I've been moderately happy this morning to find out I can open hackernews. Also Gmail is working. After attempting to get bridges using email and configuring an dozen of them I got 100% connection but then it disconnected without me being able to connect to anything.
I would assume some sort of tunneling must be possible cause the services available are varied and not limited to a few websites (We only had access to Google Search for about a week and nothing before that) now even Nintendo Store opened to my complete surprise.
I there anything the outside world can do? Like are the people relying on https://snowflake.torproject.org/ and adding bandwidth there actually makes a difference?
I usually use snowflake as a last resort, and even that's not consistently working right now. However I've seen people recommend running Conduit[1] to friends overseas, which is an easy-to-use Psiphon proxy node. Psiphon is a popular circumvention tool here so that could be helpful.
If you're an American, demand radio free gets all it's funding back to 2024 levels, for a start. I read that people in Iran have relied on that service for a long time.
I use this same username everywhere and it's tied to my identity so let me keep it brief. I live in a small town and you wouldn't get much protesting or any political activity in those.
On the other hand, I'm currently serving in the police force (Which all able bodied men of age have to do and serve in one of the three armed forces of my country) and the bigger question since the start of the protests has been "What to do if I was put in a position against people?"
Thankfully that hasn't happened yet but still there is a feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The global cybersphere will split up, the west and other parties have shown they will use social media networks to organize regime change and take over legitimate protests.
Especially now that China is taking an ever increasing share of the global information streams. Given the increased panicked the US had about tiktok. Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in Gaza. They had to enforce ownership handover of tiktok US to a group of US based entities.
So i wouldn't be surprised US internet sphere will shrink over time now that China can go on the offensive in the cyber-realm.. The components are already in place just pull the switch so cloudflare has to regulate who gets in and who gets out.
When it comes to the internet, it seems to me that "the other parties" here carries a lot of weight when it comes to disinfo, polarizing propaganda, etc.
< The global cybersphere will split up, the west and other parties have shown they will use social media networks to organize regime change and take over legitimate protests.
It's interesting you focus on "the west" when we have solid proof about e.g. Russian interference in many an election and protest via social media. From paid propagandist (e.g. Tim Pool) to the Internet Research Agency. The only factual information we have about anything remotely similar from "the west" was that research about Facebook activity in the Central African Republic being roughly 40/40/20 split between Russians, French, and actual locals. And even that isn't comparable because the French online campaign was mostly combatting Russian disinformation propaganda, not trying to bring about a coup or stoking tensions to get to a civil war.
> Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in Gaza
The genocide in Gaza is not "sponsored" by the "west". US, maybe.
An even more apt analogy is France in New Caledonia. Back in 2024, the French territorial government used an anti-terrorism law to enforce DNS blocks in that overseas territory, for the express purpose of suppressing political protests (by New Caledonians angry at the French mainland government).
> "Philippe Gomes, the former president of New Caledonia's government, told POLITICO the decision aimed to stop protesters from "organizing reunions and protests" through the app."
This is the only example I'm aware of (are there others?) of a Western government effecting internet censorship to suppress protests. (Though the article also mentions Macron considering (but rejecting) the same idea in France, to suppress protests following a police shooting. See also[1])
The difference is that people in my country get to vote. A lot.
In the Netherlands GOVERNMENT=THE PEOPLE to a rather problematic degree (if only you knew how bad things really are).
If you want to start an argument "the Netherlands is just like Iran" I challenge it with 20 political parties in Parliament.
Including a pro Kremlin party lol.
Downvotes might happen because your comment reads one-sided.
What about Russia blocking sites?
As of late 2025 and early 2026, Russia has blocked numerous foreign communication, social media, and information services, restricting platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram (partially), Signal, Viber, FaceTime, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Many independent news, VPN services, and foreign websites (e.g., Chess.com) are also inaccessible
> Spain is blocking whole blocks of internet during football matches.
Lets make this clear: "Spain" is not blocking, some ISP companies which have many users ask the judge for permission to block IP ranges because they are streaming football matches. The judge agrees (they don't seem to know how Cloudflare works), so the ISPs are the ones that are blocking their own users to access sites behind Cloudflare. As they have millions of users, the block feels huge, but it is not issued by the government.
I am not a customer of those ISP, so my internet isn't disrupted at all during football matches. Some services, like annas-archive and torrent sites, are intermittently blocked, but you can easily avoid the blocks just by switching DNS server to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.
They already have uncensored unfiltered sim cards they issue to their own people, we found that out when X (Twitter) started showing which country you made the accout from and thousands of people had Iran which normal people can't access X without VPN. Its just that they shut off the internet for normal people now, which they hadn't done before.
In "normal" filtering situations, we can connect to most VPNs and do our stuff.
When blackouts like these happen, EVERYTHING is blocked. It gets almost impossible to connect to a VPN. They have advanced tech that detects and blocks all VPNS and proxies. The internet speed is also now at crawling speed so you really can't upload download anything.
Also, in each blackout, people find ways to work around the censorship. And each time, they detect them and patch them. We have almost ran out of ways to prevent the censorship now.
Do they have something like intranet with some local services, like in DPRK&Cuba? is this the case of completely losing connection and devices practically bricked for anything other than displaying the time?
We do. It's not very good. As in, there isn't even a properly functioning domestic search engine that can match the quality of anything past AltaVista. The only local platforms worth a damn are the ones you'd be using anyway. (the local equivalents to Uber, Maps etc.)
All other platforms (instant messengers, social media, news) are massively unpopular for being horrid to use at best, and government spyware at worst.
To slow down the immediate damage the government has rolled back a few of the recent restrictions, hence why I can access HN. Among Google and a handful of other basic websites. But they are obviously experimenting and trying to figure out how much censorship they can get away with. There is talk of a planned "whitelisting" of the country's internet. Where almost all but a few big important services are blocked completely. This would have the bonus effect of making circumvention using VPNs and other methods even more difficult than it already is.
I don't see any drawbacks on this. Recent protests demonstrated that:
a) protests can and will be crushed by the government forces and people will be ultimately defeated;
b) people have no means to force government to enable back freedoms;
c) control is much easier with no internet available.
Russia is on the same path by providing white-list only internet access "during Ukrainian attacks" and a bit longer every time until ultimately internet will become whitelist only.
Also as we have seen specifically in russia, there is no shortage of senior software developers and network engineers truly putting in their best work to block VPNs better and deeper.
Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.
Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
Drawbacks are that your population loses contact with progress. Your people become less skilled for the modern world. That's fine if you want a country of agrarian peasants or factory-working drones, but it cripples your country if it's in a technological arms race.
I mean, North Korea does manage to produce rockets and nuclear warheads. They aren't exporting technology, though.
I wouldn't be so sure about this. I think people who don't give a shit about society or politics or human rights abuses and only care about advancing cool technology can participate in and drive progress.
Does the Iranian economy rely heavily on access to the global internet? They can’t trade with most of the world due to sanctions, so what in their internal economy grinds to a halt without global communications? I’m not saying I think that it wouldn’t, just that I don’t immediately grasp the mechanism.
I guess by "Everybody I know who grew up in China" you mean those elites who speaks English and have already bypassed restrictions to talk to you online or travels to other countries. There's some selection bias here.
That assumes the regime cares more about the economic prosperity of their people than about staying in power. So far they seem to care more about power. North Korea provides a model for how terrible the situation can get for every day people in that sort of arrangement.
North Korea is effectively an island. Iran has many neighbors and long borders. They have no choice but to be at least semi integrated into the world and strong enough to defend themselves.
I don’t think a lot of their economy depends on the internet. Even rich countries in the Middle East would continue to sell oil if the internet wasn’t functional. Might cause some logistical issues but nothing that can’t be done over the phone.
AFAIK they used GPS spoofing which confuses the Starlink terminals - they need to know where they are to properly connect to the satellites above.
This can be overriden to use "Starlink positioning" where the terminal ignores GPS signals and dtermines its position based on Starlink satellite signals. I think this is what is used in Ukraine where GPS is mostly jammed/spoofed to hell even far from the front.
The GPS positioning is the default as it is likely more user friendly/has quicker lock in normal circumstances.
Another venue of attack could be the Starlink WiFi AP included in the terminals- you could track that down.
So in general:
* switch the terminal to Starlink positioning
* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC address
Spoofing - ok, but how did they detect all the starlinks? Assuming that users were smart to not turn on WiFi on starlink. Do these antennas emit certain waves that a “scanner” can detect and with 99% certainty figure out that that point on a map is a starlink antenna ?
My wild guess is that jamming is local. Major cities may be fully jammed. To get an idea about GNSS jamming range (different signal of course, probably much easier to jam), there are maps online where you can see which parts of Europe are currently GNSS-jammed. But I have the same question as you.
Definitely much easier to jam. Much higher orbits for gnss satellites, much lower signal intensity.
Also, starlink uses phased arrays with beamforming, effectively creating an electronically steerable directional antenna. It is harder to jam two directional antennas talking to each other, as your jammers are on the sides, where the lobes of the antenna radiation pattern are smaller.
Still, we're talking about signals coming from space, so maybe it is just enough to sprinkle more jammers in an urban setting.. I'm curious as well.
The GPS jamming maps are based on commercial air traffic flying in the area.
While that gives some ideas of how widespread the jamming is, it won't give accurate information about the range (air traffic avoids areas with jamming) of the interference or any information from places where there is no commercial air traffic (war zones, etc).
Supposedly it's high packet loss but still available to at least some extent. Or at least it was initially? Really highlights the importance of low bandwidth P2P capable messaging systems that support caching messages for later delivery as well as multiple underlying transports.
RF and GPS jamming has been a solved problem for decades. As a SWE, we are all expected to take Physics E&M, Circuits, and CompArch in our CS undergrad - think back to those classes.
Readit News
[1] https://conduit.psiphon.ca/
Here’s Tamir’s call for action https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7419994...
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Don't expect sending anything massive such as video recording, but should be enough for text-based communications.
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I’m almost afraid to ask but how are you and everyone else?
On the other hand, I'm currently serving in the police force (Which all able bodied men of age have to do and serve in one of the three armed forces of my country) and the bigger question since the start of the protests has been "What to do if I was put in a position against people?"
Thankfully that hasn't happened yet but still there is a feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Especially now that China is taking an ever increasing share of the global information streams. Given the increased panicked the US had about tiktok. Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in Gaza. They had to enforce ownership handover of tiktok US to a group of US based entities.
So i wouldn't be surprised US internet sphere will shrink over time now that China can go on the offensive in the cyber-realm.. The components are already in place just pull the switch so cloudflare has to regulate who gets in and who gets out.
It's interesting you focus on "the west" when we have solid proof about e.g. Russian interference in many an election and protest via social media. From paid propagandist (e.g. Tim Pool) to the Internet Research Agency. The only factual information we have about anything remotely similar from "the west" was that research about Facebook activity in the Central African Republic being roughly 40/40/20 split between Russians, French, and actual locals. And even that isn't comparable because the French online campaign was mostly combatting Russian disinformation propaganda, not trying to bring about a coup or stoking tensions to get to a civil war.
> Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in Gaza
The genocide in Gaza is not "sponsored" by the "west". US, maybe.
Spain is blocking whole blocks of internet during football matches.
UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.
But every such country likes pointing fingers at others, "hey, our censorship is not bad, they have more of it!".
edit: considering the downvotes, HN is not bothered by our censorship either
There are no ID cards in the UK, so you actually have to get a special jerking off loicense.
> "Philippe Gomes, the former president of New Caledonia's government, told POLITICO the decision aimed to stop protesters from "organizing reunions and protests" through the app."
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/french-tiktok-ban-new-caledo...
This is the only example I'm aware of (are there others?) of a Western government effecting internet censorship to suppress protests. (Though the article also mentions Macron considering (but rejecting) the same idea in France, to suppress protests following a police shooting. See also[1])
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36599726 ("Macron floats social media cuts during riots", 105 comments)
edit: There was also an incident in San Francisco way back in 2011,
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
In the Netherlands GOVERNMENT=THE PEOPLE to a rather problematic degree (if only you knew how bad things really are).
If you want to start an argument "the Netherlands is just like Iran" I challenge it with 20 political parties in Parliament. Including a pro Kremlin party lol.
If you are going to post shit like that, at least get your fucking facts right.
Namely that you are three weeks out of date sushine.
The idea has been dropped: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3385zrrx73o
What about Russia blocking sites?
As of late 2025 and early 2026, Russia has blocked numerous foreign communication, social media, and information services, restricting platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram (partially), Signal, Viber, FaceTime, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Many independent news, VPN services, and foreign websites (e.g., Chess.com) are also inaccessible
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Lets make this clear: "Spain" is not blocking, some ISP companies which have many users ask the judge for permission to block IP ranges because they are streaming football matches. The judge agrees (they don't seem to know how Cloudflare works), so the ISPs are the ones that are blocking their own users to access sites behind Cloudflare. As they have millions of users, the block feels huge, but it is not issued by the government.
I am not a customer of those ISP, so my internet isn't disrupted at all during football matches. Some services, like annas-archive and torrent sites, are intermittently blocked, but you can easily avoid the blocks just by switching DNS server to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.
In "normal" filtering situations, we can connect to most VPNs and do our stuff. When blackouts like these happen, EVERYTHING is blocked. It gets almost impossible to connect to a VPN. They have advanced tech that detects and blocks all VPNS and proxies. The internet speed is also now at crawling speed so you really can't upload download anything.
Also, in each blackout, people find ways to work around the censorship. And each time, they detect them and patch them. We have almost ran out of ways to prevent the censorship now.
All other platforms (instant messengers, social media, news) are massively unpopular for being horrid to use at best, and government spyware at worst.
To slow down the immediate damage the government has rolled back a few of the recent restrictions, hence why I can access HN. Among Google and a handful of other basic websites. But they are obviously experimenting and trying to figure out how much censorship they can get away with. There is talk of a planned "whitelisting" of the country's internet. Where almost all but a few big important services are blocked completely. This would have the bonus effect of making circumvention using VPNs and other methods even more difficult than it already is.
a) protests can and will be crushed by the government forces and people will be ultimately defeated;
b) people have no means to force government to enable back freedoms;
c) control is much easier with no internet available.
Russia is on the same path by providing white-list only internet access "during Ukrainian attacks" and a bit longer every time until ultimately internet will become whitelist only.
Also as we have seen specifically in russia, there is no shortage of senior software developers and network engineers truly putting in their best work to block VPNs better and deeper.
Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.
Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
I mean, North Korea does manage to produce rockets and nuclear warheads. They aren't exporting technology, though.
This is only a drawback if you think about your country's future.
Which oppressive regimes do not.
Thus it is an advantage, not a drawback.
They can do unconditional blocking at any moment and suddenly you can experience Internet blackout. [1]
The censorship from GFW is ever evolving. See the endless cat-and-mouse games yourself. [2][3]
[1] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/511
[2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+state%...
[3] https://gfw.report/en/
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This can be overriden to use "Starlink positioning" where the terminal ignores GPS signals and dtermines its position based on Starlink satellite signals. I think this is what is used in Ukraine where GPS is mostly jammed/spoofed to hell even far from the front.
The GPS positioning is the default as it is likely more user friendly/has quicker lock in normal circumstances.
Another venue of attack could be the Starlink WiFi AP included in the terminals- you could track that down.
So in general:
* switch the terminal to Starlink positioning
* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC address
And it should be good to go.
Definitely much easier to jam. Much higher orbits for gnss satellites, much lower signal intensity.
Also, starlink uses phased arrays with beamforming, effectively creating an electronically steerable directional antenna. It is harder to jam two directional antennas talking to each other, as your jammers are on the sides, where the lobes of the antenna radiation pattern are smaller.
Still, we're talking about signals coming from space, so maybe it is just enough to sprinkle more jammers in an urban setting.. I'm curious as well.
While that gives some ideas of how widespread the jamming is, it won't give accurate information about the range (air traffic avoids areas with jamming) of the interference or any information from places where there is no commercial air traffic (war zones, etc).
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