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Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

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Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#61

Post by squigz »

_moof wrote: post #28
badc0ffee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to think for a second to realize that HF means lower frequency than VHF, not high frequency in an absolute sense.

It's very silly that "high frequency" is among the lowest frequencies, and that we wound up with Very, Ultra, Super, Extremely, and Tremendously High Frequencies!

I thought you had to be joking, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremendously_high_frequency

And here I was thinking that GregTech's "Ludicrous Voltage" sounded out of place...

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#62

Post by ChrisArchitect »

Related today:

90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46603910

What we know about Iran's Internet shutdown https://blog.cloudflare.com/iran-protests-internet-shutdown/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602066)

Among a number of other posts previously getting into it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46591974

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#63

Post by literallywho »

firefax wrote: post #13

Old fashioned phone trees can be really useful IMHO OP. We used them when I worked in a school. If there was winter weather, you'd call say, everyone with a last name from A to G in the staff directory, someone else calls G to K, and so on and so forth. You can combine the phone tree with literal runners -- so basically, someone takes their burner and calls suburbs A,B,C and D and then the runners go out and pass the…

> You can combine the phone tree with literal runners

And I thought Mirror’s Edge world was too far fetched back in 2008. But, apparently, it’s the reality now or where things are headed after all.

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#64

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

bb88 wrote: post #31

States like Iran have signal catchers, where they can get a rough idea where a signal is coming from through triangulation. The US military has had this for over 20 years now. Often these coordinates are fed in as targets into weapons systems. If you're going the radio route these come to mind: Meshtastic: 1W, one band, local. Useful if Iran doesn't know about it. But easy to jam and probably triangulate. Wifi Halow:…

Not knowing much about radio hardware your post made me wonder why we don’t see too many options for radios that can do this outside the military. Is it because there’s rarely a practical use case outside of avoiding jamming? Or is the hardware to do so prohibitively expensive?

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#65

Post by deepsun »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #64
bb88 wrote: post #31

States like Iran have signal catchers, where they can get a rough idea where a signal is coming from through triangulation. The US military has had this for over 20 years now. Often these coordinates are fed in as targets into weapons systems. If you're going the radio route these come to mind: Meshtastic: 1W, one band, local. Useful if Iran doesn't know about it. But easy to jam and probably triangulate. Wifi Halow:…

Not knowing much about radio hardware your post made me wonder why we don’t see too many options for radios that can do this outside the military. Is it because there’s rarely a practical use case outside of avoiding jamming? Or is the hardware to do so prohibitively expensive?

Radio spectrum is licensed, and licenses are very expensive.

There are several bands for Amateur radio in US/EU/AU, but it is explicitly forbidden to use any kind of encryption on them. So no one can sell devices that use encryption on those bands.

And I doubt Iran was friendly to amateur radio in the first place. E.g. in USSR it was crazy to think of any non-approved radio.

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#66

Post by jiveturkey »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #53

Is it possible to setup LoRA mesh networks in Iran? LoRA chips should be on the order of You'd have to have a huge network spanning the entire country to get a message out however

I was going to suggest LoRA.

But a country-sized network with the purpose of evading a blackout would likely have to be full mesh. A network organized into a hierarchy (aggregated routing tables) requires some coordination that could quickly be identified and squashed.

The size of such a mesh is limited by scaling factors, so this couldn't span a nation. Let's say you could do that though. The network would be completely choked up with traffic to the point of unusability.

I think starlink, satphone, maybe packet radio on small scale are the most realistic options.

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#67

Post by jiveturkey »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #15
Nextgrid wrote: post #6

Starlink and/or BGAN/satellite phones.

starlink was explictly blocked there. they are jamming gps which is needed for it

you can unjam by providing the real signal locally, or a signal close enough for starlink to work. you don't need to be centimeter-precise.

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#68

Post by orbital-decay »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #56

Yggdrasil (mesh network) would be the longer-term solution. It is fast, resilient, and pure IPv6. But you'll have to establish IP links between interested parties to peer over. Eventually some will be able to peer over the internet, and connect everyone else to the rest of the world.

Yggdrasil was never designed to be censorship-resistant and can be blocked with trivial DPI.

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#69

Post by whatever1 »

deepsun wrote: post #65
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not knowing much about radio hardware your post made me wonder why we don’t see too many options for radios that can do this outside the military. Is it because there’s rarely a practical use case outside of avoiding jamming? Or is the hardware to do so prohibitively expensive?

Radio spectrum is licensed, and licenses are very expensive. There are several bands for Amateur radio in US/EU/AU, but it is explicitly forbidden to use any kind of encryption on them. So no one can sell devices that use encryption on those bands. And I doubt Iran was friendly to amateur radio in the first place. E.g. in USSR it was crazy to think of any non-approved radio.

I mean who can stop you from transmitting anything you want at any frequency? Licenses etc only matter when the rule of law is a thing.

Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

#70

Post by CableNinja »

squigz wrote: post #61
_moof wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very silly that "high frequency" is among the lowest frequencies, and that we wound up with Very, Ultra, Super, Extremely, and Tremendously High Frequencies!

I thought you had to be joking, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremendously_high_frequency And here I was thinking that GregTech's "Ludicrous Voltage" sounded out of place...

Scientists and engineers have fantastic senses of humor when naming things.

> The time derivative of acceleration is called jerk, and the time derivative of jerk is called jounce. One published paper whimsically named the fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of "snap", "crackle", and "pop" after the cartoon characters on boxes of Rice Krispies breakfast cereal.

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