Live data from Hacker News

A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns

zola.ink

51–60 of 130 posts

Re: A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns

#51

If you are ever thinking of writing somethings like this: please be aware that people could be executed based upon the validity of your assumptions and advice offered.

It certainly looks like it is compiled by a neural net or human that has no idea how people they talk about actually live. Places of actual discussion of censorship circumvention tools are full of much different talk on how to fool the external or internal DPI servers, on tunnelling through white-listed protocols, and so on.

Also, those who can be executed like that have already realised that “safe” way of being a “good citizen” does not exist, it's a phantom for people who are — at the moment — rich, happy and walled from the rest (either physically or in their minds). They probably don't need to be told not to trust someone who is offering to solve all their problems.

Re: A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns

#52
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, although many people probably don't know the difference between SMS and RCS and use SMS to refer to both.

Even tech people? wowe

You mean that group that still calls TLS SSL even though its been 26 years?

Re: A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns

#53

If you are ever thinking of writing somethings like this: please be aware that people could be executed based upon the validity of your assumptions and advice offered.

There is that iranian bot army we hear about: "dont write down knowledge or else someone somewhere will be executed!"

Re: A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns

#54

I wish this article went into more details on what the "National Information Network" is. I would guess it's at least a set of nationally managed DNS servers that will always resolve national IPs even if upstream global DNS is cut off. Looking at a bigger picture though, honestly I think we're seeing the end of the raw global Internet for the masses. 20 years ago, it seemed impossible, but here we are. It's simply no…

This is just pendulum swinging between centralized and distributed. This is true for "online services", the Internet, computing (mainframes, PCs,cloud, mobile, etc.). If it swings one way, it'll swing back eventually. Just look for the innovations that make one option viable compared to others.

Re: A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns

#55

> WireGuard uses UDP and a small handshake footprint, making detection and blocking via DPI harder. Not quite true. Wireguard is already actively detected and suppressed if necessary. There's already a fork that employs basic changes to improve the protocol in this regard. AmneziaWG was shown to be more robust to detection for now. https://docs.amnezia.org/documentation/amnezia-wg/ Too bad managing WG is such a pain…

True. but based on my researches don't use DPI on the NIN, so you might be able to use WG or OpenVpn on a VPS inside Iran but not to a VPS on let's say digital ocean. They can also selectively increase the or decrease the strength of their DPI as well, for example a range of IP can be graylisted and nothing will work on it, or they put more active probing effort on some ranges of IPs.

Re: A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns

#56

I wish this article went into more details on what the "National Information Network" is. I would guess it's at least a set of nationally managed DNS servers that will always resolve national IPs even if upstream global DNS is cut off. Looking at a bigger picture though, honestly I think we're seeing the end of the raw global Internet for the masses. 20 years ago, it seemed impossible, but here we are. It's simply no…

I have to do more research on NIN, it's hard to know what they're exactly doing.

Re: A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it seems to me that a nation determined to control wired network traffic within its borders cannot be circumvented. if they can control the ISPs and observe packet flows then they can just obstruct any connection they cannot conclusively prove is acceptable. it seems then that store-and-forward ad hoc p2p (ie extremely high unpredictable latency) is the only option for those who can reach some node with a connection…

> it seems to me that a nation determined to control wired network traffic within its borders cannot be circumvented. Starlink/Kuiper and the geostationary satellites are an alternative. Not perfect... but far better than *nothing*

None of the major mobile satellite networks work without the terminal’s position being known.

Re: A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns

#58

I wish this article went into more details on what the "National Information Network" is. I would guess it's at least a set of nationally managed DNS servers that will always resolve national IPs even if upstream global DNS is cut off. Looking at a bigger picture though, honestly I think we're seeing the end of the raw global Internet for the masses. 20 years ago, it seemed impossible, but here we are. It's simply no…

Maybe, or Starlink and software destabilize the authoritarians.

Yes, they will, im saying it with such certainty because of how much they're scared of it. It shows when they criminalize it and call it "spyware".

But no matter what they do there will be light at the end. it cannot always be night.

Re: A technical look at Iran's internet shutdowns

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Obscura we just tunnel WireGuard over QUIC's unreliable datagram mechanism to make it look like HTTP/3 (for DPI): https://github.com/Sovereign-Engineering/obscuravpn-client/b... We just upstreamed our patch to quinn-rs that pads Datagrams to MTU: https://github.com/quinn-rs/quinn/pull/2274

Some DPIs just flat out block HTTP/3 already.

> Some DPIs just flat out block HTTP/3 already.

Actually, some DPIs just straight-up reject UDP (and since DNS and NTP are UDP-based*, just straight-up interception-and-redirect).

* TCP DNS exists but practically not used for most "normal" tasks, and at this point the censor is trying to block anything anyways.

Post reply on HN