How is it like to be a dev in Iran | Hacker News Reader

How is it like to be a dev in Iran

shahinsorkh.ir

745 pointsdaanavitch417 comments

My heart breaks for these devs. I've been able to launch a successful development career specifically because I was born in the US (and my parents left Iran). If I was the same person in a different geographic area I'd be struggling under sanctions.

Companies definitely need to push back on extra egregious legal teams who want to block services Iran, as it's mostly paranoia and not that the services actually fall under the jurisdiction of our sanctions. I know amazing people at Google who are doing this work, and I hope others at other companies do the same.

Isn't the point of sanctions to cause frustration by restrictions?

It is. But you see, those hit hardest by sanctions are neither the cause of trouble nor anti western. Those are usually people like you and i, while the “elite” can smuggle in whatever they want and access whatever they want. Not only that but regular folk is weakened and cant stand a chance against the well fed government. No sanctions means greater exposure to our way of life and thus an easier path for grassroots change. If anything, i’d make government owned proxies available to iranians and chinese and all those oppressed so they can access censored content. I’d also make it easier to smuggle in technology so they can show others what they are missing on by supporting their criminal governments.

It depends on sanctions and it is more nuanced usually. Usually people that are under sanctions are hit hardest by them. Other people usually are hit by their government and brainwashed by propaganda that sanctions are to blame.

Good point - sanctions are also a good propaganda tool for their corrupt governments.

There is a Soviet joke, on unrelated subject, but relevant.

A father informs his son that the prices have gone up. The son asks: "Does that mean that you will drink less?" - "No son, that means that you will eat less."

Not a joke tho. For some people that's what it meant in communist east Europe. But good thing you brought this into discussion. Communist east Europe didn't have sanctions against, and as a result people would smuggle all sorts of western goods, up until they figured out: hey the politruks have all those fancy things, while we are told "west bad", "west capitalist corrupt", we should overthrow them. An oversimplification, but that's how it works. Regular folk get to learn that they have to struggle to access the modern world because of their OWN government, up to the point where they figure out "screw it, let's join the free world, i want my fancy cars and my fancy colour tvs, life is too short to praise a false prophecy".

the American analog of that would be "s__t rolls downhill". Every culture probably has a similar variant of this story.

I have heard a form of that joke in the United States but for when taxes are increased on cigarettes. The shareholders of the tobacco companies feel the pain less than the children of the addicted.

It’s punishing ordinary and innocent people of Iran for its government actions. It’s also hypocritical because you don’t punish Israelnfor it’s hunan rights violations, or Saudi Arabia, or Colombia. Even though those violations are far more severe.

The take away that I get from your post is "sanctions are immoral because they make people suffer - the only way they could be moral is if you make more people that I don't like suffer".

He said it was hypocritical, not immoral.

You just mentioned US allies, by the same logic the US should place sanctions on its own states and government due to their severe human rights abuses.

Sanctions are placed on enemies not allies

Google is big. What does Google or Alphabet do that others may 'egregariously' not?

Throwaway account for obvious reasons.

I'm one of those operations people who have been required by a legal department to block access from sanctioned countries - I've literally written the HTTP rules to deny access to folks like the original author.

I think about how the infrastructure I write and operate creates situations like these, and while I know I'm partly to blame, it's worth highlighting that this is a by-product of United Stats policies that create pressure on US companies. I'm most certainly _not_ a lawyer, but if this sort of thing bothers you, be cognizant of candidate policies about technology if you want to help enact change - because I doubt most companies will provide services to these and other regions if it'll break export law.

This is a good point. To add a slightly different perspective, I work for a US company that routinely has to deal with cyber attacks by Iranian professionals, probably government sponsored. I think most people don't realize how incredibly serious this is, and how basically there is already a global war being fought. And the nations with the most freedom have the most to lose.

Certainly most of the people in Iran are similar to most of the people around the world. In kindness, compassion, in just trying to get their daily job done and enjoy time with friends and family. If only it was easy to distinguish between the good, the bad, the indifferent. Probably a lot of sanctions don't hinder the most threatening of Iran's activities, while impacting the population. But it does have an effect (not always the ones intended, perhaps).

If the government in power over you is in conflict with others, and/or in conflict with it's own people, it's going to impact you. If you want your life to be better, look for ways to improve your government. True for the USA and everyone else. Another lesson that the USA has been illustrating repeatedly recently is that it's probably better for a nations citizens to reform their government themselves, instead of a foreign power. Until that happens, yes their lives are not going to be as free as they'd like. It's hard and there is a cost to be paid for those freedoms. Many of us are fortunate in that those before us did the hard work and we get to enjoy the benefits. Good luck to the author of the blog, hopefully they can find good solutions.

Just wondering but:

> I work for a US company that routinely has to deal with cyber attacks by Iranian professionals, probably government sponsored.

The full article is about services blocking IPs from Iran (and how it's effecting him as a dev). I don't see what cyber attacks have to do with anything? Or do you think these IP bans are a defense against cyber attacks?

All countries do cyber attacks, most countries in the EU have been infiltrated by the NSA and friends. How is that related to companies geo fencing entire countries?

> If the government in power over you is in conflict with others, and/or in conflict with it's own people, it's going to impact you. If you want your life to be better, look for ways to improve your government.

Not to get all political but I think it's pretty clear that the US is the only western country not liking Iran, and they use their influence to have the whole world obey US sanctions. You expecting OP to raise against their government? I say odds of succeeding are slimmer than storming Area 51.

>Not to get all political but I think it's pretty clear that the US is the only western country not liking Iran, and they use their influence to have the whole world obey US sanctions. You expecting OP to raise against their government? I say odds of succeeding are slimmer than storming Area 51.

This isn't exactly true. The EU is opposed to Iran's aggressive policies in the region (e.g. in Yemen, Syria, and now Hormuz) and its continued development of ballistic missile technology. They're just content with the 2015 nuclear deal as a starting point, whereas current US policy is not.

It's also worth noting that the EU disproportionately benefits from oil purchases from Iran relative to US so they have their own political self-interests factoring into their decision.

So you think Iran will use ballistic missile against the EU because... what? Because Iran gets money from the EU in exchange for oil?

It's also worth noting that the EU disproportionately benefits from oil purchases from Iran relative to US so they have their own political self-interests factoring into their decision.

Oil is fungible. The EU only benefits disproportionately because the US refuses to do business with Iran.

Not exactly. There are varying costs to extracting and transporting oil depending on where it is sourced. It's estimated that American natural gas, for example, would be 20% more expensive than Russian natural gas through the Nordstream 2 pipeline -- even though natural gas is nominally fungible.

Furthermore, the US is net oil exporter in 2019 and Europe is notoriously dependent on imported oil due to lack of resources on the continent. Consequently, adding a large marginal foreign supplier has significantly different impacts on oil prices in the region.

The main reason for US policy changes vis-à-vis Iran in the past couple years has been spite toward the previous US administration.

There are some nasty folks in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, but Iran is a large, diverse, and complicated place, and there are many other internally powerful people with different agendas (just like most large diverse countries).

In general openness and cultural/economic exchange help progressive forces within the country, and sanctions help xenophobic hard-liners.

>In general openness and cultural/economic exchange help progressive forces within the country, and sanctions help xenophobic hard-liners.

I've read in various places that the opposite is actually true -- sanctions from the liberal US strengthens the liberals in Iran by highlighting how the regime's aggressive policy is resulting in economic pain for Iranians.

This didn't really work with China either. Granted, there are plenty of examples where sanctions have failed/backfired but I'd like to reject any "general" statement on the best way to liberalize a country through foreign policy.

I doubt that US foreign policy has anything to do with the desire to “liberalize” a country. Unless you’re using that term in a different sense...

Liberal countries tend to befriend other liberal countries. So yes, even from a purely strategic perspective US foreign policy has a desire to liberalize other countries (in the classical sense of the term).

This is a hopelessly naive (and incorrect) assessment of the US relationship with Iran. The US literally deposed the first democratically elected head of government of Iran https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9...

Mossadegh wasn't exactly a liberal. He nationalized the oil industry and the very justification for Operation Ajax was the fear that Mossadegh would ally Iran with the USSR -- who were certainly socialist and most definitely not liberal.

Moreover, multiple US administrations pressured the Shah on human rights and, more generally, the US has a definite (though certainly not absolute and varying by administration) preference for working with regimes with a decent human rights record.

I would also quibble with the sole attribution of his fall to Ajax (he was already deeply unpopular when it began, albeit arguably unfairly) and note that his extensive use of emergency powers at the time make the "democratically elected" bit somewhat misleading, even if nominally true.

Your statement about naivety is interesting given that what you just said about the history of Iran is wrong and a common myth.

Mossadegh was not elected by the people of Iran to be Prime Minister.

Mossadegh was not democratically elected as head of the government. He was put into that position by dictate of the elites that ruled over Iran in fact, including with the backing of the Shah. He was democratically elected to the Majles, which is not the same thing as the people electing him as Prime Minister. The Majles largely consisted of elites that were wealthy property owners. So the de facto ruling feudal lords of Iran - including the Shah - installed Mossadegh as leader of the country, the exact opposite of democracy.

In the case of Iran US is both acting as an agent of Israel and Saudi Arabia foreign policy and punishing Iran for not knuckling under.

Given the choice between a government that poses no threat to it but is illiberal and any possibility of a liberal government the US always opts to harm the illiberal government. Libya complied with all arms control treaties and is buddy buddy with Italy. Doesn’t matter, as soon as someone whispers democracy the US does their level best to fan the flames of war. There’s an authoritarian democratically elected government in Ukraine. Let’s support a violent rebellion.

This is part of a historical pattern that’s basically unbroken but is aptly represented by the US involvement in the world wars. What business did the premier power in North America, or the Western Hemisphere, have in a European war between empires? What possible benefit would accrue to them from it? Very similar argument for the European theatre in WWII but the Pacific theatre is, if anything, more ridiculous if you don’t start the history of US involvement with Pearl Harbour. The US embargoes the Empire of Japan, banning most importantly the export of oil. They know the Empire of Japan cannot continue its never ending clusterfuck of an attempt to conquer China without oil. This was a calculated attempt to bring the Japanese to heel they had to have known could lead to war. And this was not isolated. The only reason the US military started hostilities against the Empire of Japan after Pearl Harbour rather than before was logistical fuckups.

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

The US is, in every part of it, hostile to anything that isn’t a democratic republic. This is true even if wide heads within USG know that democracy is bad for US interests. If the Arab Spring had actually succeeded anywhere apart from Tunisia it would have been a car crash for the US. The Arab public is a lot less willing to deal with Israel than the dictatorships, monarchies and juntas that currently surround it, and democracies are very likely to lead to civil war and ethnic cleansing in any country with no tradition of liberal government. See Syria. The US tries to arm the non-existent liberal opposition and all the weapons end up with the people who were Al Qaeda in Syria until yesterday or with those shouting “The Christians to Lebanon. The Alawites to Hell!”

> Given the choice between a government that poses no threat to it but is illiberal and any possibility of a liberal government the US always opts to harm the illiberal government.

This makes sense only if you define "liberal" as "aligned with the interests of Washington and/or American corporations". For god's sake, USA supported Saddam Hussein while he was gassing Kurdish civilians during the Iran-Iraq war.

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

> Joost R. Hiltermann says that when the Iraqi military turned its chemical weapons on the Kurds during the war, killing approximately 5,000 people in the town of Halabja and injuring thousands more, the Reagan administration actually sought to obscure Iraqi leadership culpability by suggesting, inaccurately, that the Iranians may have carried out the attack.

"Supported" in the sense of "not letting being conquered completely by Iran." Who was carrying out its own mass executions of non-Muslims and implementing its own cultural revolution around that time.

America definitely had some self-interest in protecting Iraq, but it's not like the alternative was clearly a better choice either.

> "Supported" in the sense of "not letting being conquered completely by Iran."

Iraq started the war.

Right, that doesn't mean it went well for them.

The US didn't provide significant aid to Iraq until it feared the Hussein government being overrun altogether.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Ir...

In a war between secularists and theocrats the liberal power will have no difficulty in deciding which side it finds more ideologically simpatico.

The US record in central/south America or the support for the princes in UAE and Saudi Arabia shows they will choose stability over democracy.

As others have mentioned, this would be true only if by 'liberal' you understand 'in full agreement with US policy'. The most relevant example is actually Iran: the US and UK orchestrated a coup to get rid of the last democratic regime in Iran and reinstall the militaristic, authoritarian Shah.

They have done the same or similar in a lot of South America, starting well before the world wars.

That is not to say that they are unique in this - it is how all empires operate. My point is only that the US is not some idealistic, freedom, democracy, and everything good loving benefactor of the world. It is an empire, one that is quite good to its own people but that ruthlessly pursuits its rational interests abroad.

This particular position baffles me, especially since we're discussing Iran here. Iran had a liberal democratic government and the US toppled it(because they dared try to take control of their own oil reserves) in favor of a military coup and a dictator. That dictatorship then proceeded to radicalize the population through oppression which led to a revolution and the installation of a theocratic anti-US government in one of the worst cases of shooting-your-own-foot US foreign policy in modern history.

The reality is: US foreign policy does not care one tiny bit about the liberal/ilieberal or democracy/dictatorship spectrums, it only cares(rightly, some may argue) about its own(mostly economic) self-interests. As pertains to the MENA region, that mostly means it only cares about the economics and politics of the oil business(though there is in an irrational, lobby-driven, tendency to protect Israel in any and all things even when it harms the aformentioned oil intersts). The liberal/illiberal thing is a red herring and mostly about gaining the support of their citizens for whatever thing they want to undertake right now.

Do note, I'm not in any way condemning the US for the way they tend to act around the world, they're just looking out for themselves. I'm just saying, it has nothing to do with favoring particular modes of government and to argue otherwise is to cherry-pick maybe 30% of the events the last 60 years and ignore the rest which does not line up with your particular worldview.

"Do note, I'm not in any way condemning the US for the way they tend to act around the world, they're just looking out for themselves."

So did the Nazi Germany.

First, I may or may not have privately held views about the morality(or lack thereof) of US foreign policy post WW2(hint: If you look at my comment history, you can probably figure it out given where I've stated that I live and some oblique comments pertaining to the subject). However, the above comment was specifically meant to not make a statement about the subject so as not to fan the flames any further, but only act as a refutation of the statement it was replying to based on historical facts rather than moral arguments.

Second, your statement is patently untrue. The genocides(against the Jewish people and countless others as well) perpetrated en masse by the Nazi state have nothing to do with self-interest or looking out for oneself. So no, this does not apply. If we were talking purely about their expansionist policies and invasions, then you may have had a point, but that's not what people usually mean when they, rightly, hold up the Nazi state as an example of criminally abhorrent and repulsive behavior.

Clearing Lebensraum from lesser races had everything to do with Nazi Germany looking for its own interests.

> The main reason for US policy changes vis-à-vis Iran in the past couple years has been spite toward the previous US administration.

Well, this is a bit simplistic. A lot of Trump actions show a pretty clear pattern: recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, recognition of the annexation of Golan by Israel, recognition of the right of Israel to annex parts of the West Bank. Israel has been campaigning for the US to attack Iran for at least the past 15 years, and has used every diplomatic resource to campaign against the nuclear deal with Iran.

Connect the dots.

> I work for a US company that routinely has to deal with cyber attacks by Iranian professionals, probably government sponsored.

It's hard to posit a moral high-ground here, when basically every state is actively seeking to undermine the others' cyber security, including the US. Stuxnet is one of the most formidable state-sponsored cyber security exploits, and that was targeted at Iran, it seems easy justification to increase their offensive capability.

I have to admit some naivete here, I don't know the frequency and scale of cyber attacks emanating from Iran, but I'd guess that hostile foreign policy from the US would only intensify that threat towards the US.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m always baffled when people categorically claim that they know the source of their cyber attacks. It’s not exactly difficult for someone with the most basic knowledge of networking to disguise that information or masquerade as someone they’re not.

There is a lot more to tracking these groups than ip addresses. To impersonate any of the known groups you will need a lot of knowledge about the tools and infra that they use.

And if you have that knowledge it's impossible to imitate? Can't really tell if your comment is refuting or agreeing, attribution is hard.

Knowing that a thing is true is categorically different from knowing how to do something— Knowing that group A uses technique B doesn’t automatically make you proficient at using B yourself.

Masquerading as a particular cyber-attack group requires not only knowing what techniques and tools they tend to use, but also how to do those things yourself, while imitating their style. It’s not impossible, but neither is it trivial: We’re not talking about simply first impressions here, but fooling a concerted, post-hoc investigation.

Can you give some specific examples? What do you mean by "imitating their style"? What data would be used to "fingerprint" these groups?

I'm no "cyber security expert", but from what I can understand it can be something as simple as, what was mentioned above, tracking ip addresses to analyzing the processes leading up to and used in the attack. Whether that is how they approach the target, the tools used and/or any evidence left behind.

When a large enough amount of attacks are performed by one group you gain some insight in how they work & approach problems. Very similar to how law enforcement would be able to "fingerprint" a serial killer based on his patterns or how a professor would be able to tell you plagiarized the code for a project based on the pattern of your early assignments.

People are not immune to patterns and habits. Groups, much like people, are effectively extensions of these patterns and habits but on a grander scale. In a normal workplace this is called company "culture".

This is a great comment. Thanks.

And how these 'known' groups got attributed to a particular country in the first place?

Do you think Russian efforts on this same front are a result of US policies? Should those policies change, stay the same or something else?

Most certainly.

See 'Prevent re-emergence of a new rival (1992)'[0] and 'From Lisbon to Vladivostok: Putin Envisions a Russia-EU Free Trade Zone (2010)'[1].

Can't let that happen, can you.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/excerpts-from-penta...

[1] https://m.spiegel.de/international/europe/from-lisbon-to-vla...

I don't think Stuxnet forfeits the moral high ground. It was narrowly focused on attacking a specific military project. It's exactly the kind of thing I want the CIA (or whatever) doing, especially if the alternative is sending bombs.

State sponsored attempts to hack public network infrastructure fit into a totally different category. These are not the same.

Before stuxnet Iran had absolutely no cyber capabilities. In the years following it they have built some of the most formidable offensive teams on the planet.

There's plenty of literature on this. Whoever created stuxnet created another monster too.

You imply that without Stuxnet, Iran would not have developed these capabilities. That seems improbable. At some point every "bad actor" is going to realize the possibilities of cyber warfare - even if just for ransomware revenue - and want in on the gold rush.

I'll bet everything I have that they wouldn't have anywhere near the capability they now have in $currentyear after stuxnet.

From what we know the US was doing everything possible to be restrained about this stuff, keep it on the downlow as is the way, and history has shown they were very much right. It's insane what's happened in the aftermath.

We created a monster. We really did. It's clear to anyone watching.

And why is it ok to attack another country's military project in the peace time?

There are plenty of American military projects that deeply worry other countries.

I challenge you to name any American military project that is as worrisome as Iran's 'Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution' having control of a nuclear weapon.

Challenge accepted.

"The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing—boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike."

https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...

Let's see if I have this straight... the US is increasing the precision of its nuclear weaponry to use against military targets, and that's as bad as Iran's program to acquire nuclear weaponry (in violation of the NPT) and long range rockets?

You are being disingenuous here if you are trying to gloss over the fact that these 'military targets' can be silos with other party's ICBMs.

Box 1: A large western democracy with a free press, who has possessed nuclear weapons since their invention 75 years ago. Has been fully capable of destroying the world all that time... and hasn't. Wants to upgrade existing weapons.

Box 2: A small theocratic dictatorship, ruled by a Supreme Leader for life, who has been at constant war with its neighbors for pretty much all of modern history and still openly calls for the obliteration of some of them. It's a place where people are executed for adultery and homosexuality, and until recently the preferred method was stoning. After losing a half-million people in human wave attacks during its last big war, the country's Supreme Leader wants a bigger badder boom.

If these two things are the same in your mind, you are so far outside the bounds of rational thought that I'll just have to assume you're trolling.

1. Why does this democracy has upgraded its weapons in this particular way? The old weapons were working fine for the purpose of MAD (retaliatory strike against cities), the new ones are fit for a surprise first strike.

This democracy hasn't destroyed the world because it wants to live itself and MAD guaranteed that nobody wins a nuclear war. When it could use nuclear weapons without fear of retaliation, it happily used them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now it has gotten closer towards obtaining capability to start and win a nuclear war.

2. Iran hasn't started a war in a hundred of years, the Iran-Iraq war was started by Iraq, in which Saddam, who was supported by the US at the time, has used chemical weapons. You are clearly misinformed by your free press and Iran's desire to possess a nuclear deterrent is more than understandable.

There are a couple problems with your view of the US:

* Since the invention of the H-bomb, nuclear powers have had the ability to knock out all fixed silos in a first strike. You don't need accuracy with a 10MT bomb. As accuracy improves, warheads get smaller, but the MAD calculus doesn't change: You can't guarantee you'll take out all the submarine, mobile, and airborne weapons too. Accuracy doesn't change anything.

* The US is not a dictatorship and the president doesn't have the ability to unilaterally start nuclear war. Hell, he can't even assassinate a foreign head of state[1]. While I'm not thrilled with this particular president, I am confident that the democratic institutions of the US make nuclear first strike impossible.

There are a couple problems with your view of Iran:

* Iran and Iraq have been fighting since they were named Persia and Mesopotamia. Long before the official start of the Iran-Iraq war, both were funding and encouraging insurgent groups in the other. Khomeini openly called for the overthrow of Saddam via Islamic revolution. It doesn't matter who attacked first.

* Iran spent more than half of the Iran-Iraq war on the offensive in Iraqi territory. When they had power, they pressed their advantage. Khomeini spoke openly about spreading Islamic revolution everywhere, which is probably why all the neighboring nations lined up behind Iraq. The US was a tiny bit player; all Iraq's hardware came from the Soviets and all the money came from neighboring Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (the joke would be on them later, apparently).

* Khomeini himself didn't want peace, even after 10 years of war: "Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom. Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light. Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice..."

There's almost nothing positive you can say about Iran's dictators since the Islamic revolution (and probably long before). Theocracies with martyr complexes must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+mattis+assad

Also read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Iraq_War

Interestingly, you don't have the answer to my simple question.

* You are forgetting multiple things: reduction of the number of warheads, continuous enhancement of ABM systems by the US, this super-fuze upgrade giving enhanced anti-silo capability to submarine-based missiles which can reach targets in much shorter time, enhanced capability to track road-based launchers, overwhelming advantage in the number of fighter jets vs the number of Russian nuclear-capable bombers, disparity in the number of submarines. These things taken together in a couple of decades can end MAD.

* Giving the overwhelming advantage of the US and NATO in conventional weapons, the US doesn't need to actually commit a first strike to reap benefits of this capability. Nowadays the US and Russia are afraid to engage in a conventional conflict for fear of it escalating into nuclear war that would destroy both countries. After achieving first-strike capability, the US will know that Russia will be afraid to escalate by using tactical nukes against American carriers and troops. Ultimately, this will mean that the US will be able to do towards Russian allies or Russian expedionary forces whatever it feels like.

> It was narrowly focused on attacking a specific military project.

Stuxnet targeted some common industrial controllers being sold not only to Iran, and one usage was the control flows on the dams. Basically it just caused the control flow gates to jam. This one that I know of is not military at all!

I tried to find a source for your claim but the best I could find was a study that said that future PLCs attacks could include targets like dams.

The stuxnet targeted parameters was Siemens S7-300, connected with a Vacon or Fararo Paya PLC, spinning between 807 Hz and 1,210 Hz. It then periodically modified the frequency to 1,410 Hz and then to 2 Hz and then to 1,064 Hz.

What specific dam had their control flow gates jammed because of this? Please provide name, date and optionally a link.

Meh, it merely caused delays in peacetime so its lasting legacy will be the official declaration of world wide cyber war. The actual "victory" over the Iranian, nuclear program starts in 2013, and was embodied by the JCPOA signed in 2015 (entering to force 2016), before the USA decided to violate it in 2018.

As other pointed out, before stuxnet cyberwarfare wasn't as firmly acknowledged as an official arena, so this type of high profile attack on unprotected target is something you get to do once, and the CIA used it to toot its own horn basically.

I expect it was much like the Manhattan project: they spent all that time developing a weapon so when it came time to use it there wasn't much reflection about how to employ it strategically.

The JCPOA was not signed by the US, so it is hard to understand how it is 'violating' the agreement. The US has a process for obligating the country to observe treaties and agreements. Treaties and agreements become binding only upon Senate ratification. That didn't happen.

The agreement was signed on behalf of the US by John Kerry. See here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JCPOA_Signatures.png It is the first one directly under the word "Action".

Maybe I can consider this in more familiar terms, as if both sides have guns. Do they use them differently? I at least can't know for sure. What it boils down to for me is which side do you want to win? Being fair and impartial doesn't mean considering that both of the nations are the same and the outcome will be the same if either side wins, with only a different name and flag for the victor.

If the US wins, a rough semblance of the freedom and democracy the "West" is accustomed to will be able to face other existential internal or external threats. If Iran wins, the end. We start over at square one winning back our freedoms. Maybe we start immediately, maybe it takes 1,000 years. If I have to choose, I want the US to win this one. It doesn't matter who started it, who is doing it worse. I would like things that support the regime in Iran to stop supporting that regime (in the most humane way possible). And I would like the US, with all its warts and flaws, to win a cyber war with Iran if one must be fought.

Maybe this all sounds extremely unlikely, but the first step towards a superpower like the USA to lose to Iran is for the USA to not be trying at all, and Iran to be trying very hard. Also nuclear weapons are a great leveler.

Therefore the USA must do two things at minimum. Try to have cybersecurity supremacy over Iran, and try to keep Iran from having nuclear weapons. If both of these objectives can be met we don't need to fight them, we can leave them in peace. If either is not met, this war might have to get very physical very quickly. So right now the sanctions don't look so bad, among available options. Not saying there aren't better options, but it's above my pay grade.

> What it boils down to for me is which side do you want to win? Being fair and impartial doesn't mean considering that both of the nations are the same and the outcome will be the same if either side wins, with only a different name and flag for the victor.

Your argument makes sense, but it starts with a very flawed assumption: that Iran wants to dominate the world. The reality accepted by everyone except the US and its few allies on this issue is that Iran is an extremely defensive country. The current regime, and the country in general, feels threatened in the region, being generally sorrounded by belligerent hostile countries, with the backing of the US (Saudi Arabia and Israel being the most powerful and the most belligerent).

So, if Iran wins, what will actually happen is that Iran will be left alone to function just like any other non-democratic state. Is the regime bad for its people? Yes. Is it better than being at war? Absolutely.

And regarding nuclear weapons, Iran has declared numerous times that it would gladly participate in an agreement, enforced by UN/IANA inspectors, to declare the entire region a nuclear-free area. Israel is blocking any such agreement. Iran has entered deals with the US and other western countries to renounce its nuclear weapons program in exchange for lifting the embargo and other kinds of help. The US has backed up from these deals twice now. The second time, they have not even claimed to have any evidence that Iran is not respecting the deal; and the other parties to the agreement, like the entire rest of 'the West' have in fact remained in the deal, as has Iran, despite the new US sanctions (deemed illegal by the UN).

> Iran has entered deals with the US and other western countries to renounce its nuclear weapons program in exchange for lifting the embargo

Which weapons program? AFAIK current Iranian inspection mechanisms are the most stringent (anywhere ever).

'Most stringent' inspections with the proviso that Iran gets notification in advance, and that most inspections are in support of temporary restrictions. If these restrictions are necessary they should be permanent, otherwise we've got another NK in the future.

The second deal I was talking about is precisely the current one, the JCPOA, which Iran is abiding according to all objective observers.

How can you possibly know this? The JCPOA includes non-public "side deals" with the IAEA. How do you prove the secret fine print doesn't restore what the public large print took away?

Iran is already part of an agreement (called the NPT) to not have any nukes ever, and has already violated it. It has no justification to ask for any concession from any other country for it to honour its original signature, much less from countries they have sworn to annihilate. It sounds like they want others to disarm their intended victim for them.

Iran's most rabid enemy illegally owns nuclear weapons, while the world's greatest super power is helping them hide it.

Iran's position makes logical sense, and the best way to ensure they have no reason not to abide by the NPT would be to actually uphold the NPT, not to selectively enforce it against Iran but not the country threatening it.

More accurately, the country Iran is most rabid enemy of. Its 'most rabid' enemy has never had any claim against Iran - it's Iran which has decided to declare total enmity.

So Iran picks a fight, says it wants to 'defend' itself from the enemy it created (instead of burying the hatchet), and further demands the worlds disarms its opponent to make Iran's work easier.

There are a few loan words in the English language for such behaviour like 'chutzpa'. It makes 'logical sense' only if the world sympathizes with aggression which I don't believe it does.

P.S. Said country has never signed the NPT and is therefore not bound by it, making its possession of weapons still 'legal', unlike Iran which has signed the treaty and is therefore bound by it, even when Iran ignored its own signature.

P.S.S. It would make no sense for such an arrangement to not include Pakistan, which has already taken part in past wars in the area. Weird how nobody notices that. Almost like, the idea was to disarm one side to try to give the other a killing advantage.

Tertium non datur?

Obama made a deal with the Iranians to stop production of weapons grade nuclear material and to destroy related infrastructure.

This also had the side-effect of strengthening the most reasonable politics within Iran.

But no, I guess this new course undermined the career of too many apparatchiks so the Orange Man was persuaded to kick the table up in the air.

And we’re back to square one, with the loudest monkeys showing their teeth at each other...

> What it boils down to for me is which side do you want to win?

This is a bit simplistic, isn't it? First, the one between Iran and USA doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. Why is it a matter of states winning or losing? I don't recall Iran waging a war against the US, or trying to destroy civil liberties in the West. For example, with the nuclear agreement, both Iran and the US (or Europe) would have benefited- why did the US got out of it then?

Second, the two sides in this game are not necessarily Iran with its model of society and the US with its own model of society. The US is a free and democratic society, but that doesn't mean that their geo-political goals are all about freedom and democracy. In fact, the main rivals of Iran and allies of the US are Saudi Arabia- a country even less democratic than Iran itself- and Israel, a country that while internally free and democratic is illegally occupying a foreign territory and expelling its native population in violation of international law. So the US winning this particular exchange might not necessarily mean improving or preserving the freedom of US society, but making the world a worse place, with more injustice and future grievances. See what has produced the "existential" war against Saddam.

At the moment the people doing the expelling are Iranians (and their allies) in Syria, and they threaten to do it elasewhere. For whatever it's worth, Palestinians are not being expelled, and furthermore, Israeli presence is not illegal according to resolution 242.

In addition, Iran is also even more repressive than SA, because they are killing dissidents outside of their territory, unlike SA.

Then again, I don't see why we should be bothering with this given that the Iran regime is the one shouting 'Death to America'. It's pretty natural for the US to oppose those ideologically hostile to it.

> In addition, Iran is also even more repressive than SA, because they are killing dissidents outside of their territory, unlike SA.

Have you not heard about Jamal Khashoggi? It was a big story a while back.

> It's pretty natural for the US to oppose those ideologically hostile to it.

Chicken or egg? That is, if the US hadn't engaged in regime change operations in Iran and hadn't supported Saddam in attacking Iran, would Iran be hostile towards the US?

Khashoggi was killed inside Saudi embassy, that is, Saudi territory. I'm not excusing it, but had he been warned, he could have just avoided going in. Iran tends to kill people outright on foreign soil.

e.g.

https://www.tellerreport.com/news/--intelligence-service-ira...

It's funny that people think that the mullahs have any grudges against the US becuase the US overthrew a 'socialist atheist'. They didn't like Mosaddegh either and in fact took part in his overthrow. Khomeini's grudge was purely ideological.

> Khashoggi was killed inside Saudi embassy, that is, Saudi territory.

That's generally not really how embassies work, but sure.

> Khomeini's grudge was purely ideological.

As in "all islamic religious hardliners in charge of a country hate the US"? The first gulf war couldn't have anything to do with it?

Sure, the mullahs are really upset that US prevented their arch-enemy Saddam from conquering another country and getting stronger. Now, I wouldn't say "all islamic religious hardliners in charge of a country hate the US", but it sure is common.

My point was that Saddam was acting with US support when he attacked Iran in the first gulf war in the early eighties, back before he got himself on the bad-dictator-list by invading Kuwait.

US did not support the initial invasion, and in fact allowed Israel to supply arms to Iran (!) to stop it. US support for Iraq came later when Iran continued the war after throwing off the Iraqis, because they didn't want to let Iran continue into Iraq.

"That's generally not really how embassies work..."

Someone needs to tell Assange about this, if that isn't how embassies work.

> At the moment the people doing the expelling are Iranians ... For whatever it's worth, Palestinians are not being expelled

How can you say something like this? It's even happening right now, for example these are today's news:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-jerus...

Just imagine the scene:

"Bulldozers accompanied by hundreds of Israeli soldiers and police moved in to Sur Baher, a Palestinian village on the edge of East Jerusalem

Israeli forces cut through a wire section of the barrier in Sur Baher under cover of darkness early on Monday, and began clearing residents from the area.

Floodlights lit up the area as dozens of vehicles brought helmeted security forces into the village

“Since 2 a.m. they have been evacuating people from their homes by force and they have started planting explosives in the homes they want to destroy”

You can always post an eviction story from any country. We need to look at the larger picture: Palestinian population of Jerusalem is increasing both as an absolute and on percentage basis:

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

> You can always post an eviction story from any country

At 2am in the morning, with floodlights, military and explosives? On a territory that doesn't even legally belong to that state?

The evictions and demolitions purpose is to build a wall:

From Wikipedia: "the border traced by the barrier is more than double the length of the Green Line, with 15% running along it or in Israel, while the remaining 85% cuts at times 18 kilometres (11 mi) deep into the West Bank, isolating about 9% of it, leaving an estimated 25,000 Palestinians isolated from the bulk of that territory."

So Palestinian houses are demolished to make space for the wall, while the wall bends for kilometers to include illegal Israeli settlements built in Palestinian land.

"If Iran wins, the end. We start over at square one winning back our freedoms."

You really believe there is a threat of Iran occupying the US and it's the reason for the US policy towards Iran?

Gosh, it's scary that people like you vote to choose the government controlling by far the most powerful military in the world.

> And the nations with the most freedom have the most to lose.

I'm genuinely curious - can you please expand on what exactly you mean by this?

- The nations with the most freedom also have complex, efficient industries and markets that provide high standards of living - These nations have complex governments designed to protect people from each other and from external threats - These nations are technologically advanced and highly reliant on things attached to networks - These nations have a lot more information freely available, and access to things

All this adds up to a much larger surface area. It's like we're in a stone throwing fight and one side is living in a glass house and the other side is in a mud hut. Losing a cyber war could destroy governments and economies in the West. Imagine no electricity everywhere, no water, no sewer, no planes or trains, no tv or internet. It would be an apocalypse. The same thing happening to Iran might be difficult, but mostly annoying. I'm not sure. In North Korea most people wouldn't even notice.

"Imagine no electricity everywhere, no water, no sewer, no planes or trains, no tv or internet. It would be an apocalypse. The same thing happening to Iran might be difficult, but mostly annoying."

I can imagine people in Iran reading this and quite strongly disagreeing.

Censoring TeamViewer or Slack doesn’t do anything to stop the Iranian government’s cyber task force from carrying out attacks. It hurts the regular people and the Iranian economy. I’m not sure what the ultimate agenda is but considering the travel ban and extra visa requirements for visitors of Iran it appears that the goal is to isolate Iran and strangle its economy.

"And the nations with the most freedom have the most to lose."

What on Earth does this mean?

"muh freedoms" probably.

maybe that totalitarianism is the default and that "freedom" is a recent development that has been very hard won. It is not the default state of things. If you lose it i.e the state becomes totalitarian, it is orders of magnitude harder to go back the other way.

"If the government in power over you is in conflict with others ... it's going to impact you. If you want your life to be better, look for ways to improve your government."

Or help your government because it is the other government who is imposing sanctions on your country and making your life worse.

> be cognizant of candidate policies about technology if you want to help enact change

We don't get to mix and match attributes of various policies

We get to choose 1 candidate, from 2 candidates

Their technology policy will never be a deciding factor

Let's do a thought experiment: What would happen if you removed the rules? Would anyone in the US actually notice? Would there be plausible deniability because, for example, a reboot has wiped all of the iptables rules?

> not all servers like to get traffik from TOR. For instance, CloudFlare annoys when you are accessing its servers through TOR.

This is why you shouldn't ban Tor. In some places, it is absolutely necessary.

it's also why you shouldn't abuse Tor with web scraping or other actions that lead to sites blocking it

This is why you shouldn't use CloudFlare, whose good intentions lead to not so good places

When 80% of traffic from an IP is malicious and the other 20% is regular traffic, but both sources look like the same traffic (impersonating browser headers, sometimes running headless chromium), what else can you do? Cookies and stateful cookie-like objects, such as privacy pass.

Can anyone report how well privacy pass works nowadays?

The times I've had to use Tor, privacypass has been usable.

> When 80% of traffic from an IP is malicious and the other 20% is regular traffic, but both sources look like the same traffic (impersonating browser headers, sometimes running headless chromium), what else can you do?

Accept the traffic, taking the bad with the good. We all know the ills of visitor profiling regardless of effectiveness.

That's an easy position to take when you personally do not bear the expense of the extra bandwidth, increased hardware needed to ensure acceptable response times, and cleanup/reputation damage when you are compromised.

All of these things have a cost, and they should be balanced against the benefit seen by allowing open access.

So uh, why does “malicious” traffic need to be blocked?

Because nobody is entitled to receive response packets from my computer.

That doesn’t explain why you’d waste your time blocking this traffic. In fact, that explains precisely nothing.

you != you

This is why some services shouldn't ban Tor. I don't think that my hobby project that serves cat pictures (for example) needs to accept any and all traffic.

I was a little surprised that Docker even returns text indicating why the request was blocked with the 403 status code. I wonder if there are any services trying to comply with sanctions in this way that are using response code 451 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451)....

I can’t think of a historical example of economic sanctions even moving the situation toward the putative goal of regime change in the target country, let alone achieving that goal.

I’ve lived under UN sanctions imposed on Serbia under Milosevic regime during the nineties. Two things happen: 1) people in the regime leadership don’t suffer 2) the little people who do suffer feel attacked and rally around the leader. Pretty much the opposite of what the sanctions ostensibly aim to achieve.

This same dynamic played out in Cuba, North Korea, Iran, you name it, for decades with no good effect.

What brought Milosevic regime down was the aerial NATO assault and its aftermath, not the sanctions.

As far as I can tell sanctions are a way for US politicians (they may be imposed by all the western countries, but I can’t think of an example where US wasn’t the leader) to look like they are punishing the offending country without going to war. They just don’t seem to work.

South Africa is seen as a success.

That’s a good example, albeit a special one where the regime was not accepted as being of the people by a large majority of the population.

It's really hard to judge how 'accepted' governments that remain in control via fear and information control are.

I'm not sure the entire plan is to get the country to do what you want. It's also about not supporting your enemies. Why send them raw materials, hardware, software that they will then use to fight against you? This seems to have worked for the countries you listed and a few more with the possible exception of Iran. They are much weaker than they could have been and are therefore not as significant a threat.

That rings true to me, and it sounds very cruel and depressing. By that measure it hasn’t worked with North Korea either, slowly but surely they have turned into a significant threat to US.

It may also turn out to be just a short term improvement in safety. Hatred toward the West as the perceived, and real, tormentor festers in the population over generations, and that’s a very bad thing long term.

I’m not saying I know of a better solution.

US government officials have a long history of adopting stupid policies that do the exact opposite of what they claim. Sanctions. War on drugs. Iraq war. Hell, pretty much everything they do never has the intended consequences but others. It's not that hard to foresee the consequences, but they don't care. They are either stupid, callous or both. Most are vicious, disgusting human beings who likely get off on the suffering and loss of life they create. And the population keeps voting the same scumbags in time and time again. What does that say about the people here? You can decide.

The modern computer world is so interwoven in the internet now. It was only 20 years ago when every company I worked had physical computers, no internet access (except email) and every piece of software had to be installed from CD.

I wonder if/when a big war or disaster occurs much of our computer world will just break. We've built an extremely fragile system now.

This is also a subject of intense interest to me. We're in uncharted territory here, and the most relevant historical example imo is WW1 where all major participants began the war without giving any real thought to oil and left the war knowing oil (and the vehicles it powers) was arguably the single most important strategic factor in wars during that time period (and still today really aside from speculation).

It seems plausible, if not very likely, a similar paradigm shift will occur after the first serious cyberwar occurs. We will learn a lot of lessons.

Yes!!! The current world power structure is underlain by the control of oil. That's going to change radically in just ten years. Because of solar, wind, and electrified transportation Makes the control of oil vastly less important.

And just like 1914 the dominant powers are clueless.

GP posted:

> left the war knowing oil (and the vehicles it powers) was arguably the single most important strategic factor in wars during that time period (and still today really aside from speculation

Then you responded:

> That's going to change radically in just ten years. Because of solar, wind, and electrified transportation Makes the control of oil vastly less important.

Unless the US military is making a solar, wind, or electric powered series of fighter jets and tanks then the control of oil will be relevant until at least the middle of this century if not the end of this century.

> a similar paradigm shift will occur after the first serious cyberwar occurs

I don't think we'll see a paradigm shift. Energy will still be the single most important strategic factor in electronic warfare. People love to harp on wind/solar/bio/etc... but even though they're growing in acceptance, they won't overtake the primary traditional means of energy production for many decades to come.

Effects of sanctions totally slide off the elite and shit all over the poorest members of a society.

It is sad the sanctions have that side effect. Hopefully it’s enough to affect some change in a hostile country led by an oppressive elite.

Like America?

Exactly like America

At this point can it really be considered a side effect. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that that is what the result will be and yet people still insist on them.

As the comment above you alluded to, and as it's been evidenced many times, it is not enough to affect change. These aren't "side effects", the poorest feel the main effect of the sanctions.

They're side effects, but not entirely unintended.

If the head of that state (and party elites etc) don't meet the requests of the sanctioning states, the ensuing poverty can mobilize the impoverished masses. This can backfire and drive them to further nationalism/jingoism, but it opens a window of opportunity for the opposition (and, more cynically, covert agents and external forces).

Sanctions (in the form that the US is applying them to Venezuela and Iran) are a form of economic warfare. The idea is to cause economic instability by stopping (oil) exports, and thus cause general instability. Now, there are mismanagement arguments you could make but it would be naive to ignore the massive effects that US (and importantly, US ally) sanctions have on a country that relies on exports.

The effects on Iran are not side-effects. They are clearly the primary goal.

The sanctions hurt from the bottom up. The elites who own the economy lose some money but they are eatill comfort.

The elites in countries like Iran and Venezuela derive all of their wealth by theft from the bottom 99%, without exception.

Just take a look at the extraordinary pile of wealth and power the fake theocracy in Iran has thefted away via Setad (about $100 billion stolen from the Iranian people). Reuters has done great investigative reporting on this over the years:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1

It turns out Khamenei is nothing more than a Putin-like kleptocrat, a thief, using religion as a cover for building a massive corporate empire on the backs of the poor Iranian people (from which he aggressively steals property). Everything about modern Iran makes sense once you read about Khamenei and Setad.

The people in the bottom 99% are the only ones who can change these countries. If you could take most of the personal wealth of the members of eg the Maduro regime in Venezuela, it would change absolutely nothing. They ultimately rule by gun, through military control. The majority - including large sections of the military - has to turn against the leadership to spur change.

Countries have no moral obligation to support the Maduro or Khamenei regimes (which is what happens when you freely trade with them and prop them up through hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign investment and oil purchases). Someone will reply to this and say: well the US is exactly the same as Maduro and Khamenei (or worse). The only proper response to that is: ok, sure, boycott or embargo the US, give it your best shot.

There have been a growing trend of personal sanctions targeting power actors and their affiliates. Most of them in form of Magnitsky laws, championed by Bill Browder. They hurt enough that Putin had to bring up punishing Browder at Helsinki summit with Trump.

Yep, Bill Browder is basically the most effective person to ever lobby multiple world powers into creating legislation to blacklist people by name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act#Individuals_affe...) from Russia or any country for that matter. TLDR; is that Browder was making some sweet money in Russia after the USSR collapsed and eventually enough powerful people in Russia didn't want him there, so he had to leave, but one of his lawyers was arrested and mysteriously died in prison.

There is a great podcast floating out there from NPR where they talk about the seemingly real possibility that Russia had a vested interest in getting a president in office just to repeal the Magnitsky Act because it hurt that much.

Worth noting though that the majority of powerful people in Russia have primary assets, investments, family and property in the West. This makes the legislation very effective. It is hard to tell how much that would apply to Iran's mullahs.

The western banking system is much more porous than one would think. Sanctions against individuals could be a very fine grained stopgap solution.

The below is mostly writing off the recent shock of having been centimeters away from buying real estate off one of the most important known straw men laundering shady Russian and other former USSR money. I discovered his identity just in time...

A lot of this shady money was laundered through Baltic banks. Just one straw man, Staņislavs Gorins (Stanislav Gorin), was a director in name in many hundreds of companies in Latvia and offshore that laundered enormous amounts and moved it west.

He claims his identity was stolen, but that's very unlikely, given actions like him personally going to foreign embassies to help setup foreign shell companies. And given he's actively scheming with OneCoin, a shady Bulgarian crypto coin.

I went looking down the rabbit hole a bit further. It looks like Latvia has somewhat learned its lesson, but especially in the UK, relevant legislation is like Swiss cheese: one giant loophole. Just search for "companies house loopholes".

And war doesn't?

War has often resulted in regime change or occupation, sometime even execution of defeated leadership, so no; war often affects the elite (in the end).

Short of receiving an act of aggression challenging the sovereign of your nation, sanctions are always preferable to war. Resource starvation occurs during wartime, but, in contrast to war, sanctions mean no lives are being lost and no property is being destroyed because of physical violence. The people of a nation are still put in a corner, but they don't have a gun to their head. It's something they can get out if, should they choose to.

Also, pizza's comment is naive and misinformed. Broad sanctions on entire industries can affect the poor, yes. It also affects the people in the middle and also the people near the top! You can't fly in a private jet if 1) you can't buy one and 2) can't get fuel for the jet. Furthermore, sanctions have explicitly been used to target the wealthy and not the poor. See:

https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/s...

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/06/politics/russia-sanctions-oli...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-24/trump-say...

pizza says his one of his interests is "realistic alternatives/complements to pure capitalism," which already demonstrates a misinformed notion of the world: he assumes pure capitalism exists in ANY form. It doesn't. The US is perhaps the most capitalistic society, but Social Security is quite clearly a socialist program in nature. I like Social Security and think it's highly useful, by the way (notwithstanding the storm of the decline of program revenue and increase in program participants).

I think it's important to distinguish between conditions which are unfortunate and conditions which are unbearable. Sanctions commonly make conditions unbearable for the poor; when food becomes scarce, the poor starve first; when energy prices increase, the poor are the first to be without energy. While the rich suffer too, they tend to retain their relative place in society, and their dignity. Being without a private jet is unfortunate but not unbearable.

> The people of a nation are still put in a corner, but they don't have a gun to their head. It's something they can get out if, should they choose to.

This really trivialises the challenges and discrimination economic refugees face, especially those from sanctioned countries.

The consequences of warfare have a much greater potential to make life unbearable for those in power. Being captured, executed or otherwise killed is a likely eventuality.

>I think it's important to distinguish between conditions which are unfortunate and conditions which are unbearable.

Ok. Some conditions created by sanctions are unbearable, and some conditions created by sanctions are unfortunate. In war, all conditions are unbearable. War is objectively worse.

>> The people of a nation are still put in a corner, but they don't have a gun to their head. It's something they can get out if, should they choose to.

>This really trivialises the challenges and discrimination economic refugees face, especially those from sanctioned countries.

It is not my intention to trivialize their situation, though perhaps that sense is lacking from my comment. What I mean is that sanctioning a nation does not mean the citizenry is forced to stand on a battlefield and die. When I say, "should they choose to," I'm referring to either seeking refuge or revolution. Both are immensely difficult tasks, but both are a choice.

One of the (stated) uses for sanctions is encouraging regime change. The US tried and failed over the last 60 years to create democratic nations by taking out the leadership of regimes. My understanding of the reason that policy failed so many times is because the people themselves didn't fight for it. The people are so controlled and government so corrupt, they have no easy way to.

Do I like sanctions? Of course not! They obviously create incredible difficulties for everyone in that country. But I'd rather suffer through hardship than die fighting for an unjust cause.

>The consequences of warfare have a much greater potential to make life unbearable for those in power. Being captured, executed or otherwise killed is a likely eventuality.

pizza used the phrase "elite," and you use the phrase "in power." If you're a political figure, you're both "elite" and "in power." The political figure (as well as any subordinate) holds the moral responsibility of waging war. They tacitly accept the risks of conviction and/or execution; incompetence is no excuse. So, yes, you're right, but war would create an even worse environment for the poor than sanctions do. I'd wager that every country in the world has special rules that come into effect when in a state of war. Those rules usually include tough rations, in order to supply the military. If the fighting is happening in that country, it would get worse once the country's means of agricultural production are wiped out.

yep, let them build nuclear weapons and have their way in Syria.

I do not know how others feel. But I feel resentment towards embargoes (and calling their poodle countries to follow suite) placed on other countries just because they don't tow your line. Going to Iran's backyard and threatening them and then cry when they retaliate (a pretext to start war)...its so...pathetic. In fact most of the 20th century wars were started using this kind of baiting.

Most of the comments below you are correct in the scope of the last 10 years, but in the context of the last 50 are absurd.

For those curious about how and where the whole "Iran thing" started: A freely elected Iranian president decided to nationalise oil fields. This irked British Petroleum (Anglo-Iranian Oil Company at the time..) and the USA, so they initiated a coup to overthow the government [1], complete with CIA-paid Iranian mobsters to push the Shah regime.

Years after this imposed rule, the western-propped government was overthrown with an.. anti-western government.

If you look at Iran with the context of 15 - 20 years history, it's impossible to understand the government's rabid anti-west stance. If you zoom out a little bit more - you understand completely.

Finally - the Iranian people suffer incredibly under this regime. The Persian culture has over 5000 years of rich (non-islamic, incidentally..) history. I'd sincerely advise traveling to Iran if you'd like to understand geo-politics a little better.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

Yeah I was aware of this. Didn't state it here since I thought most of the people here are intelligent enough to understand what really happened. I saw a few here trying to play the "timeline" game (like you stated about the time frame). To what end?

EDIT - Does not mean you are playing this timeline game. I meant a few others.

Travelling in Iran is amazing experience - completely unspoiled from tourism, amazing history left and right, very warm and welcoming people, almost everybody speaks OK english (and most signs are dual farsi/english). For an experienced travelers / backpackers, this is one of the best places to experience these days.

Btw one addition - we all know that US embassy was stormed and employees held hostage in 1979. It gave US political ammunition for decades to come. Do you know why it was stormed? Because it was proper CIA headquarters in all this meddling and impoverishment of iranian people for decades. They shielded themselves with diplomatic immunity. Not something you see mentioned in the (rather bad for all that empty patriotism) movies. But wouldn't you be pissed off if they did this to your own country? To have the potential for greatness due to rich oil reserves, but having little from it because some foreign power installs corrupt ruler to have safe access to oil. Sounds like an african story.

Those employees taken? Most were involved or directly in CIA payroll. No respect there, nor much sympathy. Spies are generally either executed or traded for.

> very warm and welcoming people

I'd second this, one of the friendliest country I've ever been to. No significant tourist industry yet so most people are not trying to sell you anything. I think it's a genuine wish to be friendly to travellers and especially so given they don't yet get many travellers.

You're somewhat curtailed as a US traveller (not sure if that's still the case) but for anybody else, go.

One tech curiosity from over there: one guy said he used a USB stick that contained his browser and stored his internet history on the stick when in internet cafes (his only way online). That way when the cafe was audited none of his data would be there for inspection by police/security.

Many people would probably use ‘portable’ software (in the Windows-world sense) in internet cafes, but I imagine most cafes forbid USB sticks or at least running your apps.

Even if a cafe uses some sort of sandbox environments that are wiped after each visitor, there's a danger that you'll bring in a ‘Scriptkiddie 2019’ exploit pack on the stick.

And not mentioning islamism once in your post....

Check out the last sentence. In the context of Persian culture, Islam was forcefully introduced in the 650's. Iranian culture dates to 4500BC. From my experience (been through Iran 5 times..) - Islam seems to play a very minor / non-existant role in the majority of people's lives.

Naturally there's variation on this (Tehran vs. Qu'om / Mashaad) - but at least that was my experience from living and speaking.

You suggest that what defines the current regime is a reaction to the West. I think this is completly missing the point. Islamism has been on the rise in every single muslim country since the 60s, and the current regime is before anything an islamist regime.

I am not sure what the fact that Iran is a thousand year civilisation has anything to do with it. China is a thousand year civilisation too, it didn't become less communist nevertheless.

> I'd sincerely advise traveling to Iran if you'd like to understand geo-politics a little better.

Unless you're gay, in which case they reserve the right to execute you. Seems worth mentioning.

I feel for you and I know that normal people are always the victims of sanctions, not the privileged and rich. I hope one day your people will be free. Sincerely.

Am I the only one to see this as a positive side effect of sanctions?

Now Iranians have a legitimate reason to use TOR: bypassing sanctions. Turns out it allows them to bypass censorship as well and brings more people into the Tor network.

I doubt that they use Tor. First Iranian I have talked with after airport security simply shown as VPN app to use that works. I have used SSH tunnel without problems. Censorship is quite weak in Iran and Tor is not necessary.

It's only weak if you have access to a credit card and are able to pay for a VPS or VPN abroad. If you're trying to bypass it using only free(as in beer) tools, it's quite effective as clearly shown by the article.

I was answering to Iv comment that people in Iran will find Tor. That's not the case from my experience while I was traveling in Iran last year. People simply use free VPNs.

The article mentions Tor

Article is about developers.

Plus I have never understood why people assumed it was safe from the government. You are making a credit card transaction with your name on it and associate it with a named account! You never know who is behind a VPN company. If I were a state censor I'd make sure to have several cheap and reliable VPNs accessible to the locals and just make a list of what they are doing with it.

The user experience on Tor is not great at the best of times. I can't imagine trying to do something like `docker pull` or `npm install` over it, let alone technical research.

Having tried to use a censored internet in China, I suspect it beats the alternative.

"People are dying due to absence of medicines. People are starving. The economy system is falling apart and the politicians and their children are all abroad! None of them have any sense about what is going on the streets."

That is not what we (the West) are hearing in mainstream media.

Edit: I may well be wrong on this as others have pointed out.

That's kind of by design. What other effect do you think the total economic embargo would have? It's not like they're some super advanced country that's independent of anybody else for tech.

Good (for the US) news is, it's working. They're getting ready to negotiate, hence the UK tanker intercepts etc. Weak negotiating position, need bargaining chips. I kind of agree with Lindsey Graham: if you just want nuclear power, there's no need whatsoever to enrich your own uranium. You can buy fuel for reactors from the enriching nations, no problem. I'm sure, given the situation, you could even negotiate the price down to nearly nothing, as well.

> it's working

The last deal for de-nuclearization already worked, but it was inexplicably terminated.

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

It's not "denuclearization" if you continue to enrich, retain all nuclear infrastructure, and if the deal expires after a few years. Parts of the "deal" were expected to expire as soon as in 2026.

It's the best deal they could negotiate. It was done by moderates on the Iranian side who have now been discredited and the hardliners are ascendant.

If you think military provocations and escalations are a sign that sanctions are "working" you're in for a surprise. All it takes is one side to make a little mistake and it escalates quickly and unintentionally.

Trump has emboldened the Iranian military by pulling his punches. Now they assume they can take action without a military response from the US because Trump is not willing to go to war. That logic unfortunately makes war more likely.

>> It's the best deal _they_ could negotiate

Exactly my point. Doesn't mean it's a good deal.

By definition the alternative is a worse deal.

More sanctions won't necessarily produce a better deal. Iran can also have a military response or build a bomb.

> By definition the alternative is a worse deal.

You need to let go of the illusion that there was any actual permanent "deal" in place at all. What was in place was a temporary stopgap at best, and Iran would exit from that stopgap with multiple avenues to building nuclear weapons within a year or two after the expiration of its provisions. If the goal was to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, the "deal" didn't accomplish that at all, it merely postponed it. Letting an extremist theocratic regime (and a known sponsor of terrorism) eventually arm itself with nuclear weapons in a powder keg that's the Middle East seems like a terrible deal to me. Much worse deal, in fact, that not doing anything about North Korea for two decades.

I know what the deal was and I now who the Iranians are. I'm not defending them. The point is that was the deal that could be done and it had Iran voluntarily not building a bomb or enriching uranium. That was verified by an independent authority.

Now they have started enriching uranium again, so they are theoretically moving closer to building a bomb. To stop that without Iran's co-operation would require force, so if the West finds a bomb unacceptable the West is on a path to war.

For all your criticism of the deal, you haven't addressed the fundamental question of how this situation is better than the deal. Interpreting Iran's provocations as signs of progress towards negotiations is not convincing.

Where do people get these talking points from?

Intelligence chiefs have testified in front of congress that Iran was following through with it's end of the deal. The US then unilaterally decided to tear up the treaty and put in economic sanctions based on nothing. It's almost as if they want Iran to build nuclear weapons. It's also putting pressure on Europe to pull out of banking and business ties that were built after the embargoes were ended.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/us/politics/kim-jong-trum...

> Where do people get these talking points from?

From the text of the deal itself? All the nuclear restrictions were for "15 years", and some for 10 years. After that? Unclear.

Surprised at the downvotes - read the text for yourself: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2165388-iran-deal-tex... search for 15 years, it's the plain fact of the matter, not some "talking point".

Most deals of this nature are going to have a sunset clause, this doesn't seem to be a big deal. Before 15 years is up, there's just a new negotiation.

No, most deals have a withdrawal clause, where either party can end the deal.

They don't normally have a set end date.

A set end date basically means Iran plans to restart activities on that date without any kind of sanction. There's a reason this deal was so heavily criticized.

You didn't address this idea that nuclear power does not require Iran to enrich uranium. The deal seems faulty if they can still enrich uranium, regardless if they were following it or not.

Every NPT-signatory has the right to enrich.

Iranian media announced and then the IAEA confirmed Iran had breached the limit on uranium they were allowed to store.

>The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors Iran’s nuclear program under the deal, confirmed in Vienna that Tehran had breached the limit.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-iran-usa/iran-rej...

Yeah, after the US unilaterally pulled out of the deal.

Explications: supporting war in Yemen, Al Assad, Hezbollah, etc.

Nope. There have been multiple reports that validate the claim that the deal was terminated by a combination of Trump's personal distate for a deal negotiated by his predecessor and a proliferation of Iran hawks in the Trump Administration.

And yet none of those explications were cited by Trump. They would seem like obvious rhetorical wins for populist support of the fight against terrorism. A more honest explanation would have to ask what the US government stands to gain from renewed sanctions of Iran.

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

Well, it's sort of good news in the sense that, if the U.S. chose to negotiate, Iran still wants a deal, and we might end up with the same deal as before?

Or in other words, this was all unnecessary, but some of the damage caused by abandoning a done deal might be reversible.

No deal will be made unless perhaps if Trump wins a second term. One year with sanctions is not something new. As long as Iran have it’s energy supply secured.

>They're getting ready to negotiate, hence the UK tanker intercepts etc. Weak negotiating position, need bargaining chips.

You do realize that the UK grabbed a tanker first?

I dont understand this type of reply where just because a specific subtopic of a news story isnt being screamed just as loudly as every other top breaking headline, its the western media being silent on the issue. Plenty of discussion has been had on mainstream media about the effects and.effectiveness of sanctions on basic goods

https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-sanctions-hit-iran-r...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/inflation-rampant-in-tehran-...?

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/sanctions-t...

Needle in a haystack. Today's articles for me:

* Heat wave relief in sight after scorching temps... * Disney star Cameron Boyce's mother breaks silence... * 'You're breathtaking' Keanu Reeves pulls another classic Keanu... * Thousands of bones discovered in Vatican crypt... * Miss Michigan winner tweets... * National Ice Cream Day means free cones. Here's what to know... * The Horrors of Jeffrey Epstein's Private Island * The 1 Reason you shouldn't save for retirement

Today's body count for the MI-complex never seems to make the cut.

> Needle in a haystack

As a practical matter, Tehran’s domestic governance is irrelevant to most Western readers. My FT, WSJ or Bloomberg subscriptions tend to touch on it about twice a year. Given I have zero influence over the situation, that plenty for me.

Japanese tanker incident and a close-call expanding our middle-east misadventures just a few weeks ago, and free ice cream cones are still more relevant...

Can American reporters even go on the ground in Iran without a government chaperone?

Ten years ago when I still lived in Iran I was a wizard working my way around the "filternet". I had even taught my mom to setup a socks proxy through an SSH tunnel!

I do this at work to get around the company firewall. Pretty useful technique!

Seems like it could be dangerous just to blog about these activities if you live in Iran?

That's what I was wondering, it seems like a public admission of breaking the local laws ( as corrupt as those laws are.. ).

Is it illegal to bypass blocking in Iran? I know in some countries it's legal to bypass such blocks if you can, even if a government tries to block proxying as well.

In Russia there is no punishment for bypassing blocking. But if you publish information about bypassing or proxy server addresses, your site will be blocked too (but no punishment for you personally).

The same is generally true in Iran based on my experience.

It technically is, but such a huge number of people use vpns. I know 14 year old children who use commercial VPNs to watch YouTube.

Unless you are not in Iran and this is propaganda.

I am not a fan of IRI by any stretch but that post does not pass the smell test. And last I checked -- I have relatives in Iran -- no one is "starving".

As for Iran's government not wanting its citizens spilling their daily beans on an Israeli platform, that's pretty sensible. (Would Israel permit its citizens to chat away on platforms from Iran?)

How difficult is it to redirect to a server outside of Iran?

Who resolves "shahinsorkh.ir" for your browser? DNS lookup says 104.24.126.79 and that is in California, United States, and not Iran.

"Let's go invade Iran so Iranians can access Facebook and not starve!!!"

>Who resolves "shahinsorkh.ir" for your browser? DNS lookup says 104.24.126.79 and that is in California, United States, and not Iran.

because it's cloudflare

Exactly. And that is where the trail stops. that ".ir" is worth precisely zip as far as verifiable facts are concerned.

This guy has his full name and his employer on his blog. His employer, "Douran Group"[1], lists Iranian banks, Ministry of Agriculture of Iran, Ministry of Broadcasting of Iran, the Postal Service of Iran, and even a "Islamic Conference" as their clients.

"TOR", "VOA", "Facebook", "Israeli" platforms, and "starving" Iranians, and "elite" entirely unaware of the condition of the populace.

[1]: https://douran.com/fa-IR/Dourtal/1/page/%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%AD%D...

Your relatives are not entirely honest with you. Of course they might not be starving and people might have enough food, but they are having less access to medicines and other necessities.

I did not comment on medicine. So there is no "starvation".

> "not entirely honest"

You are possibly projecting your own family's character. Kindly refrain from discussing matters regarding which you have zero insight. Tashakor.

”And last I checked -- I have relatives in Iran -- no one is "starving".”

You basically shared anecdotal evidence from your relatives. Which means you’re cherry-picking and opening yourself up for critique of that comment.

Grow a thicker skin. Tashakor.

In Iran people openly talk of their disdain of the government, sometimes very publicly even. It's only when you become an active political activist that things might go awry.

The same can't be said of China; People here self-censor even in personal conversations.

Looks like his blog with GitHub pages have been restricted bu GitHub.

Dear devs,

Please stop using Google Cloud Platform to host your projects.

GCP blocks Iran, so by hosting any part of the app on GCP, your apps become impossible to access from Iran. Azure and AWS do not do this. This form of blocking is exclusive to GCP.

After the switch to GCP, Iranians lost access to gitlab. Firefox Monitor is blocked in Iran for the same reason. The list goes on and on.

I don't believe Mozilla team for example has consciously decided to block Iran, just that their devs do not know about Google's policy regarding Iran. I hope all devs learn about this fact, so they make informed decisions when choosing cloud platforms.

This should be spread more widely. I didn't know this.

Is GCP blocking a result of the current sanctions on Iran? (ie. we can't differentiate what you provide so we'll cut everything) Or some other reason?

It's because of sanctions, but it's not recent. I think GCP had always blocked Iran, but I'm not sure.

In any case, Azure and AWS are complying with the same sanctions without a blanket ban. After all, they are American companies as well. Azure and AWS don't allow customers from Iran to purchase hosting services, but don't block access to all sites hosted on their platforms, and it seems that this is enough for US regulators to not consider them in violation of sanctions. I imagine Google has taken an extreme "better safe than sorry" approach which other players have fortunately decided not to copy.

I bet it's technical. Both GCP, YouTube and other Google properties suffered recently due to a misconfigured core switch in one of their regions. This implies they share at least network fabric between GCP and everything else. They probably slapped a blanket block over some shared infrastructure, and decided GCP is too much of a small-fry to justify the legal and technical work to be more nuanced.

(Disclosure: I work for MS but have no knowledge of our sanction compliance stuff)

I'm interested in knowning more about this. Not a lot of information about it, I found this article from 2018... https://news.sky.com/story/google-faces-calls-to-lift-anti-c...

The documentation seems to be lacking, which explains why so many people in the US seem to have not heard of this. But as always, Stack Overflow has an outdated answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32678313/what-countries-...

Dear dev,

Please disregard the message above. USA and Europe too are forbidding you to sell to Iran and a couple of countries. Google is doing you a favor by blocking traffic out of the box. If they didn't do it, you would most likely have to block it yourself.

There are official documents listing items and services you're not allowed to provide with how many years of jails you're risking. Just because you don't know about them and don't care won't be worth squat as a defense when the police will come knocking on your company's doors.

Google is not blocking access to Google Search, or Gmail, or Calendar, Drive, Photos, Maps, etc. Only access to dev tools (e.g. Android Tools) is blocked.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding, based on the actions of companies with larger legal teams than most companies have employees, is that only a tiny portion of the apps need to be blocked in Iran to be compliant with the sanctions. Simplenote (hosted on GCP) is inaccessible in Iran while Google Keep is accessible, not because of sanctions but because Google's company policy blocks access to anything on GCP. I am sure the Simplenote dev would not be in jail had he chosen to host on Azure.

Quick rule of thumb, as soon as you're dealing with any payment or physical good, you're in quasi certain prohibited territory. That goes for EU countries too that could be considered somewhat chilled in comparison to the US.

Hence all businesses should be blocking Iran really, contrary to what you are implying... unless you have a magic business that sells nothing and earns no money. A note taking app might just fly, or not.

Based on the actions of large US tech companies, as described above and in my other comment [0], I believe the rule of thumb is "Don't take Iranian money."

If you are blocking access to a free-to-use service or the free tier of a paid service, you are using a stricter blocking scheme than seems to be required based on the actions of legally-savvy tech companies.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20494402

At this point, you clearly show that you have no understanding of export regulations or sanctions, and you're basically arguing that there can't be any because you've seen a well known company not block all access outright.

Get legal advise if you run a business. Don't do legal based on a hunch or an internet discussion.

It'd be pretty sad state of affairs if I had to hire a sanctions lawyer (they are a fair amount more expensive than regular ones) so I can sell, say, icon packs on the internet, but fortunately, that is not the case.

The reason Google's GCP block is outrageous is that they are on a mission to become one of the backbones of the internet, and as such, they are on a mission breaking the internet in US sanctioned countries. You defend this based on the largely misguided notion that US sanction law is so aggressive and unpredictable, that anyone one running a website would be better off with an auto-block of those countries, or risk his freedom.

In reality, the lack of such an auto-block from currently much larger providers (by multiples), and a lack of enforcement actions that could have been prevented by such a block, would tell us that this is FUD.

Outsourcing legal choices to google and others? In that case you better integrate real tightly with GCP so that nothing will work if GCP does not work. Or else...

Or else some Iranian, by accident, might find your endpoint that just happens to load. What then? You hope he does not rat out your company to the feds?

>Just because you don't know about them and don't care won't be worth squat as a defense when the police will come knocking on your company's doors.

Every US companies must block Iran, it's not Google it's everyone.

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/programs/...

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Sanctions/Page...

630. Is the provision or delivery of goods or services to an Iranian counterparty after November 4, 2018 allowed?

The wind-down period has ended and the United States intends to fully enforce the sanctions that have come back into effect. The provision or delivery of goods or services and/or the extension of additional loans or credits to an Iranian counterparty after November 4, 2018 — even pursuant to written contracts or written agreements entered into prior to May 8, 2018 — may result in the imposition of U.S. sanctions unless such activities are exempt from regulation, authorized by OFAC, or otherwise not sanctionable.

Canada too.

> Every US companies must block Iran,

This does not seem correct. Here is a short non-comprehensive list of services by US companies not blocked in Iran. The list is big enough, and the companies involved large and legally-savvy enough, that this cannot be an oversight.

* Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook

* Google Maps, Waze (quite popular right now in Iran too!)

* Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive

* Github

* Google Keep

* Google Docs, Zoho

* ...

The complete list would be hundreds or thousands of pages long. Based on this, I don't think your assertion is correct. Either that, or every big US company is breaking sanctions on Iran with impunity. That does not seem plausible.

I don't know what are the details but I worked for a major company and they didn't even try to see if the service was against embargo they just blocked it. Gmail might not be blocked but can you create an email?

Yes, you can create an email.

The fact that your company "did not even bother to check" is a poor argument for "everyone has to do it".

They probably did checked but it was most likely complicated / subject to various limitations and with all those complications they decided to not provide services, like most US companies, that was pre 2018.

When a county is under embargo it's more complicated that just checking a website from the comfort of your chair, I remember many Iranians complaining about that but the chance that you're infringing some rules could lead to very very serious / expensive sanctions ( with DoJ / DoT ) it's just not worth it.

http://techland.time.com/2012/08/29/world-of-warcraft-blocke...

Zoho is Indian, not American.

Waze is Israeli. Which is actually more interesting.

Google bought Waze in 2013.

All their jobs are still in Tel Aviv, and the subsidiary is likely still registered in Israel.

Would that matter? I don't believe you can work around government sanctions by simply registering a subsidiary in another jurisdiction and saying "look, the company isn't officially in the US, even though it's owned by us".

No, but it indicates that it's also subject to Israeli restrictions.

Or... maybe developers should not play the games the Iran goverment want them to play and every effort should go towards throwing the current dictatorship not to stop using what they want us to stop using?

What about American developers? Shouldn't they stop using services like Google, Facebook, etc. Because of their proven collaboration with US intelligence service?

America is not a dictatorship, the chance of changing the goverment (and that includes its intel agencies) for the best by politics still exist so I don't even see the equivalence you are trying to make here, if anything developers and everyone else should _use those platforms_ (Google, Facebook, etc) to promote saner politics.

Most of the difficulties the author is mentioning are caused by the US sanctions that have been put in place after Trump's decision to walk away from the deal the US signed with Iran (against international laws). What you call "democracy" is causing most of the difficulties the author encounter, not the censorship or surveillance from the "dictatorship". But I think it's not more the role of developers to change the politics than any regular citizen. In that case, you might want to reconsider the products you buy from China as well.

Me stopping buying products from china would change exactly nothing, the only useful change against China tyranny that can be done is forbidding importations with new laws.

Why don't you overthrow the Iranian dictatorship?

Because I don't live in Iran, if there is ever a solution to the Iran tiranny it must happen from the inside and from its own people.

There's many Americans that didn't live in Iraq, but fully supported the toppling of Saddam.

Did you know it took about 25-30 years for South Korea to no longer look like a disastrous third world nation after the Korean War?

Millions of Korean people died in the process that made the South Korea of today possible. Was it worth it? Should the South Koreans regret their prosperity and freedom today? Should they have avoided the bloodshed and chosen to perpetually live under the Kim regime instead?

Saddam being gone is not a bad thing and the US should not have invaded the country to topple him. The US installed a functioning democracy with a constitution in Iraq, at enormous national cost to the US and to the Iraqi people. In 25 or 30 years, if the Iraqi people are even moderately free, living in a democracy and able to chart their own path as a people through elections, will it have been worth it? What would the alternative have looked like?

Not sure why it was presumed that I thought that toppling Saddam was a bad thing.

And play the game the US government wants them to play?

US is creating the situation were enough conservative Iranian (their are enough) are going to support their government just because sanctions and muslim ban exists.

Some down voters, but no counter arguments?

So you all basically think sanctions are going to work and the hardliners are going to cave in and agree to a new deal and not try to crush dissent?

Have you seen state of Venezuela? US threatened to go in and supported an opposition. And the result is failure and real tragedy for the people. Now they are blaiming Cuba.

You don’t need a majority to create a revolution that succeds. You need an enemy which is lacking morale and the means. The Iranian regime supporters now have morale (US dropping out of deal, and allies which can’t stop US influence) and they obviously have weapons to crush the resistance which have none.

Oh sorry, how many times did you overthrow your government? Any tips?

I did it once, Romania. Took about max 20k people in the street to start it.

My government doesn't need overthrowing yet, so no tips over here; there are some excellent books about it tho.

Are you able to use VPN services from Iran to change the apparent country of origin of your traffic?

Not saying that's a great solution, but it's what I would try to do, provided VPNs aren't blocked by the government.

Iran is sending oil to dictatorship which gasses children, changing our business strategy to appease the barbaric regime is not a priority for us.

Iran was sending this oil to us, the Syrian people, the "regime" was willing to start the winter oil supplies to the poor Syrian families on the next month, now the oil has been stolen by the GREAT DEMOCRATIC UK, and we will face the cold winter without oil, thanks to the new pirates of the Mediterranean.

Definition of terrorism according to Wikipedia:

"Terrorism is, in the broadest sense, the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror among masses of people; or fear to achieve a religious or political aim."

How economic sanctions and maximum pressure different from terrorism? Putting a lot of pressure and pain on ordinary people to achieve political goal, which in this case is surrender of Iran. This is economic terrorism, plain and simple.

The answer to your question is in the text you quoted: intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror. Economic sanctions may be justified or unjustified, moral or immoral, but they are distinctly different from indiscriminate violence.

Muddying the definitions of words really doesn't help anyone and indeed makes the discussion harder to have, as communication is only possible if both/all participants can agree on their communicative medium - i.e., that they are both using words to mean the same things.

I didn't say it is "Terrorism" I said "Economic Terrorism". Economic sanctions by definition are indiscriminate. Now there is a shortage of some cancer and MS medication in Iran and people are dying because of it. Even though the medications are not sanctioned, the financial transactions are sanctioned and these medications cannot be purchased easily. How isn't this violence? According to the UN, sanctions on food and medication is a crime against humanity. We have seen this period of sever sanctions on Iraq in the disguise of oil for food program. We know how it ended.

I don't want to justify the actions of Iranian government, in my opinion most governments are evil and power hungry. I am just pointing out that the goal of sanctions, even according to the US officials is to cause suffering for people ultimately in the goal of regime change.

Sever economic sanctions are just another tool in the empire toolbox. Be it against Iran or Cuba for example.

"I am just pointing out that the goal of sanctions, even according to the US officials is to cause suffering for people ultimately in the goal of regime change"

No, you're not in fact pointing that out, you're just stating it without providing any evidence at all.

If you're saying 'the goal is to cause suffer according to US officials' surely you'd have a quote for it? You won't because they did not say that and you just stated something not in evidence. Officially, the purpose of the sanctions is to get 'a better deal'.

Just refer to John Bolton, you can find many instances. He gave a talk for MEK which was in the US terrorist group list.

Surely you can provide one.

It's true that Bolton argued war is best option several years before joining this administration, but that's not your claim. Your claim is that he (or some other official) said the purpose of the sanctions is to make the common people suffer, and I can't any statement to that effect.

Yes, you are right they didn't literally say that because in that case it would be legally troublesome. I think it is childish to think that this is not pure coercion either to the negotiation/surrender table or public unrest. By the way, Bolton didn't just advocate war/unrest years ago. It was last year [1].

I understand the importance of being exact, but by being pedantic in a political context without considering motivations and effects is trivialization.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cenpiO6LMpE

Ok, so you don't have a reference. If we take the admin at its word, they say they want a better deal.If you believe Bolton doesn't follow orders, than he seeks war. The one thing nobody of any disposition ever said they seek is 'regime change'. That's because a ground invasion is inconceivable and homegrown revolution unlikely when it's the regime with all the guns.

Some would say Taxation or Sanctions are a form of violence. If I do not adhere to your sanctions, what happens? If I do not pay your taxes, what happens?

Violence, condoned by a state or a group of states.

Asking Iran to stop foreign adventures including support for terrorism == "capitulation"

Not trading with countries stating 'Death to [your country]' == "economic terrorism"

It depends what you mean by surrender of Iran. Iran is the one with an explicitly stated foreign policy goal of annihilating another state. They are also persistently taking active steps intended to achieve it. That inevitably creates conflict, and in armed conflicts nobody ends up looking good.

What they mean by negotiation is sever limit on Iran missile program. They ask Iran to limit its missile range very considerably. At first you may say missile is not defensive but offensive.

But the fact is that Iran has no air force or any other serious military hardware to defend itself. Because simply they wouldn't sell them to Iran. Most Persian gulf countries have military budget per capita orders of magnitude larger than Iran. In addition they have the might of US military behind them. Missiles are the only reason that Iran is not like Iraq or Libya right now. Iran has been on the hit list of Neocons since long time (you can refer to General Wesley Clark)

Iran experienced a very bloody war with Iraq during 80s where everybody was supporting Saddam Hussein from Soviets to the US and persian gulf monarchies. I know personally people that where harmed by Saddam chemical weapons but international community remained silent for too long. I remember seeing Saddam's missile on the Tehran skies but we had no means of stopping them or retaliating because again nobody cared.

About annihilating another state: How can Iran annihilate a state which has 200 nuclear warheads? It might be other way around.

Iran has troops in at least three countries thousands of km of its border, its on the offence. Besides, it's not like these missiles could do more than tickle the American army. Their only use is to menace the other countries of the region, except no country in the region is even capable of invading Iran. In short, their purpose is offensive.

Now, 'Moderate' President Rafsanjani argued that "the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam". It's best we do not allow such an apocalyptic scenario - such a war could hardly be contained to the Middle East.

I feel this is becoming a geopolitical conversation. I can go on and on, so do you. I don't want to hijack the main discussion of the thread any longer which was the human aspect of the sanctions to a geo-strategical game.

Thanks for a civilized conversation anyways.

If Iran stopped funding active offensive organisations like Hezbollah there would be no reason to restrict their weapons purchases or impose sanctions. The sanctions aren't the root cause, they are responses to specific stated goals and actions of Iran. Goals of destroying specific foreign states, which it insists on pursuing through violent means. No nation has a specific stated goal of destroying Iran, nor are they acting in order to achieve it.

>About annihilating another state: How can Iran annihilate a state which has 200 nuclear warheads? It might be other way around.

If the US or Israel really wanted to destroy Iran they could. The US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, in both cases in response to hideously brutal attacks on themselves or their allies. They could do it to Iran, so why haven't they? Because they don't want to, they have nothing to gain from it. They didn't want to invade Iraq or Afghanistan either, and have been trying to get their troop out as fast as possible ever since. The only reason they attacked Saddam or Afghanistan was because of the invasion of Kuwait and the 9/11 attacks. If Iran would just leave them and their allies alone, they'd be fine just buying their oil and selling them Coca-Cola.

What did Saddam or Afghanistan have to do with 9/11? Saudi Arabia and (I think) Pakistan were connected to 9/11, both countries that are US allies.

Understanding why the US entered Iraq is not hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOsWcEoKfp4

General Wesley Clark ran for POTUS on the Democratic ticket and was opposed to the war in Iraq. He also opposed those calling for war with Iran in 2007. His politics don't square with the neo-conservatives at all. Did you mean to refer to him as an opposition movement leader?

Pure nonsense. Terror is not the same thing as economic sanctions. To suggest it's the same is to make language meaningless.

It seems like some of those obstacles are also opportunities. For example, the point about not being able to get a MasterCard or Visa and therefore not being able to use AWS makes me think there's probably an opportunity for a neat business renting out VMs to Iranians with whatever payment they can use.

Of course AWS does a lot more than just rent VMs, but it seems like a relatively straightforward part of the business to copy.

Being on the wrong side of us sanctions is not a happy place.

I was imagining this as an opportunity for Iranian devs, who are, presumably, already on the wrong side of US sanctions.

There are many hosting rpov8ders who accept local payments. In Georgia (the country), you can even pay for hosting from the numerous kiosks on every corner of the street. Super market cash payments, Alipay, etc. It's a saturated market already.

Its an ongoing war. Just without bullets. My concern is that people will see him mention things like censorship and for them that will justify an invasion that results in mass killing and destruction.

Does anyone know exactly what sort of actual submission they are looking for from Iran? I really don't believe its about nuclear development.

I hope that any Iranians who can get out will get out.

Iranian living in the U.S. here.

During Obama it was:

We will choke you to death unless you give up your nuclear ambitions.

Now it is:

We will choke you to death unless you shoot yourself in the head.

U.S. is bullying Iran right now and people are starving to death. All because of a partisan issue. Unbelievable.

Nothing has been learned since the 50s it would seem. Unbelievable indeed.

Do you think it is a partisan issue or do you think it has to do with long term military strategy such as the Strait and fossil fuels? My guess would be they essentially want total military submission, something like a base inside the country.

AIPAC has a great influence in both parties.

And don't forget the military industrial complex and its influence to break the peace and sell more weapons.

AIPAC has influence because politicians wants perception of an ally to ”defend” and so have better support for their policies. This is not about real genuine support for Israel.

Well I don't really have any insider knowledge but it seems that Republicans didn't want Democrats to have this win therefore didn't pass it in the congress and there was a ton of propaganda against it.

Trump, riding on the wave of propaganda, just called it the worst deal ever only to have something to criticize Obama's foreign policy over.

It might be about Strait of Hormuz which is a strategic point [1]. Iran and Oman want to have full control over their coastal waters, but "civilized world" doesn't want that because in that case they could for example forbid entering Persian gulf to warships of specific countries, or for merchant ships. So the civilized world wants Iran to play by their rules.

Quote from Wikipedia:

> A third of the world’s liquefied natural gas and almost 20% of total global oil consumption passes through the strait, making it a highly important strategic location for international trade.

Here is another quote from [2]:

> The United States under Ronald Reagan imposed new sanctions in 1987 after Iran's actions from 1981-1987 against U.S. and other shipping vessels in the Persian Gulf and support for terrorism.

Also Iran is a rich and large country with 80M population that could take a leadership in the region unless stopped by sanctions.

But that is my personal opinion not confirmed by any proofs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iran

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/mike-pompeo-speech-12...

These were USA's 12 demands from Iran, and this is Iran's response[2]. Iran has sort of colonized Iraq and Syria, similar to how it has control over Lebanon using Hezbollah. IRGC even recently announced Syria as their 35th province. This video from 6 yrs back captured from a killed Iranian Journalist in Syria gives a clear picture of IRGC's actions in Syria.

https://youtu.be/ZI_88ChjQtU?t=868

I have linked the video at a timestamp where an IRGC soldier says how the Arabs who are living in that village aren't humans, but watch the whole video, it is good. So what is happening is Iran/IRGC is using the Shia identity to get poor and oppressed Shia people from Afghan/Pakistan with a promise of citizenship in Iran, to wage a war against Arabs and Israel. There is also a war going in Southern border of Saudi with the Houthi of Yemen, supported by Hezbollah/Iran[1]. So Saudi and Israel are concerned with this, and using their support from the current Trump administration, they are trying to get Iran to act.

[1] https://twitter.com/lcmporter/status/1152880775580258304

[2] https://twitter.com/FareedZakaria/status/1152647222586036224

I notice that doubleclick won't serve to Iran. A very small silver lining to the huge black cloud of sanctions...

There are full data sets out there of stack overflow and Wikipedia, etc. After reading this I’d love to get that in the hands of more Iranians and others. It’s most likely not illegal to deliver the actual data as long as its not via the web.

I would recommend talking with a lawyer before taking any actions to circumvent international sanctions. There are very severe civil and criminal penalties.

One of his complaints is that they can't even reach Docker docs and just a few minutes ago I ran into an issue where Ubuntu didn't have a manual page for a build in command. We have been so accustomed to having access to the internet all the time that systems no long ship with the required documentation.

If more tools actually shipped with complete documentation, then the Iranian developers life would be just a little easier. I would imagine that they have access to Docker, via mirrors, so why isn't the entire Docker documentation just included.

Quarterly IPFS snapshots for Wikipedia and quarterly data dumps for SE are available.

While the Iranian regime is somewhat less than perfect, the US has no business interfering in that region. The establishment reason for tensions is to protect (nuclear armed) Israel and oil (with some other knock on oil based relationships like SA). Guess what though, Israel has nukes and we desperately need to stop using oil as soon as possible. Why not just drop sanctions and stop tearing up perfectly good nuclear deals?

A deal with no adequate verification regime is not a good deal.

A deal that gives billions of dollars to the worlds largest supporter of terrorism is not a good deal.

It is appeasement.

When fascist regimes like what run Iran say things like how they're going to nuke Israel and the US, that this is a goal they are pursuing, I believe them.

It's sad that the Iranian people have to put up with the fascists who control their government, but appeasing their government will not solve anything.

Your first two points are not really supported by facts. The nuclear deal had a relatively invasive verification regime. I also don't understand why people refer to Iran as the world's largest supporter of terror--what specific terror acts are we speaking of?

Any negotiated deal will have tradeoffs. The US's latest policy of total humiliation as articulated by Pompeo seems destined to fail. The regime is not going to sign for that and it will grow increasingly confrontational without options.

"The nuclear deal had a relatively invasive verification regime"

A 'relatively invasive' inspection regime where you had to get permission in advance from Iran to visit 'military sites', and nearly all of the restrictions were temporary.

"what specific terror acts are we speaking of?"

There's a pretty massive civil war you may have heard of, where Iran is on the side which uses chemical weapons. Or maybe we could mention sending lots of IEDs to Iraq to kill Americans. Or bombing the AMIA center to kill Jews. And we can't forget the Rushdie affair. Really, the list is endless.

"The US's latest policy of total humiliation"

Got it. Demanding the regime to halt interference in foreign lands == "total humiliation" Holding hostages like Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe != "humiliation".

> A 'relatively invasive' inspection regime where you had to get permission in advance from Iran to visit 'military sites', and nearly all of the restrictions were temporary.

Thankfully, you can detect traces of nuclear material for months and years: https://www.iiss.org/blogs/survival-blog/2019/04/iaea-inspec...

On the other hand, you might now get less access, an Iran as a nuclear threshold state, and the war to stop it might not happen after all.

> There's a pretty massive civil war you may have heard of, where Iran is on the side which uses chemical weapons. Or maybe we could mention sending lots of IEDs to Iraq to kill Americans.

Those things at least are not terrorism by any reasonable definition.

'Detecting radioactive traces' isn't anywhere near enough.

You need to 'detect' centrifuge building and storage otherwise their breakout time ( = time to get nukes from the time they decide to just ignore the arrangements) is reduced to nothing and there isn't enough time to stop it.

Unfortunately, centrifuges don't have to be loaded with radioactive material before activation, so a large construction program would be undetectable under this scheme (especially given that some research and construction of centrifuges was allowed).

Another problem is actually the long trace detection time: that allows Iran to claim any trace is from the old nuclear program, and not a new one (that claim already happened. It's probably right this time). Since Iran was never asked to account for the old program, it can make the claim for any new site ever. It's not trivial to disambiguate whether a sample is new or old after a certain threshold, these are trace amounts after all. There would be plenty of room for doubt. With no possible proof, there would be no support for action against any new program.

"These things are not terrorism..."

I gather that Iran's support for genocide/mass ethnic cleansing is no biggie, but if you allow that in service of the deal, I wonder what you will allow in the future.

> A deal that gives billions of dollars to the worlds largest supporter of terrorism is not a good deal.

No kidding. We should really be charging Saudi Arabia billions of dollars instead of giving them anything.

Wow. Reading this felt like a continuous nightmare, can't image living in such a restricted country. Very enlightening read, thanks for sharing!

This is so sad to read.

Few things I learned recently: Iran is cut off from all international banking, wire transfer, SWIFT etc. This means Iran must pay by hard cold cash for everything. Sometime cash is sent in shipping container! Iran had few countries helping for export import like Russia, North Korea and few 3rd world countries. Recently Trump administrators have tighten up screw so much on this that any company found to be doing transactions is also then cut off from International banking system. US now tracks all ships going around Iran, runs audits on them and enforces sanctions. Countries like Saudi Arabia is also top enemy of Iran which puts additional pressure on other countries for sanctions. I can’t imagine how average tech savvy person would be able to survive in Iran.

Any DApp developer/startup care to comment on this? Blockchain/distributed ledger is often touted to be resilient against attacks, censorship resistant etc. etc. blah blah blah, so how well will they function against the will of the United States?

@muneeb? @perlin-network?

I'm sure you heard of China GFW, We have strict censorship too, especially during some event, we have used shadowsocks, v2ray. Lots of users reported tcp packet was dropped, but you can use shadowsocks with v2ray-plugin, or v2ray https over cdn

Hi, do you have any servers for shadowsocks I could use?

Has anyone here managed to hire people from Iran? Our immigration lawyer told us it would take more than a year to even get an appointment at the embassy - I've tried calling multiple times and ultimately gave up. We're in Europe. It sucked because we had a few promising candidates. If you happen to have any special insight / loop holes that you are willing to share with me over email, I would really appreciate it.

Has anyone ever heard of a charity fund for buying VPN access for people in repressive, low-income countries?

NordVPN is 2.62 EUR per month right now for a 3 year plan. It seems like a lot of good could be done for not much money.

Public VPNs will get blocked more frequently than private VPNs.

I think a better solution is go setup a bunch of private VPS and setup VPN servers. Then share each of them with a few dozen people each. You can get them for $12/year or less at lowendbox / lowendtalk

"Even in US we can find certain domains which are blocked and cannot be accessed like those which contain CP or wild anti-humanism contents."

Is it true? I always assumed US never blocks access to websites. They would rather ask the hosting provider to take down the website or try to arrest the author.

Yeah my understanding the FBI takes the actual domain down in case of child pornography. But they still won’t mess with your DNS.

Blocking access to documentation is too much, I think. Sanctions do not require to block any access to the site from countries under sanctions.

Forcing HTTPS apparently doesn't help people who could benefit from privacy. You don't really need privacy to learn to code.

I worked for quite some time as a network engineer in a Syrian company.

I'll be honest here, sanctions only slows the internet down because of the VPN overhead, so does the government with its stupid proxies and single point of connection for the whole country, but is it stopping us from doing our job? no.

Censorship: Back in 2010-2011, just before the revolution, ADSL subs were growing fast, government censorship getting tighter. Facebook, Youtube, even Amazon (they don't deliver to Syria tho), are banned. With more websites adopting ssl and people getting more educated about its benefits, government started doing Man-in-the-middle attacks causing the red ugly warning. Fortunately, that didn't last too long, thanks to free VPN services(yes we gave up privacy to foreign firms, to escape local censorship), I believe the government saw that it's attacks are causing people to be more aware of their security rather than helping it in identifying and arresting activists. Luckily most websites use https now. Until recently we didn't have a local ban issue since all the block was done by local forwarding proxies configured to filter certain domains, and only plain http traffic was processed there. I remember seeing Blue Coat hardware being used in some official departments, not sure though if this was used on a larger scale. That was the way to block things, in addition to blocking a few dozens of IP addresses. Now government is trying to tighten the censorship on messaging and VoIP apps to raise the profit for local telecom companies, which are (surprise!) largely owned indirectly by the president through loyal (shadow?) businessmen. They have blocked most connections to Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, their method is not perfect, but most of the people are using proxies like psiphon or even getting a paid subscription. They will probably try to block the proxies too in the coming years (they are very slow tbh). I heard that they are promoting local VPN services, but didn't find anything relevant, though it's highly possible like the Iranian case.

Sanctions: It's a real pain, especially when it comes to payment, but thanks to diaspora and UAE (which serves the main breathing point for the Syrian companies to avoid sanctions), we have a way to pay for and buy stuff. Now comes the online services, which are blocked by US based companies. We're still using proxies for most of the services, but since few years, most ISPs started implementing their own remote proxy service outside of Syria and passing them some traffic, thus unblocking some services like Apple Store, Google Play, and even Snapchat. But for us devs we still have to use proxies to access AWS, GCP (and everything hosted there), Docker, Bitbucket, Gitlab, everything related to android dev, and many other services. Can the government unblock these to help locals do their work? yes. Will they? probably no, they don't need to do so. Since they can get to Dubai or Paris and enjoy their time there it's all fine. BTW, some people who can afford to live quite a luxurious life have Netflix subscriptions.

Tor? haven't used it since the early days of the revolution. Bad network connection with our crappy infrastructure makes tor dead slow.

Personal Opinion: sanctions or not, foreign companies who want to work in Syria, or Syrian companies that want to work for foreign clients, both found ways to bypass it. We have German companies employing Syrians, I worked for a British firm last year. After all, who wouldn't prefer to pay someone $400/mo to get work done than say $1500/mo? not to mention insurance and taxes. Same for locals, even $300/mo is still very good compared to what most companies offer, for an IT guy at least. Finally, we need a new democratic Syria, by helping Syrians people take the lead and rule themselves freely, weakening Assad's family grip, but the government and its strongmen are finding their way to bypass sanctions, so do sanctions really help or are they only affecting the poor? I have mixed feeling. But had the sanctions been meant to help Syrians, they would have confiscated Assad's family and their loyalist crimes supporters billions in the West.

What is it like, not how is it like, you could say how was it like. but how is it just doesnt feel right

america needs to elect another straight shooter so people don't get confused about foreign policy issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qdvm6h8WKg

There are of course arguments against doing this and in support of sanctions, but I feel for this person.

I think, given that the Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Roberts, never met a first amendment argument that he didn't like, these restrictions could probably be eliminated if not narrowly tailored.

Any significantly large software company could sue to overcome general software export restrictions on First amendment grounds, but most likely they won't. Politically it would be shooting themselves in the foot and inviting wrath from Trump, and they don't get paid to support free speech, they usually just do it incidentally.

Perhaps a little more likely, The EFF could sue again.

Somebody should ask the EFF about export controls on software during their Defcon panel on the 10th or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

I'm a developer in Iran too. Just wanted to say this guy works in Douran (شرکت دوران) company, proudly stated in his page (Which screams amateur and narcissist), they are providing the government with many censorship and surveillance software and services.

They are notorious and hated, like death squad level in the free minded, geek community in the country.

I can't believe his post got this much attention and sympathy without anyone noticing he works in a freedom killing company... what a joke!

Sanctions really hurt... good luck using a good cloud provider, which is a backbone for our daily activities as developers. No doubt about that, nothing new.

The problem is our double standards in the middle east, we fuck up everything then blame it on others. They (west, east, x, y) aren't saints but we aren't either. Here is a clear example of this ugly truth.

I know people mostly from minorities (Kurds, atheists, LGBT, secular, Narenji guys) with death sentences in Iran because of their online activities and if there is a single corporation you can easily blame and point to who lands a hand to the government for their inhuman acts it's them, Douran.

Double standards won't work, you can only fool people for a very short period of time in our era.

Thanks for sharing this.

> his page (Which screams amateur and narcissist)...

Pls tone down personal attacks, if you can.

I can't believe your ad hominem got so many upvotes. I live in Tunisia, and till before 2011 revolution, we were classified as "Enemies of the Internet" by reporters without borders. We were worse than Iran. I can tell you something : the role played by the geeks working for the state security was crucial in changing things over here. Considering them enemies got us nowhere, because they were silently on our side. By doing what you did, you fucked up everything and blame it on others.

> "this guy works in Douran (شرکت دوران) company, proudly stated in his page (Which screams amateur and narcissist)"

You really decimate your credibility when you say absurd things like this. If you're willing to misconstrue something as simple as stating your employer on the internet as such a serious character flaw, how can we trust the rest of your judgement to be reasonable?

Seems near impossible to keep up with modern tech advances if you can't even google stuff properly. :(

He says that Google search works but results are irreachable.

I may hold an extreme position here. I believe sanction is always a bad idea. I grew up in a formerly sanctioned country, Vietnam. Life was rough for normal people. They become increasingly attached to their sanctioned regime. The US sanctioned Vietnam mainly because it took down a genocidal regime. Sanction is not an effective tool for change.

The right way to move the world forward is to lead by example, to become the society that other countries want to emulate.

I have seen a lot of this kind of stuff. Sanctions almost never work, and are almost always a bad idea.

Just like arming rebels against a government, the CIA found out, almost never results in anything good[1], then tried it again[2] and it again predictably resulted in something awful.

When it comes to sanctions, they have exacerbated situations that could have been solved with diplomacy. In the case of Iran, we already had negotiated an unprecedented deal with international inspectors having more access to its nuclear facilities and mining sites than any country in history. But that wasn’t enough. The deal was scrapped by Trump simply to erase Obama’s legacy[3], with no plan in place. It’s not just Trump, it’s the Republican leaders[4] and types of presidents the new Republican party tends to elect.[5]

Let’s turn to substance and back up the claim abou sanctions. We have seen this movie before. North Korea, cut off from world trade and under threat, was angling to get nuclear weapons. Clinton had negotiated a deal with Kin Jong Il, called the Agreed Framework[6], in exchange for step by step normalization of relations and lifting sanctions. It was already signed and began to be implemented!

Then the next administration entered office - Bush and the GOP called the deal expensive “appeasement” and scuttled it. Instead, they put more sanctions on North korea.

How did that work out? The people got united under the credible narrative that “they hate our way of life and they hate us” and North Korea got the bomb. With a little help from Ukrainians on the black market[7].

What’s worse is that with no agreement in place or relations with the US North Korea continued to act as a rogue state and gave nuclear technology to Syria to use against Israel. The Syrian nuclear reactor was covertly bombed by Israelis in a pre emptive strike[8] and no country (including Syria) spoke about this for months.

I could go down the line to show that diplomacy beats sanctions every time and that sanctions radicalize the population and make them support the very thing you want them to abandon.

I will jump straight to Godwin’s law. The Nazis came to power because of crushing sanctions on Germany after the Treaty of Versailles. Yes, France hated Germany and yes they wanted them to pay reparations for starting World War 1. But as a result, the German people were reduced to complete poverty and hyperinflation. What did they do? They had a nationalist fervor and pushed for leaders to “restore” Germany, armed themselves to the teeth, and then launched World War 2!

Imagine if there was no sanctions. Would the Germans elect Nazis if they were prosperous? Would North Koreans not develop a rootless cosmopolitan bourgiousie class if they were allowed to trade with the world? These things happen when sanctions are LIFTED. You want to help a country — lift sanctions on its people!

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/arming-rebels-has-...

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-syri...

3. https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-48978484

4. https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/the-gops-no-compromis...

5. https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/12/usa.books

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreed_Framework

7. https://www.npr.org/2017/08/14/543477518/north-koreas-secret...

8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Outside_the_Box

I’m always caught by surprise when I see intelligent, educated people ignore the nature and actions of Iran to justify their adversarial feelings towards the US administration.

Iran is on an unprecedented aggressive and violent push towards dominating the Middle East.

They are deployed in Syria, building forward bases to threaten Israel, destabilize Lebanon and pushing it closer to another war with Israel by funding and arming Hezbollah.

They are sponsoring and arming Shiite militias in Iraq and provide them with ballistic missiles to threaten other Middle East countries.

They are supporting and funding the Houthis in Yemen who are responsible for the civil war and attacks on Saudi Arabia and Gulf states. They are supporting, funding and arming Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, both of which are recognized terrorist groups intent on murdering Jews.

They are responsible for historical attacks on US forces in Lebanon during the 80s which killed hundreds of Americans. They are later responsible for the attack on the Jewish community in Argentina in the early 90s. Lately multiple Iranian operative cells have been exposed in Europe, trying to engage in assassinations.

They are bullying Gulf states. They are calling for the destruction of Israel every few weeks.

Iran is developing a ballistic missile program which is intended to threaten Western Europe (they are up to 4000km in range now with their latest missiles).

Finally, Iran hangs gays from cranes.

Now, why would anyone in their right mind oppose sanctioning this country?

One side of the story. But the thing is, intelligent people will want to know why?

Intelligent people already know why: Iran is interested to see Shiite Muslim groups proliferating, for religious as well as practical reasons. Iran is the leader of the Shiite world, in the same vein Saudi Arabia represents the Sunni world.

This is why Iran supports Hezbollah (Shiite) over other groups in Lebanon, Houthis (who are not Shiite but oppose the Sunni majority) in Yemen, Shiite in Iraq, Bashar Al Assad (who is Alawite himself but closely aligned with the Shiite and opposing the Sunnis in Syria). The only place where Iran supports Sunnis is Gaza, and that's done to primarily weaken Israel which Iran perceives as its primary threat to regional hegemony.

> Now, why would anyone in their right mind oppose sanctioning this country?

Just to answer your question, I don’t really have a position myself on the topic:

Embargos target the general population, making things way more difficult for normal people who are just trying to live their lives. That can potentially create pressure for the people responsible for the evil actions and decisions you want to sanction, but as a side effect a lot more people are negatively impacted. That seems quite immoral to me.

The sanctions have real, tangible practical effects. It's not just about making them suffer. For example, Hezbollah who are almost exclusively funded by Iran, had their budget cut by half [0]. The military operations Iran undertakes in Syria which are intended to strategically threaten Israel have taken a cut. It's hard to justify supporting proxy wars when the population at home is hungry.

[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/as-iran-us-tensions-rise-with-...

Hezbollah was created to expel the Israeli invasion in south Lebanon. [1] One thing is for sure: Middle East politics and history has no single (or correct) perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Lebanese_confl...

Now that Hezbollah covertly built five tunnels extending far into Israeli territory to attack Israeli civilians, you need to ask “who’s invading who?”

Because sanctions (on the Internet) will radicalize younger people. Iran happens to have an abundance of them: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/Ir...

If you want to help them, you don't do so by cutting them access to the information. Iran is not a dictatorship, it's a theocracy. Like literally everywhere else, the more people are educated, the less likely they are to let religion govern their lives.

Young women are already protesting compulsory hijabs since December 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9319_Iranian_protes...

Now I understand that you're from Israel which makes you too affected to look at the problem objectively, but the best way to help young people under an oppressive regime is to stay the fuck away and let them do what they must. The worst thing you could possibly do is to give them additional boundaries that they have to go through to access the information from the outside.

>If you want to help them, you don't do so by cutting them access to the information

Worked wonders with Russia, right? At least those young people could use foss to better target artillery strikes in Eastern Ukraine to pay off their mortage.

Criticizing soldiers for fighting effectively?

Also, how much of that FOSS was written by Russians anyway? It's not a nation with a math or programming talent shortage.

> They are supporting and funding the Houthis in Yemen who are responsible for the civil war and attacks on Saudi Arabia and Gulf states. They are supporting, funding and arming Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, both of which are recognized terrorist groups intent on murdering Jews.

Saudi does the same, by arming the opposite side.

> Finally, Iran hangs gays from cranes.

There are right wing fanatics in the "West" who openly are against LGBTQ, trolling them IRL and on social media. Some, calling for violence as well. Pushing those people to depression or cornering them in society, is as worse as hanging them.

> They are responsible for historical attacks on US forces in Lebanon during the 80s which killed hundreds of Americans

Like the US warship that blew up a civilian airliner and the officers who got medals for that?

Whatever you said about Iran, is applicable to the other side as well. There are no "good guys" or "bad guys" here. So, everyone has blood on their hands one way or the other.

The west should practice what it preaches to the word, not pick and choose.

You don't want yet another Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria situation. Let the people of the nation decide their fate.

I for one, don't believe in any religion and it should have no place in this world. Many problems might go away.

"There are right wing fanatics in the "West" who openly are against LGBTQ, trolling them IRL and on social media. Some, calling for violence as well. Pushing those people to depression or cornering them in society, is as worse as hanging them."

Go find yourself some Iranian expat friends and ask them what it's really like to live under the rule of Mullahs, then come back and check if your moral relativism has taken a turn.

I know that Iran is worse, but the West is no saint either, with the atrocities it does around the world. Your country/government is always good when you're not on its bad side. Same goes for mine as well.

> [...] is as worse as hanging them

> I know that Iran is worse

Which one is it?

Do you ask which is worse of the two?

I was asking if you think it's equally bad for gay people in Iran and the west, or worse in Iran. Your first statement sounded like you think it's no better in the west, and the second one like you think Iran is worse.

I said worse overall like its laws, how religion restricts people, censorship & the proxy wars.

Parent made the wrong argument.

First, the Iranian state does not have a policy of finding and murdering gay people. You'll note that basically all press reports of the execution of homosexuals ultimately refer to acts of rape, possibly statutory. The argument, roughly, would be that this is a pretense, and certainly, Iran's legal system is very flawed, its laws regressive and offenses such as "enmity against god" ill-defined. Nevertheless, they are not ISIS, and merely being homosexual is not a crime.

Second, if you want to morally justify sanctions based on the idea of improving LGBT rights in Iran, find at minimum some evidence that there is significant percentage of those people in Iran who would welcome them.

Third, Saudi Arabia (see [0]). The west simply has no, absolutely no leg to stand on when it comes to the human rights argument. It is blatantly obvious that Iran could continue as it does with regard to its treatments of minorities, so long as it stops opposing our geopolitical interests, and starts to provide some benefits instead.

To summarize, this is not an issue of moral relativism. This is an issue of dishonesty and jingoism.

[0] https://www.out.com/news/2019/4/29/saudi-arabia-kills-5-afte...

One could say a lot of the same things about the USA or UK or Israel (especially Israel with their ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine).

One could say many things, it does not mean any of them is correct.

As Shakespeare wrote, “A plague o' both your houses!” — Iran’s sins should not result in the USA being surprised by their reactions. Sanctions will affect the entire nation (isn’t that the point, to reduce war fighting capacity while giving the target a get rich quick scheme called “stop attacking our interests”?) and that necessarily makes the nation imposing the sanction unpopular with many of the population that has been sanctioned against (it’s an easy propaganda win to say “The Great Satan is responsible”).

A failure to foresee this would be an error even if the USA was populated entirely by literal saints and angels; as it stands, human history is littered with so many genocides that it’s more like two drunks telling each other to stop looking at their pint. (And yes, my country is just as bad, and yes it doesn’t know that either).

Do you think Iran is worse than the US when it comes to foreign involvement, world domination, destabilising regions, arming militias, assassinations on foreign soil, ballistic missile programmes, proxy wars, human rights violations such as torture, etc.?

US promotes values I am interested in, while Iran promotes what to me seems like a nightmare. Those who are interested in the Iranian end goal should be supporting Iran, but then I have to wonder why Western people would be promoting the Iranian stance. It does not seem self serving.

> "US promotes values I am interested in,"

What, like overthrowing democratically elected governments, as they did in Iran? I really hope neoconservativism dies with the boomers, but I fear you're young.

US does not promote values, it promotes its influence. USA went against many progressive leaders in latin America because they were about to damage the US influence and economic interest. USA is completely fine with Saudi Arabia and its values, while not fine at all with Allende (or even De Gaulle in France).

Quick question: Is there any action taken by the Israeli government or military in the past 20 years that you feel is worthy of criticism?

Obviously, although I suspect some of my criticism of them and what you mean by “criticism” will be radically different.

I expect this (VERY relevant to the current discussion) proves you wrong. Democratically elected, modern minded minister being "replaced" (he died in the process) by the secret services of the US and UK.

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

It's not about some "end goal" its about both gov'ts using dirty tricks to further their own goals and the goals of the oligarchs that are associated with them.

My take: both are not worth my promo. US has, as other have pointed out, caused a lot more harm to a lot more people since WW2 then Iran has in the last 250 years.

Compared to what the US has done and is doing, Iran looks like a rookie. I despise Iran's rules and the way it police its people. But, the way US gets away with whatever it does, is baffling. Snowden leaks, WikiLeak's diplomatic cables, still its not the hot topic. We can discuss all day about NK & Iran's nuclear programs or China's censorship, but US & its allies should be discussed more as well. Whatever they do impacts us all, directly or indirectly.

Because you are not sanctioning only the military and the government, you are sanctioning everyone in the country. You are sanctioning young people, who just want to live their lives, just like we do. They already suffer from the oppressive regime, and you just want to make their live even harder.

All the Iranians I've met seem like completely normal people. I've never been to Iran, but from what I hear the young people in Iran aren't much different from the people here: They like to go to parties, listen to music, etc. The only difference is that they have to do it in hiding, and that they will get arrested when they do something like hold hands in public when they are not married.

Why would anyone approve of sanctions that make these people suffer even more?

And then, when these people start fleeing the country, asking for asylum, why do we turn them away?

At what point should we start to hold ordinary civilians responsible to the actions of their governments?

None? If they are under a regime and the government do not represent their will. At what point you start jailing children for their parent's actions?

For any such action you should consider reason and effect. Do you have a good reason here and do you expect good results, or are yoy hust trying stuff out?

For autocratic countries this is not even a viable question to start considering.

For democracies there might be some consideration. But then you need to know how the individual people voted.

EDIT: Also you need to consider whether the politicians actually had the acts on their manifestos.

Always. The people always get the politics they deserve.

Do the current citizens of North Korea deserve the government they have?

The only thing propping up the regime is the society which feeds it.

Do you believe that the main reason that the North Korean regime can survive is due to the support of the people?

Indeed, its the only reason any regime survives.

What practical means of resistance does the average North Korean citizen have?

Every possible means. Plus, the decision - and responsibility - to act on it.

we suggest them to overturn their government, start a revolution.

Well that's the most dumb comment I've seen here for some time. you realize that most revolution end up in millions dead, having a new generation of dictators at the helm and little changed for the better, compared to a lot changed for the worse? But yeah its a sure way to give proper fundamentalists a good chance to rule.