Is there anything people outside Iran can spin up in order to get more routes out?

There is some evidence to suggest that certain countries (Russia, China, Iran itself) have an incentive to use the Gaza conflict to cause disunity in the west - and hence keep it in the news cycle and public opinion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/israel-hamas-i...

Interestingly, during the last internet blackout in Iran, a lot of the pro Scottish independence X accounts went quiet too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_influence_operations_i...

I'm sure many Iranians are deeply concerned about that cause.

It's all over American national news, competing for airtime with the domestic executions.

That's because the "30k" number is bs

> in Gaza even though they were mostly militants (using human shields).

You are severely misinformed or worse spreading misinformstion.

https://www.ochaopt.org/content/reported-impact-snapshot-gaz...

> Casualty numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health (MoH) and the Israeli authorities.

Estimated children killed: 20k.

Pray tell how children are "mostly militants". I'm not even mentioning the men/women killed here to really hammer home how utterly wrong this comment is.

Both Israel (Gaza), Iran (religious nuts) and the USA (ICE fascists and Trump's gang) can be declared as ruled by human turds, they aren't mutually exclusive.

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.

No, This is different.

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.

That would really boost productivity! Not gonna happen.

I mean... EU already blocks eg. some russian sites (some countries more effectively than others)... plus all the chat control pressures every year.

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

> Iranians will be reminded

I think this comment is misguided enough / detached from reality enough to rightfully be flagged to death for being trite and not contributing anything to the discussion.

Iranians lost internet than 3 weeks ago. They are as aware now as they ever will be about how things are going outside their borders.

> Then Iranians will be reminded how peaceful and prosperous the most other Muslim countries are.

This is factually incorrect. Top 10 majority-Muslim countries, sorted by population:

Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia

Now, the majority of those have problems with seeds in Western Imperialism, but the point is (a) the majority of those have problems (b) Iran's problems also have seeds in US interventions.

The gap between how peaceful and educated most people are, and how bad governments are, is a phenomenon almost unique here. Figuring out how to bridge that gap is the major challenge. The trick would be establishing a collective caliphate -- where the caliph isn't an individual but an institution -- and which spans the Muslim world.

> how peaceful and prosperous the most other Muslim countries are.

Which coutries are those?

Hard to make it airtight without tanking the economy. Since the economy is already tanked, I guess they don’t care anymore.

Have they though? Everybody I know who grew up in China has told me its trivial to bypass restrictions with VPNs

This will be entirely possible in 2027 when AI will be able to individually profile each connection for "disident" risk.

Do you think they have a better shot than any other country with an explicit firewall (Eritrea, China, NK, Cuba etc…)

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 unfortunately has given them a path forward. If you're willing to murder your own citizens en masse, you can get away with about anything.

Nah, just for a year or so, after they will say all the footage is "AI generated".

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.

You can jam the satellites, you can jam the receivers and you can jam GPS.

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.

It not just information, but capital (crypto) - think prediction markets and their influence:

https://polymarket.com/event/khamenei-out-as-supreme-leader-...

Mossad is curious as well. They might want to indiscriminately make people's devices blow up in public again.

Astroturfing much? I haven’t been able to talk to my family for three weeks. Friends who manage to connect are hopping from one workaround to another because IPs are routinely blocked.

You’re proposing a world wide agreement even by their allies? Like they can just tunnel their traffic through Russia or China.

You could try to bifurcate into allied and non allied, but even that would be flawed, especially in countries like the USA where it becomes a first amendment right to try to ban such connectivity. It’s very hard to kill the Internet in terms of connecting peers - that’s kind of the point of its design.

> perhaps they will now form pleasant relationships and have joyful interactions

You do understand what’s happening in Iran, right? Hard to take your comment seriously.