Iranians Are Using Satellite TV to Beam in Banned Internet
wired.com
wired.com
The Soviets were brought down by the humble FAX machine. When the United Auto Workers reached out to Lech Walesa of the Solidarity union and said what is your biggest problem he reportedly answered secure communication. So the union sent him hundreds of FAX machines and that is how Solidarity was able to coordinate their protests and share information.
What these guys in California are doing with their satellite channel and accompanying software is important. Now they need to enable the former leaders of the green revolution with a mesh network in each city in Iran. The answer once again could come out of Detroit where they're the world's leaders. All they would need is the funding, doubt it will come from the Feds but maybe from the UAW once again?
Assuming your description is accurate, this is still only sort of true.
The Soviets were such a disaster that their downfall was greatly overdetermined. Without fax machines, they would have been brought down by something else.
"Old age" used to be an official cause of death. There was a period when we started doing autopsies on people who had died of old age, and discovered (keep in mind this was new information at the time!) that in every single case, those people had died of some malfunction that would have killed anyone else, old or not.
But, after a spree of autopsying people with the goal of preventing death, we figured out that there were basically no implications to this. What happens when you're old is that everything is failing all the time. Remove a 20-year-old's ruptured appendix and they'll probably go on for several more decades; if you fix a similarly severe problem in an 80-year-old, they're unlikely to get one more decade, because a completely different problem will kill them shortly afterwards.
The Soviets were like that.
Source: personal [unfortunate] experience of having been born and lived there for a the first couple decades of my life.
P.S. Also note that a lot of (and I'd say the majority of young) even non-technical people know how to circumvent internet censorship and are regularly on Facebook and social media, so it's not exactly a social revolution happening just today. In fact, I see this type of system without direct user choice of the content, just another form of centralized, controlled, media, which is a step down from normal internet over some sort of proxy/VPN (albeit slow). (I don't want to detract from the technical contribution; just putting it in perspective of the existing available techniques in wide use over there.)
https://www.academia.edu/633578/Xerox_Project_Photocopy_Mach...
Are some angles harder to block than others? Or do they just mean that satellites are hard to block in general?
As a matter of fact, yes.
Satellite dishes have, by their very nature, a narrow "beam width" of reception. That's so that they can pick up the weak signals coming from satellites (which, having limited sources of power out in space, can't produce as strong a signal as terrestrial broadcasts), and it's why they have to be carefully pointed in order to receive that signal.
In order to jam a signal and prevent someone from receiving it, you have to overpower it by aiming a signal of your own on the same frequency at their antenna. Since satellite dishes have such narrow reception beams, though, that means in order to jam them you need to get your signal out in front of the dish, so you can aim it directly in. If the dishes are pointed to the side, at a satellite near the horizon, that's not so hard to do. You just need to get your jamming transmitter up on a tower in the way and Bob's your uncle.
If those dishes are pointed straight up, on the other hand... well, there's not much you can do without a capable space program. Iran is not exactly known for their extensive space program. :)
This sort of thing is how they _should_ be spending that money.
I agree though, this is pretty clever. It's not quite the RoK building a giant bank of speakers on the DPRK border, but it's probably more effective.
omg, it took me a while to decode that bunch of words, super power-packed words indeed. Hilarious and witty.
Thanks for making that comment. It captures the sentiment of some section of US which is very much eager to use weapons no matter whether it makes much sense or not.
Edit: quoted properly.
(Not because CIA shouldn't fund something like this, but because they're too dumb/slow/bureaucratic to, and if they were doing it, it would cost way more than $100k)
Met the founder at TechWeek in Chicago and liked the idea. Backed it by buying a shirt.
This is download only too.
A more interesting approach would be to use a data carousel with erasure codes. That way you could tune in anytime and be done once you've collected enough blocks to reassemble the wanted files. You could even vary the allocated bitrate for each file, starting with a higher bitrate to get early birds fast access and then lowering the bitrate as more and more people already completed their download, but still allowing stragglers to catch up.
Since this is just a curated collection of content, it has very little to do with the Internet, unlike the title suggests. At the very least they should add some level of interactivity, so that users could vote on content to be sent and/or submit content for broadcasting like other similar satellite data casting systems already in use.
As for a more complex data transmission scheme, do all satellite receivers support it?
Provide a simple feedback form or voting system. It doesn't have to be perfect, these downloads are already hand assembled by someone each day. You aren't obligated to use all suggestions, or even the most popular, but use it as a feedback mechanism to inform your choices.
How about using that nifty Tor browser they keep rebroadcasting to access a hidden service website to vote and issue requests? Hidden services cannot by definition be accessed without Tor and are thus more secure from prying eyes, even when used by non-technical users.
> As for a more complex data transmission scheme, do all satellite receivers support it?
The satellite receivers just store the transport stream. The data is extracted by parsing the transport stream with a Windows program. You can implement whatever scheme you like with software.
Even if the above makes the voting easy to rig, it's more important to ensure anonymity than perfectly accurate voting results. And even with biased voting data you can figure out what the users are interested in. If nothing else it will help you cull content, as lack of interest is also a good indicator.
It's been noted regarding the Soviet satellites that only a tyrannical government needs to shoot to keep people in; one might likewise argue that only a tyranny tries to stop its people from learning their rights under that government's constitution.
Before we get too full of ourselves, we might consider what a public school makes of teaching the First, Second, Ninth and Tenth Amendments …
Internet via satellite is just like a big local network, when you request data it get sent in space unencrypted, you only have to read it...
So you basically download what other people are downloading without any way to control what to download except with filters that filter text, css, jpg, small files... since this is most of what people get (browsing the net...).
"Hundreds" is ambiguous, let's conservatively say it's $200. So half a percent of your income went to a plan with 1GB of data. Here in Holland the average (gross) wages was €3073 in 2012 (most recent numbers I can find), and in 2012 €50/month for a plan with 1GB internet was pretty normal. So the Dutch are playing 3-4 times as much of their relative income for data, excluding the fact that they probably pay higher taxes and that 'hundreds' probably means more than $200.
[1]: http://www.oecd.org/internet/broadband/BB-Portal_5i_13July_F....
Or not. You simply need to pick a carrier with good coverage and cheap prices.
Either you picked the wrong plan/carrier or your monthly fee includes a phone subsidy.
Most likely they are paying for their handset in the monthly fee and that has nothing to do with the real price of the data plans.
Multiple options for 3GB at 15€ or less. Paying 37€ for 2GB is ridiculous.
I'm sure you can find better deals buy visiting the different providers websites or shops.
"Here's the thing with ad blockers."
I'm not using any ad blocker! I'm not letting you run scripts in my browser. Why do you need to run scripts to show a static magazine article, with ads or not?
You aren't getting my dollar, but you would have gotten some impressions ($$$) and I would have read the article if you didn't act like a retard with your website.
* requests blocked on this page 10 or 23% * domains connected 13 out of 22
And here it is in bookmarklet form javascript:void(window.location.href='http://www.readability.com/m?url='+window.location.href)
Cut it out.
It's probably better to silently downvote it.
I think basically you'd end up with a lot of sponsored content and "Brought to you by..." type sponsorships interwoven in the site so they cannot easily be blocked.
They could just have the overlay default-on and use a script to remove it, or stick it in a noscript tag, but that's another order of dickishness I've never seen outside of local newspapers, who sometimes put a meta redirect in their noscript tags for this precise purpose...
The article says "Satellite TV, however, has become common in even small villages, with as many as 70 percent of Iranian households owning a satellite dish."
Satellite dishes are not illegal because satellite TV is not illegal. (Edit1: I am wrong.)
Edit1: Satellite dishes have apparently been illegal since 1994; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_in_Iran
Regardless, my focus was not on the legality of dishes, but the amount of people who have them.
With 40-70 percent of households owning a satellite dish, even after being illegal for over 20 years, it seems unlikely that Toosheh is more "dangerous" than the limited internet that Iran already has.
Eye for an eye, makes the whole world blind.
Unfortunately Iran is going to have to go through a slow revolution. Where the elders die off and the young take power. In some ways this is better than a Big Bang revolution like we want - it lets them gradually establish the system they want. Even if it's not the system we wish they had.