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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

The Mullah's like the Soviets before them will find that once they lose the ability to block the truth their expiration date is only a matter of time.

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?

https://www.alliedmedia.org/dctp/digitalstewards

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That's wishful thinking. I can't say much about the Soviets, but the regime in Iran, or at least a chunk of the people in power, understands how to balance their power and freedom (critically the "freedom to get rich", despite, and often because of massive corruption) and the perception and hope of freedom in the wider society and they adapt well to new circumstances. They are much more sophisticated than you portray them to be in your comment. If they weren't as good in adapting, they would have been gone many times by now.

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.)

> The Soviets were brought down by the humble FAX machine.

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.

Anyone interested in the UAW/FAX story might also like to read about George Soros and his efforts to aid samizat production in the eastern bloc by providing xerox machines

https://www.academia.edu/633578/Xerox_Project_Photocopy_Mach...

The Chinese censors seem to be doing just fine. If anything they're tightening the firewall and blocking VPNs more tightly.

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