Oppressive governments must be thankful to all BigTechs able to consolidate userbase and services around a handful of apps. It makes it really easy to switch things on/off when needed. The original purpose of the Internet as being a resilient p2p network for the people has been completely defeated in some nations.

It's not like ordinary people were running their own mail servers or other p2p tech in the pre-Big-Tech days, nor would it have been considerably harder for the government to disrupt email traffic than it is for them to block Facebook/etc. This isn't a pro-Big-Tech or pro-centralization message, only that we never actually lived in a golden age of ubiquitous decentralized communication that was robust against state a…

this just sounds like whataboutism and is skirting the issue. there is an enormous amount of censorship power within BigTech right now. given the “value” their core businesses provide, which is funded by manipulating your attention to get ad impressions, they should be broken up. why does facebook get to run whatsapp when it’s an ad business?

Re: As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp

#167

Post by aljgz »

danrocks wrote: post #145
aljgz wrote: post #124

Iranian software engineer here, AMA

Why do protests in Iran always seem to lose steam before any change is made? Rust or Zig?

There are several factors.

One is the government's violence. They shoot people with rifles, arrest them and kill them in the prison, do everything they can to scare people off.

Another is government's total control over communication. In 2009 they shut down the internet and SMS for a week. They did that again recently. When people cannot communicate, they can't organize.

Another is a lack of leadership. The government has successfully removed (killed or imprisoned) anyone people trusted. Intolerance plagues cooperation of opposition groups. Maybe that's because of the history of Iran, maybe part of that is fueled by the government (it maintains an army of supporters in cyber space, spreading misinformation, hatred, and everything else they can do to prevent a large scale movement, some times masquerading as opposition)

Re: As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp

#168

Post by tptacek »

marcosdumay wrote: post #153
Abekkus wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a resilient p2p service on the internet doesn't just require not using big name SaaS, it means building that service to not need the WebCAs or even DNS, two core services that are anything but p2p. I honestly don't know of any applications that require neither.

You can distribute DNS data over any transport, p2p or not. Ans with DNSSEC, you can trust the contents you get from any transport. Are you concerned with countries forcefully removing entries? Because there are a lot of other country TLDs where you can add your entries if you want.

Virtually everyone relies on ISP DNS servers, which can trivially bypass DNSSEC (DNSSEC collapses down to a single bit in the header on the last hop from server to stub resolver). If all you're trying to do is resist DNS censorship, you can get almost everything you need from using an out-of-country name and DoH, which is universally available, very much unlike DNSSEC.

Re: As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp

#169

Post by mylons »

jimbob45 wrote: post #164
amir734jj wrote: post #98

This protest is very different from previous protests. Look it up. Women in Iran are just tired of being oppressed and their movement is an embodiment of feminism. I'm an Iranian and unfortunately this protest hasn't received world wide attention in the news. This is a first time women taking the lead in protesting against this tyrannical regime.

Iran is geographically two countries away from Israel, the country that clandestinely fomented similar riots/insurrections in 10+ other countries that border Israel during the Arab Spring. Furthermore, Israel has been greatly outspoken in its hatred of Iran and Iran's nuclear program, going so far as to deploy the most sophisticated cyberattack in history[1]. It would hardly be a conspiracy theory to pin this on Isra…

uhm —- even if israel is fanning the flames of this, so what?

Re: As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp

#170

Post by throwaway894345 »

ailef wrote: post #116
throwayyy479087 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, they won’t be. China has been exporting some really amazing surveillance tools to Iran, NK, Russia that make revolutions basically impossible now. When was the last successful overthrow of a despot in a middle income country? Euromaiden 2014?

Euromaidan 2014 overthrew a democratically elected president.

It's not clear that he was "democratically elected"--there were many allegations of election fraud and voter intimidation. Moreover, he wasn't "overthrown", parliament voted to remove him (because he ordered the police to shoot protesters en masse). The courts also convicted him of treason, and he was even disavowed by his own party.
Post reply on HN