How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet | Hacker News Reader

How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet

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> Still, he and other analysts emphasize that it's difficult to know exactly what has happened...

For HN's standards, the article is disappointingly light on detail. It's not hard to imagine what they did but confirmations would be nice. They should remove "How" from the article's title.

I found this medium blog about internet censoring in Iran [0]. There are other posts there detailing the situation of Internet in Iran.

Here's the NetBlocks article: https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-disrupted-in-iran-ami... It looks like network connectivity is going back up.

[0] https://medium.com/filterwatch/is-layered-filtering-the-futu...

Based on traffic flows into Cloudflare managed domains... yes, connectivity seems to have come back _a tiny bit_ compared to yesterday.

Yeah, I was expecting some detail on whether it was firewalls, DNS, downing interfaces, or null routing, or...?

Yes, information will spread in other ways, but simply saying "it will not work because information spreads in other ways" is batting a blind eye to how effective outages are, and how reliant and vulnerable we are to outages. We all use screen-based devices that connect to the web. If our countries did not offer streamlined cellular services, we would be at the same limitation. Internets require backbones. This is both a boon and a drawback. The spread of information is slowed dramatically, but also this requires more old-world creativity in message relaying. You can always put a USB stick on a pigeon's leg and get Gigabit transfer rates.

It's not the backbones that cause the issues. It's the centralized services we rely on.

Fully decentralized services don't make money, as they inherently rely on a population of providers to be exactly equal to them.

After Usenet fell out of favor, RSS sort of answered the mail here since aggregators could pull the news together and cache it. That is, until news services stopped providing more than the intro paragraph in their feeds.

But yes, social networks are central to many peoples relationships now and people would have to remember how to communicate without messenger apps again.

I don't see the Usenet connection to RSS. Could you flesh it out a little bit please? Before the governors used the fear of pr0n to encourage willing ISPs to kill netnews it was a nice free distributed "town square" kind of service that came along with an ISP account. The ability to download article headers via NNRP is the only obvious commonality with RSS.

Indeed. Television? Internet. Telephone? Internet. Messaging? Internet.

Without the Internet, my ability to communicate here would be reduced to printed pamphlets and receiving radio broadcasts.

In the great 2003 power outage in eastern North America, there were already problems communicating with people about the outage because a surprising number of people didn't have battery-powered radios. Kill the net, the phones, and cable TV and that cut off the majority of people 15+ years ago.

When the 2013 ice storm hit Toronto, entire neighbourhoods were in the information-dark after the backup generators for cell towers died. It wasn't long before my neighbours came knocking asking if I knew why the power was out and what was up. Phones were down. TV was down. Internet service was down. And they had no other way of getting information. I think I might have been the only person on the block with a battery-powered radio.

Back in the day, the international switchboard operators at White Plains and a couple other places would be the first to know when a coup happened, since outward calls stopped and inward calls could not be completed.

I used to be a toll operator (literally the other end of when you dial zero) for a brief period and dealing with the international operators was interesting. They could tell you about the state of so many countries based on their interactions with other operators there.

can you expand on that? "They could tell you about the state of so many countries based on their interactions with other operators there."

Last I checked, Iran effectively requires all public connectivity to go through one of its state-owned ISPs (via BGP) - you can see routing for these yourself, virtually every single AS assigned to Iran will be upstreamed by Telecommunication Infrastructure Company or Information Technology Company (ITC) or something like that.

Just pull routes or down your sessions and no more internet.

Yep. And most gulf nation's ride someone else's fiber and connect to transit providers in Europe. As someone who deals with routing in the middle East it's very frustrating to deal with westerners who don't understand that there really is isn't much inter country networking out here (just because two points on a map are close don't assume that's how the packets go). Want to go to Bahrain to Oman? You're going thru Europe. Saudi Arabia to UAE? Europe. While UAE is the closest thing to a "hub" where there are well populated IXs, every gulf nation seems to have one big govt backed incumbant carrier who doesn't want to play nicely with outsiders. Also the mixture of internet blocking systems and backhauling of data to centralized scrubbing facilities is also fun.

I believe Germany is the 'big transit upstream' of Iran.

I haven't found UAE to really be a genuine hub with IXs, it seems like every incumbent ISP/UAE ISP will have 'selective' peering, refuse to be on the routeservers, and refuse to peer with 'outsiders' even if you are on the damn exchange.

It's gotten better in the last year. But there are still problems with the locals buying a small ix port and it gets congested. The biggest challenge in the area is the the asymmetry. I could learn the routes if a network in the gulf I want, but they will refuse to accept my prefixes and force the return traffic by Europe unless I pay in some fashion.

> I believe Germany is the 'big transit upstream' of Iran.

There's a bunch of countries in between, so how does that work?

Domestic carrier buys optical transport from their country that goes back towards europe. They'll drop some network infra in Europe and buy transit from folks like tata/dtag/telecom Italia.

Check https://as49666.peeringdb.com to see where they land in eu.

A set of networks, cables, and routers, presumably :)

On my routes to parsonline I see this: dubai -> italy -> france -> germany (ffm) -> iran

The germany to iran leg might be doing mpls or something, I don't see anything in between it other than a lot of timed out hops.

is there any scoring of internet freedoms based upon the number of routes in and out of a country? the same means by which a country controls its own people through this method can certainly be used against the same by both forces inside and out. certainly economic war could be fought just by shutting down access for countries which only have one or two nodes to the outside world.

the international community could also simply put in place rules that a countries leadership can have no more access to the internet than its populace and cutting off that populace would invoke limits on the leadership if not economic sanctions

Some countries do it by obvious means and others hide behind friendly sounding "protecting the integrity of" laws but the results end up the same. the government keeps its rights and access but everyone else is cuffed

It is not so much the number of connections that a country has to the internet but the number of connections that a country internal to itself. Consider two countries:

Country A has an IXP (Internet Exchange Point) within its borders. Thus, if it cuts external connections, Country A still has working network connections between hosts within its borders.

Country B has most of its internal communications routed through IXPs in neighboring countries. When it cuts those external connections, it cuts connections between hosts within its own borders.

All other things being equal Country B will bare a much higher cost to cutting the internet than Country A because at least people in Country A can access websites inside their country.

Given this, consider the national security implications of Amazon AWS.

I wonder censorship-proof communication technology will ever be widely deployed around the world, so that this sort of blackout is no longer possible.

Maybe some sort of an open access via satellites that cover the entire surface of the Earth. In which case just having a device that can tune into the signal would be enough to get outbound access.

But then someone has to control that satellite access too... The "good guys" no doubt.

Stuff like Starlink and similar constellations (which I'm torn on mainly because of the effect they're going to have on ground based telescopes) would in theory be pretty hard to cut off access to on the individual level but most people wouldn't have the up-link antennas needed to access it. Because of that you'll need some kind of alternative networking that isn't controlled by a business the government could strong arm. I've been vaguely researching for a while and it doesn't seem like anyone is really making networking tools for intermittently connected nodes where people could connect their cellphones or something together and as they move around messages are cached (encrypted) and forwarded.

Starlink/OneWeb/any-other-transmitter doesn't solve the problem. They are all unauthorized transmitters and would not be legal in the host country. Finding tankers transmitters is trivial with even consumer-grade hardware. Depending on jurisdiction, unauthorized transmitters go directly to jail.

I am not sure what the relevant laws say on paper, but I would expect unauthorized transmitters to never be heard from again (so to speak).

That depends a lot on the directionality of the transmission though right? We don't know much but the satellites are using a phased antenna array so the ground stations could be as well.

Do we know anything about the end-user Starlink ground transceiver?

Specifically, I wonder if a old digital satellite TV dish and an RTL-SDR dongle and a little software would do the job. That stuff should all be available in rough countries.

That's enough equipment to receive Othernet (nee Outernet) transmissions[1] (which are one-way, but would keep you informed potentially - but not let you get any news out).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Othernet

It's been described vaguely as a flat disk about the size of a pizza box that only needs to be pointed mostly skyward. [0] It's extremely unclear how complex the radio setup will be in these so I'm not sure a simple SQR dongle would have the resolution to decode the signal.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/24/spacex-reveals-more-starli...

RTL-SDRs are receive-only devices.

I just spent a few days with the company Bivy [1] who make the satellite comms device Bivy Stick. The current one looks like an external battery pack, and people have said it's great to take into foreign countries like Afghanistan because Authorities have no idea.

You can send an receive text messages (and soon send emails) from anywhere on the planet. I played with it for a few days, it works great.

[1] https://www.bivystick.com/

It uses the Iridium network which means it's very, very slow. Fast enough for emergency SOS messages and perhaps tweets, but it's not what most people expect from "The Internet."

Certainly you can't browse "the Internet", but we were playing with it for a few days, and you can send and receive 140 character text messages in less than 30 seconds.

That's pretty nifty when you are a long, long way from cell service (I just drove all the way around Africa for 3 years) or you're in a country that has turned off the Internet.

So 'round about 100 years ago, amateur radio was starting to ramp up after the WW I shut down. It actually meets your definition. Of course, every node requires some infrastructure, and the ionosphere as a long-haul back-bone has its vagaries, but peer-to-peer over HF radio is a well understood technology.

Now, for certain, ionospheric channels are very challenging for digital communications. Anything north of a few kilobits per second is probably a non-starter. But it would be sufficient for tactical comms, print news, and a few small images.

It strikes me that an Arduino "shield" (it would be more the size of a book) could make an interesting HF gateway node, within the bandwidth limitations. It could be built in ham-radio friendly countries, and allowed to leak into less tolerant regimes -- although in some countries possession would probably come at considerable personal risk.

The actual field-radio node would not need huge power and a great antenna -- because radio nodes can be asymmetric a larger station in a safe country with big antennas and a big amp could make up for a pip-squeak field node.

Amateur radio is great for last-ditch communications in a disaster, but it is not in any way covert or safe for people in a hostile regime to use; a bit of direction-finding equipment will easily track down anyone using it.

Agreed. Covert radio ops requires non-trivial op-sec.

I like the radio idea. It brings to mind the good old days of pirate radio stations.

As for the objections regarding the of locating radio transmissions by adversaries, as technology becomes cheaper and more miniaturized, it will become more and more feasible to have very small, very cheap, disposable repeaters, which could be deployed on mobile, relatively anonymous transport (like flying drones, trains, and ships), and perhaps automatically activated long after their owner has left.. and perhaps activated only in case of emergencies, like this blackout.

Individuals wishing to communicate through these repeaters could send very short and rare transmissions from different, and maybe also mobile locations, so that finding them will be much more difficult.

Unfortunately, if adversaries are aware of these devices (and they would be were such devices to ever become widely deployed), they could still either jam them or perform a denial of service attack by flooding them with their own transmissions. Some sort of steganography might be of use here, but I'm not sure how effective it would be if lots of people know about it, which is a requirement for any widely deployed technology.

It's by no means complete but it looks like there are only 5-7 places Iran connects to the undersea fiber optic cable network. If they had control of those they could easily just restrict access. The network level is very resilient but the physical layer is where governments can really exercise control.

Would it be possible for Iranians to acquire a satellite internet signal outside the purview of the state-run Iranian ISPs? I understand many TV signals are received in the middle east this way, especially areas where last-mile cable connectivity doesn't exist.

I've thought this for many years. In Iran's capital every rooftop apartment has many satellites for TV use. The government claims these are "illegal" (not because its free but because of porn and unapproved channels) and the majority do not get caught (I've seen very few cases). Why can't they use a different kind of satellite for internet?

I am sure every government have internet kill switch by now, so no surprise here

Also In Iran all internal, locally hosted websites/apps were available during this time.

I really hope new technologies such as Starlink or others can help this terrifying reality. I agree with you that government's have kill switches, why wouldn't they? Very effective way of controlling people considering all is controlled with the devices we use everyday.

At least it’s still worth shutting off the internet.

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