Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

news.ycombinator.com

171–180 of 198 posts

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#171

Funny how the women's rights situation in Iran became bad enough to prompt large scale protests within two weeks of Iran joining SCO. Not two months earlier. Not two months later. Just within weeks.

This is the sixth occurrence of major protests in Iran in in five years.

How many of them were such large scale 'spontaneous' protests that were televised this much like this one...

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#172
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The objection was to your metaphor.

A metaphor is never going to cleanly map from one situation across to another. If it did, we would have no need for the metaphor as we would just have two identical scenarios. The metaphor’s purpose is to elucidate insight in one matter by presenting another with some similarities. If you’re going to object to a metaphor, I think you should do it on the grounds that it offers little to no insight into the situation.…

Your metaphor would work if we discussed whether or not to contact some isolated tribe in Amazon.

Then we could have discussed pro/cons of destroying someone way of life by introducing our civilization vs. turning a blind eye to the poor (by our standards) living conditions of the tribe.

Iran (even if you don't like its political system) is not it.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#173

We all sympathize with the death of Mahsa Amini. However, don't be a fool and destabilize and destroy your own country at the hands of foreigners. What do you intend to achieve with the chaos? Syria? Iraq? Afghanistan? Division of Iran into ethnic and religious enclaves? Because that is what the CIA/NSA/Mossad is working for. I'm all for protests by and for Iranians but this is no longer something related to Iran. An…

I am unsure... looking at pictures of iran in 1970 and they look quite happy being progressive back then. I could easily believe that people want to get back to to a similar lifestyle.

also see the movies : "my teheran for sale" and "Persepolis"

as much as I hate USA foreign policy, it is also possible that Iranians want peace and freedom outside of foreign interests.

not everything is black and white.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wonder how internet quality scales of antenna size. Would a covert antenna with a quarter of the area of a regular antenna give you somewhat usable internet?

It would be possible for Starlink to make more covert antennas. The smaller antennas would just make for a higher noise floor which would lead to more dropped packets. Such an antenna would be usable just lower throughput than the normal antenna.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#175
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A Starlink dish isn't much easier to hide than a Ka-band dish. It would be much easier to set up if taken down though since it's a phased array rather than parabolic. You're right that laser backhaul solves the ground station problem, so long as the track covering Iran has laser backhaul capability.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#176

Back in the 80's, I remember that people were protesting without internet and mobile phones, with very successful results. They bought down the iron curtain after all. The most sophisticated technology they used was the printing press, for printing and distributing fliers, newspapers and censored books. Underground groups were organized in cells too, without phones, email or apps. Right now, it seems like those who u…

Back in the 80s, the number of people who had been and were killed organizing this way had a lot of zeroes at the end of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a low tech approach to security where it makes sense, but it’s not a panacea. And it’s not like this evolving movement wasn’t organizing the same way at the same time, we’ve learned more from them than the inverse.

we’ve learned more from them than the inverse

Adding to this, their security forces learned a great deal as well. Here is a brief talk on this covering a little bit of the protest history and what is likely to occur. [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooROZDeds8o [video 4 mins]

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#177
post #90

This is why I invested many years and $1M of our profits into building Qbix Platform https://github.com/Qbix The why in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI The why in blog form: https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...

Make a separate Show HN post for it. Otherwise I am afraid this will get lost in shadows of the main discussion.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#178
post #172
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A metaphor is never going to cleanly map from one situation across to another. If it did, we would have no need for the metaphor as we would just have two identical scenarios. The metaphor’s purpose is to elucidate insight in one matter by presenting another with some similarities. If you’re going to object to a metaphor, I think you should do it on the grounds that it offers little to no insight into the situation.…

Your metaphor would work if we discussed whether or not to contact some isolated tribe in Amazon. Then we could have discussed pro/cons of destroying someone way of life by introducing our civilization vs. turning a blind eye to the poor (by our standards) living conditions of the tribe. Iran (even if you don't like its political system) is not it.

The metaphor obviously doesn’t resonate with you. It does resonate for myself and for 13 other people. I wish you well and hope you find something more to your liking.

Re: Tell HN: The Internet situation inside Iran

#179

you might want to consider scuttlebutt[1]. It's a truly decentralized social network. You can set up your own in-country servers to spread information between clients fairly easily and it doesn't matter if they take them down because it's decentralized any any other server can replace it. Set up a few and then if they take one down the others can spread the word about where to find its replacement. [1]: https://scutt…

Wouldn't p2p applications be problematic because they reveal the IPs of several people who are connected?
Post reply on HN