None of the people I know inside Iran actually use this Toosheh[1] thing. And I mean zero, nada, none. Not one. Most are unaware of its existence. This sounds something that sounded cool pre-Starlink era that received funds and favors from western governments and NGOs and did not result in anything useful (not surprising that they get international press too despite being a total failure.) Realistically, a download-only solution does not solve a problem. Persian video content that people watch are delivered via DVB Satellite TV video channels. With Internet, what people want is to communicate and therefore need realtime access and data upload capability to contact others and use web services, not download a new offline copy of Wikipedia everyday! In practice, Iranians inside Iran end up mostly using VPNs and tunnels of various sorts. Often some variant of shadowsocks with SNI spoofing, which stop working in a full blackout. What will be left during a full blackout is people who have government-sanctioned SIM cards with full Internet access (known as "white SIMs") to propagandize on social networks in favor of the reigme when everyone else is disconnected and, a tiny set of people who have acquired Starlink terminals.

The same set of people behind that project were supposedly given additional resources to smuggle Starlinks inside, and in the Persian community on Twitter, there's an ongoing meme mocking where those Starlinks actually went and given to whom, never to get an answer...

[1]: TLDR: data archive within DVB-S video stream

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ifwinterco an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I also wonder: if roles were reversed and (say for example) the US government was blocking parts of the internet to stop rampant CCP propaganda during a war with China - would "NetFreedom Pioneers" be advocating for ways for Americans to get around the block so they could continue to consume CCP propaganda because "muh freedom".

I expect not to be honest.

Not saying the cause is wrong necessarily but let's just call a spade a spade - this is aimed to help one side and one side only, "freedom" has nothing to do with it

	▲	tgma an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It appears they do receive funds from US government so while I cannot directly answer your hypothetical question, I imagine they would lose at least some of their fundings. The author of the IEEE article is receiving compensation as Executive Director. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/455... That said, I'm sure CCP is spending more than enough to make sure Americans get its propaganda, so I wouldn't be too worried if I were in your shoes.
	▲	vrganj 40 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"Freedom" as used by American politicians has always been a euphemism for "the interests of the American ruling class".

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stackghost 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>What will be left during a full blackout is people who have government-sanctioned SIM cards with full Internet access (known as "white SIMs") to propagandize on social networks in favor of the reigme when everyone else is disconnected and a tiny set of people who have Starlink.

One would think this is exactly the sort of circumstances under which store-and-forward/delay-tolerant routing would be useful. Years before Jack Dorsey thought of bitchat[0] I had the same idea, but never pursued it because I live in a western country but not in a "tech city", in other words, nobody around here is interested in being an early adopter of an app primarily of use only to preppers or people living under repressive authoritarian regimes.

Anyways, it's a great idea in theory, as the techno-anarchist preppers that LARP with off-the-shelf lilygo LoRa tranceivers will be happy to tell you. But in practice nobody who actually could benefit from these seems to adopt these things. Or at least I never hear about it, if they indeed do. Perhaps today's internet blackouts are too transient for a 2026 version of samizdat to develop?

Do the people you know inside Iran plan to just wait it out, or do they have some other solution ready for a total blackout?

[0] https://bitchat.free/

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tgma 3 hours ago | parent [-]

To be clear while the annoying firewall has been a forever thing, and even grandmas know how to use VPNs day-to-day to access Instagram, a full, long-term blackout, has been a relatively new thing, so I don't think there's enough prep for that. Bitchat was certainly something that was spoken about after the January protests and before the war broke out. There was even a thief who cloned and renamed it something Persian without attribution and with shady security and the Bitchat guy got upset about it just a few weeks ago.

There are some government-sanctioned messengers that apparently keep working but some people would not use it as they are completely insecure and watched by big brother, of course. The biggest issue is getting data out of the country not internal comms (e.g. video evidence of massacre, for example, so that some poeple like in this very thread don't get the ammo to whitewash the regime, intentionally or accidentally.)

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stackghost 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>The biggest issue is getting data out of the country not internal comms

No doubt. Unless there's somebody friendly just across the border in Azerbaijan or Basrah or something, I don't see how they'd do it. Maybe point a dish and establish a point to point link, but you'd need to pre-arrange that.

	▲	tgma 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think what you are suggesting is more practical today than before, since there are at least a few people who have some sort of access. The real catch is really the prep, or lack thereof. The anecdotes around me is they are hoping (perhaps wishfully) for a total regime collapse and internet freedom relatively soon.