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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?

#71

Post by a012 »

whatever1 wrote: post #69
deepsun wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Once you transmitted, you’re exposed so the authority can find you sooner or later

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

#72

Post by nerdsniper »

whatever1 wrote: post #69
deepsun wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's trivially easy to watch the entire radio frequency range at once and triangulate the location of any transmission. If someone more powerful than you wants to stop you, they can.

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

#73

Post by nerdsniper »

idontwantthis wrote: post #19
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…

Radio stations too. The US civil rights movement sometimes used radio DJs to call people out for protests.

ClearChannel and Spotify certainly changed that potential!

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

#74

Post by wolvoleo »

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:…

WSPR carries almost no payload data and by default it literally broadcasts your location. You could modify it but it will still take ages to send a short sentence which is probably the last thing you want when you want to avoid getting caught.

Short bursty spread spectrum hopping seems to be more what the military do and they also care deeply about triangulation.

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

#75

Post by wolvoleo »

a012 wrote: post #71
whatever1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Once you transmitted, you’re exposed so the authority can find you sooner or later

Well yes but you could of course choose not to stay at the location you transmit from.

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

#76

Post by pjc50 »

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…

Presumably the phones are tapped?

People have been claiming for years that US phone calls are subject to routine computer analysis (Echelon); these days that's a relatively cheap thing to do with LLMs.

I suspect the literal runners solution is what's happening, although that's also very dangerous when the police control the streets.

And don't forget the whatsapp group chat classic: secure communications where at least one person in the group is leaking them.

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

#77

Post by edgineer »

literallywho wrote: post #63
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.

Using couriers, and not phones, was largely how bin Laden escaped capture for so long. Took months to track a courier back to him.

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

#79

Post by markus_zhang »

nerdsniper wrote: post #72
whatever1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's trivially easy to watch the entire radio frequency range at once and triangulate the location of any transmission. If someone more powerful than you wants to stop you, they can.

Just curious what if the transmitter hops freq around? What is the tech to track these?

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

#80

Post by uyzstvqs »

orbital-decay wrote: post #68
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.

That's correct. But it is designed so that it can run over PTP IP links, which is the only option in a full internet blackout. Yggdrasil is censorship-resistant in that it can form one big mesh network, without the internet or ISPs. Peering over the internet is just convenience.

If you want to peer over a censored internet connection, you should set up XRay first and peer over that.

Yggdrasil is not a darknet or anti-censorship tool for the internet. It's an alternative to the internet.

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