Word on the street is Starlink is operational in Iran [0]. Although the article claims it's being jammed in some neighbourhoods:
> Starlink was being jammed, Rashidi said, although the extent varied from one neighbourhood to another.
I've always thought the world needs a project to provide guerrilla internet connectivity to a large area using cheap, common hardware like a Raspberry Pi for situations like these which are increasingly common.
Basically a 12V battery-powered Wifi+3G(+Wimax maybe) antenna for clients and an outbound Ethernet port to plug to some illegal internet socket. Make it open-source, able to be built with a little ingenuity and low cost.
One of the best sources on Iran seems to be the Iranian/British comedian Omid Djalili on X funnily enough. The BBC have been a bit rubbish.
Run Tor Snowflake browser extension to help internet access (I like to think it helps!)
There is a case to be made that overcoming oppression is extremely hard to achieve in populations over 50 million. Are there any successful examples where this has happened?
What's chilling is realizing how little the coverage of those riots is in the West. At best, the BBC is copy-pasting the statements from Khamenei.
Thanks Elon.
That old maxim - the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it - no longer true unfortunately.
Larger and larger swathes of the world population are coming under the purview of governments and corporations that are technologically strangling the free flow of information over the intertubes. China, Russia, India, Iran, UK, US (corporations a.t.m.) are the prominent examples.
Just having a resilient software stack is no longer sufficient. An open source hardware stack AND infrastructure is critical.
Eventually there will be need for an open source manufacturing base as well. Even if it is only at the level of 1980s computing, that is better than nothing.
The world needs some big thinkers to start working on this yesterday. A civ resilient project to avoid the dystopian futures or something like the dark ages coming back.
interesting that this item has disappeared off the front pages completely, while items with much fewer comments persist...
So we are censoring comments we don't like? Iran? No, right here in the West
Comment in question:
It's ironic to watch the contradictions unfold
On one hand, nobody actually knows what's happening in Iran, yet everyone has a rock solid opinion, complete with intricate details, as if they'd just left a classified briefing
On the other hand, those same confident voices all want the same thing: a leader who'll privatize Iran's oil for Western companies, align with US policy, open markets to Western finance, and prioritize defense contracts over local development
Funny how that works
Some random farmer from Ohio is obsessed with Iran for some reason
I remember hearing a report that Iran was making real progress towards safety and freedom before the war on terror led them to appoint strong men to keep them safe.
Does anyone know enough to comment?
A Time source is alleging hundreds of protestor deaths in Tehran[0]. It's a repeat of 2019 [1]; the network blocks aren't incidental, it's their purpose to create cover for coordinating massacres.
[0] https://time.com/7345092/iran-protests-death-toll-regime-cra...
> "A Tehran doctor told TIME on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital had recorded at least 217 protester deaths, βmost by live ammunition.β"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019β2020_Iranian_protests