Iran in 'Digital Blackout' as Tehran Throttles Mobile Internet Access (thenationalnews.com) 45
An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet access available through mobile devices in Iran appears to be limited, according to several social media accounts that routinely track such developments. Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic on behalf of the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said on Thursday that IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), a standard widely used for mobile infrastructure, was affected.
"IPv6 address space in Iran dropped by 98.5 per cent, concurrent with IPv6 traffic share dropping from 12 per cent to 1.8 per cent, as the government selectively blocks internet access amid protests," read Cloudflare Radar's social post. NetBlocks, which tracks internet access and digital rights around the world, also confirmed it was seeing problems with connectivity through various internet providers in Iran. "Live network data show Tehran and other parts of Iran are now entering a digital blackout," NetBlocks posted on X.
"IPv6 address space in Iran dropped by 98.5 per cent, concurrent with IPv6 traffic share dropping from 12 per cent to 1.8 per cent, as the government selectively blocks internet access amid protests," read Cloudflare Radar's social post. NetBlocks, which tracks internet access and digital rights around the world, also confirmed it was seeing problems with connectivity through various internet providers in Iran. "Live network data show Tehran and other parts of Iran are now entering a digital blackout," NetBlocks posted on X.
Fuck this (Score:3, Interesting)
They need to drag out all the mullahs, lunatics, rabid dog clerics, and schutzstaffel types that have been running the place! No appeasement bullshit. The regime murdered people youth in their teens and early 20s for the most trivial things. They showed no regard for human life, why should anyone have regard for theirs?
If the theocrats are coddled they will keep trying to come back.That place needs an Ataturk times 10, PLUS French revolution/First Republic level score settling. I'm talking about a complete dismantling of the bubonic theocratic cancer plague.
And btw, they shouldn't get the so called Shah's son .. or "crown prince" back. He's the definition of a soft-ass pansy. He'll be milquetoast and set it up such that the theorcracy can agitate and con it's way back into powe within a few years.
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"He'll be milquetoast and set it up such that the theorcracy can agitate and con it's way back into powe within a few years."
Is he milquetoast or can he set it up so the theocracy can come back? Seem like mutually contradictory things.
Anyway, the Iranians want the Shah. There is no organized internal opposition force, he's moderately well-respected, he hates the theocracy (so why would he reinstate it?), and he's pledged supporting democracy.
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Not seeing the contradiction. He's not deliberately going to enable the the theocracy to return, but he'll allow it to return out of naivete and lack of toughness.
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Yeah, 47 years ago! Most of the people who supported that revolution are dead, and only the islamic geezers now support it. The only slogans being chanted by the demonstrators are pro Pahlavi chants
Before 1979, Iran was never a republic. The Pahlavis came to power by ousting the Qajars in 1925
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The Shah is long dead.
He was a strong supporter of democracy, e.g. introducing women voting rights.
If there is a successor as in son/daughter who could be Shah: no idea.
If there is, it will be a person having no clue about Iran, politics, and probably democracy neither.
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Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi - the last Shah - died some years in exile, and is buried in Cairo. His son - Reza Pahlavi - is the person whose name people in Iran are shouting
Reza Pahlavi has said that he is not interested in power (yeah, yeah, I know they all say that, but he lives a nice cushy life in Maryland, so why would he need to care?), but that he wants the current regime to be replaced by a secular, democratic country. Beyond that, his transition plan calls for a referendum, where Iranians will v
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Sadly, "they" are the mullahs, lunatics, rabid dog clerics, and schutzstaffel.
Options for Iran (Score:2)
I agree w/ the first part of what you said: do a complete purge of the theocrats. Starting w/ the ayatollah and down to every mullah (not sure about the islamic clerical hierarchy). As per a GAMAAN survey in 2020 [gamaan.org], contrary to popular belief that Iranians are 98% muslim, it turns out that only 40% of Iranians are muslims of any sect, and only 32% are Imamiyeh shi'a - the ruling state religion. Note that this survey was done 6 years ago, and the numbers today are probably far lower. 22% say None (meaning
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The problem is he isn't a strongman. He's not tough. He has the right beliefs (or at least talks) in terms of being secular and all that, it's just that he won't be tough on the extremists.
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Good point. That said, he has said that the members of the regime will get due process, something that they forever denied others. While one's raw instinct towards the mullahs may be bloodlust, at some point, Iran has to break the cycle of violence and embrace rule of law, so that they become a country that people are happy to work in, and with, such as Poland, as opposed to just flipping power and making it a payback exercise
The other thing is that popular support in the streets is overwhelmingly behin
Re: Fuck this (Score:2)
These are the implementation of Islamic laws, and criticizing Islam is a death sentence there and in most of the middle east. In most western countries, it's a hate crime that will probably land you in jail.
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They need to drag out all the mullahs, lunatics, rabid dog clerics, and schutzstaffel types that have been running the place! No appeasement bullshit. The regime murdered people youth in their teens and early 20s for the most trivial things. They showed no regard for human life, why should anyone have regard for theirs?
If the theocrats are coddled they will keep trying to come back.That place needs an Ataturk times 10, PLUS French revolution/First Republic level score settling. I'm talking about a complete dismantling of the bubonic theocratic cancer plague.
And btw, they shouldn't get the so called Shah's son .. or "crown prince" back. He's the definition of a soft-ass pansy. He'll be milquetoast and set it up such that the theorcracy can agitate and con it's way back into powe within a few years.
Javid Shah motherfucker.
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You're right. Carter's naiveness F'd the world, no amount of his other peace deals and post presidency stuff made up for it. The only excuse is that it was impossible for him to know. The lesson is when there are religion-mad people advocating crazy stuff, they need to be stopped early and hard.
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Given the various forces trying to pull Iran into their orbit, the Shah did a good job. The main challenge to his regime initially looked like coming from the Left, so he had SAVAK cracked down on them. The mistake he made was underestimating the islamic forces trying to take over Iran. On top of that, while he resurrected pre-islamic Iranian history - something that islam considers "jahiliya" or the "period of ignorance", he also continued to patronize islam both in Iran and abroad, although of course n
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Russia offering some asylum may be helpful. Some in the regime may choose to flee early that may be a good thing to hasten its demise. I believe there's a recommendation in Sun Tzu's book "Art of War" .. always let the enemy see an escape route, because if they feel cornered they'll fight harder.
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For those who don't know (Score:5, Interesting)
This is actually Egypt's original tactic, that Russians learned and then passed on to the Iranians.
The idea is that you have kill switches on national edge routers. And you don't touch them until your domestic security people are ready to go.
Then you hit the kill switch, disrupting communications. It takes a while for protesters to reorganize to P2P and while that is ongoing, there's no command and control. So your domestic security people get to just cleave their way through disorganized masses for quite a while.
In this case, this is what IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the people who have the actual responsibility for maintaining the theocratic rule) has done already in the past. Like most such organizations, it takes time to set up a proper response to a wide uprising, and it's important not to tip your hand before your men are in position to just go and crush it. Because if you do, they will adapt by the time you men get to them.
Unfortunately it looks like it's going to be a rough couple of days in Iran for those who rose up.
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I have been following their news closely, from Iranian expats. Today was the day of a national strike, called by the Kurds, Balochis and Reza Pahlavi. In several cities nationwide, there have been IRGC/Basij defections, since they have been badly outnumbered. If they were going to switch sides, it's surprising that they would have turned on the kill switches to all the national edge routers
In past uprisings, they were supported by foreign militias, particularly Hizbullah fighters. In fact, there were
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The problem is the order. Iran is basically remains of Persian Empire, with Persian core on the inside of the mountain ranges within Iran and then a lot of minorities on the outer sides of the mountains, that Iran binds to itself for the security of access to the inner side of the nation.
In such cases, you first take the inner core of the nation, secure it, and then project power outwards into the rebel provinces on the periphery. Just as their ancestors did when they originally built the Empire.
As for "but
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Fundamentalist shi'ites may be overwhelmingly Farsi, but they have their religion uber alles. They back Arab shi'a in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. All this despite the fact that some of those are not Twelvers like the Iranians, but belong to other shi'a sects
The ayatollah himself may be Farsi, but most of the troops that helped him control the populace had been Hizbullah all these years. It's only last year, after Israel decimated Hizbullah and the fall of Syria that they can no longer
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Again, this is all complicated, but fundamentally boils down to my point:
Tribals view other tribes as subhumans to be used and then discarded when usefulness is no longer there.
This applies to Persian vs Arab, Shia vs Sunni, sects within each islamic denomination vs other sects within same denomination, all the way down to individual blood clans.
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If they were going to switch sides, it's surprising that they would have turned on the kill switches to all the national edge routers
The routers will be under the control of a small, ultra loyal Iranian group. If IRGC units are changing sides, that's just the moment the loyalists would use a tool like this to stop things.
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Pro-Tip: The US has this infrastructure in place too. I wonder when the orange ape will order the US Internet to be cut.
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That moment when your TDS degrades your mental model of reality so badly, that you're an IT guy on slashdot with really low UID, and you're incapable of grasping the most basic concept in IT. Server-client based infrastructure, and that cutting routing to other nations wouldn't cut centralized communications... because their servers are overwhelmingly in the US.
Your TDS is so bad it made you go full retard with this one.
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Counter Pro-tip: No it fucking doesn't.
The internet in the US is not consolidated from an interconnection or control perspective the way that it is in small 3rd world countries with a single national ISP.
In Iran, they called up one guy at one place and said "turn this off or we'll shoot you and your family", in a system designed intentionally from day 1 to have a kill switch. Here that would require thousands of people to take separate actions, most of which have never been done before. If you call up Comca
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How naive.
TOI (Score:4, Interesting)
A Times of Israel article here:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/... [timesofisrael.com]
It is better than the rumours i gather left and right.
You can listen to the locals (Score:3, Interesting)
Times of Israel? These days, w/ social media and the web, I directly access any country's media for news about it, rather than listen to foreign know-it-alls like BBC, CNN, Fox, et al. Right now, for Iran, I'm checking out Iran International [slashdot.org], which has a pretty full coverage of everything going on there. That, and a few YouTube channels of Iranian expats
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I did read it and it is interesting. I had to duckduckgo it though as the link here does not work.
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Censorship: A Novel IPv6 Usecase!! (Score:2)
Want to block protesters easily? Just kill IPv6!!!
No one's affected except cell phone users.
IPv6 censorship a lot more difficult (Score:3)
Looking at an IPv6 adaption map, Iran's IPv6 adaption is 15% - pretty low. In fact, if Iranians want to get around the blackout, IPv6 is a good way to do it. As it is, the few Iranians who do have Starlink access probably are IPv6-only. What has been shut down has been their cellular networks: I'm not sure what sort of terrestrial internet Iran has
One thing the islamic regime can do as a last act, maybe as a part of this internet shutdown, would be to release all their routable IPv4 addresses to RIPE.
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My cell phone has half a dozen IP6 and 4 IP4 addresses.
Would IP4 be enough? Who knows ...
How are they.... (Score:2)
How do they pull this off, when they've pretty much lost control of most cities in the country? I have ben following Iranian channels, like Iran International [slashdot.org], and some YouTube channels hosted by Iranian expats. From all the reports, the IRGC is either in the retreat, or in some cities, has changed sides.
In which case, how are Iran's telecom operators determining who to obey, as opposed to going w/ the flow and just not touching anything, letting everything run on autopilot, until things break? After a
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Iran International - the site I linked to above - is a pretty neutral news site. They're reporting what's happening, regardless of which side benefits. Such as the fact that major members of the Iranian establishment are applying for asylum to Western countries such as France - something that suggests that the regime is about to fall. While on the flip side, reporting that members of Iraqi shi'a militias, such as Kataeb Hizbullah and Badr Brigades, are infiltrating into Iran via border posts on the prete