Quoted post unavailable.
Iranians are protesting and chanting "women, life, freedom". So are you saying that you're against those moral ideals?
woman is not a moral
Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran
91–100 of 198 posts
Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran
#92What happened to starlink?
Terminals have to get in-country and there needs to be usable ground stations in the same cell as the terminal. Good luck getting a terminal to Tehran where the police are apparently gleefully destroying satellite dishes. Even if you got an intact terminal there's no ground station nearby. StarLink has been given special dispensation to operate in Iran. This is not the same as air dropping a warehouse worth of termin…
I believe there is no gateway (ground station) problem. It only needs to be in view of the satellite, not in the same cell, and even if there is no gateway in sight, laser backhaul is now operational (see starlink providing service in Antarctica now, https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/spacex-satellite-internet-...)
You do need to get the user terminals into the country, though. But once you do, they're easier to hide than a geostationary satellite dish.
Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran
#93Just curious, is there some sort of special license or permission required to get access to computing resources like these in Iran, like there is with the Chinese website license number thing?
I have thought about trying to run a VPN server on my EC2 web server for my friends in Iran but not sure if regular VPN protocols are even allowed through. I don't think they know what Tor is much less how to set it up with a custom bridge. They seem to be using some kind of proxy/bridge for Telegram, but didn't know the technical English vocab to tell me exactly what it was.
Ironically, I once talked to someone very pro-regime on HelloTalk and asked them why they were using Telegram if it was blocked/illegal there, since they would defend the regime on anything else you asked them about. They claimed to believe that it was blocked because of US sanctions and denied that the government blocked any websites. Is this a narrative they are pushing on state media there?
Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran
#94the servers inside Iranian data centers still have access to the outside world. Knowing that, the simplest and easiest solution that would avoid detection is to SSH tunnel into that datacenter and SSH-ProxyForward out of that datacenter into Amazon AWS via SSH and use that SSH proxy chain as a SOCKS proxy for browsers. Make sure the browser is using the SOCKS proxy (SSH) for its DNS. Many sites will make your friends…
This is a good recommendation.
Using Tor sounds good in theory, but it's too far easy to identify all of the Tor connections and identify the residences connected to them.
I would suggest using SSH tunnels on whatever port a given server normally communicates on. If this is 443, connections should just look like normal web browsing on an ISP level. If the server is used to transmit other data over TLS using that port should be fine too.
All of that said, the challenging thing is not to secure the traffic, but to make it look normal. A persistent connection is not normal from a residential IP in most cases. This means you should take your session down once you've sent your messages for the day.
Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran
#95Just curious, is there some sort of special license or permission required to get access to computing resources like these in Iran, like there is with the Chinese website license number thing? I have thought about trying to run a VPN server on my EC2 web server for my friends in Iran but not sure if regular VPN protocols are even allowed through. I don't think they know what Tor is much less how to set it up with a c…
I moved out of Iran about 10 years ago, but when I was there you couldn't purchase internet plans faster than 128kbps unless you had a legitimate reason such as being a reporter, business, etc. There was, however, no special license needed for any computing equipment. I purchased very cheap VPS and other resources without even having to submit any personal info.
Nowadays, the limit is gone and there is faster internet access but the issue of filtering still exists. When a service doesn't work in Iran it's either due to sanctions, the government blocking access to some domain/ip, or a combination of both. The user is left wondering which one it is and how they can get around it
Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran
#96I spun a c3.large for the cause and email the person.
any gotchas I should worry about? (the aws calculator gives me 76.65$ USD / month)
I want to help but I am by no mean rich... don't want a crazy AWS bill...
Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran
#97I spun a c3.large for the cause and email the person. any gotchas I should worry about? (the aws calculator gives me 76.65$ USD / month) I want to help but I am by no mean rich... don't want a crazy AWS bill...
I’m by no means an expert, but one thing I would keep an eye on is the egress data metric, because Amazon charges for that. If there’s a lot of traffic you might be billed more.
Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran
#98Can people use a steganography app to communicate via innocuous images? 1. Take a picture. 2. Use app to insert message into picture, encrypt with passphrase. 3. SMS picture to friend or upload to Iranian equivalent of imgur (if any is up). 4. Friend loads picture into app and types passphrase to get message. I'm not sure what a good choice of app would be, but something good must exist?
Is there any good open source or publicly usable steganography software with reasonable UX? Page 1 of Google shows this thing called OpenStego. I've heard of steganography but have no idea what tools are reputable in this space.
PixelKnot for Android, developed by Guardian Project:
https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/info.guardianproject.pix...
Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran
#99I spun a c3.large for the cause and email the person. any gotchas I should worry about? (the aws calculator gives me 76.65$ USD / month) I want to help but I am by no mean rich... don't want a crazy AWS bill...
I’m by no means an expert, but one thing I would keep an eye on is the egress data metric, because Amazon charges for that. If there’s a lot of traffic you might be billed more.
thanks... I revised the simulator, and indeed, I could have racked a serious bill 1-4k
Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran
#100I spun a c3.large for the cause and email the person. any gotchas I should worry about? (the aws calculator gives me 76.65$ USD / month) I want to help but I am by no mean rich... don't want a crazy AWS bill...
Wouldn't something like DigitalOcean or Linode help? They are far more cheaper and you don't get weird random invoices from them.