As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp
reuters.com
reuters.com
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937782 links to claims that the Iranian government hacked WhatsApp or one of its networking providers.
Normally, that makes the service provider implement blocks on their end, because then at least they can present the user with a sensible error message, and other services that the government isn't trying to block are not impacted (eg. services hosted on the same servers - for example Whatsapp voice calls might be banned, but text chat not banned).
Ignoring the Iranian government might make them loose some users. Trying to ignore the US government will make some people go to prison. If that's what happens.. someone made a _very_ bad decision
The government is blocking at network level anyway.
The app provider should detect the network outage and provide a good UI, not proactively block users who aren't using the affected network at all.
Can the blocking be adequately distinguished from packet loss? If not it seems like it would be embarrassing for the app to declare Government blockage when it's not really the case.
How could any network-level block by Iran prevent a user in the UK from calling a user in India?
Edit: can be a compromised CDN. See https://twitter.com/roozbehp/status/1572841090910388225?s=46...
Edit 2: Videos are being removed too https://twitter.com/youranonstory/status/1572747450368290816...
Edit 3: from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/protests-internet-disruption-ir/
Voice calls and text worked just fine.
I don't see mention of a CDN in the link or the conversation around it, the closest being "artifact of its infrastructure". Was it the correct link?
I'm not seeing how a CDN exploit would result in Instagram replying with "your post has been removed". That said I'm only inferring how Meta uses its CDNs (e.g storing static user posted video/image assets)
Are you concerned with countries forcefully removing entries? Because there are a lot of other country TLDs where you can add your entries if you want.
With DNSSEC it is still vulnerable, but only to the kinds that you will know you are being censored, so you can try to get it from another country or another channel.
If your ISP denies DNSSEC for you, you already know you are being attacked, and can get it through some other channel. DoH is a cool channel, just make sure it has DNSSEC.
The only way around this is for local systems to do their own recursive resolution, which isn't the default configuration on any OS or distribution that I'm aware of.
What is it with DNSSEC that people have to pollute discussions saying that stupid stuff that isn't DNSSEC isn't secure?
The reason I'm describing local stub resolvers that check the dnssec bit of their upstream recursive resolver is because that's how DNSSEC is implemented in every OS/distro I'm aware of. So that configuration is what actually matters when we talk about users being protected (or not) by DNSSEC.
Are you really making FUD about it, by claiming unrelated logical fallacies in a non-boolean discussion? How does a "no true Scotsman" even applies to something that has a published standard?
I know you don't like it, yet, I have never seen any proposal that brings you the assurances DNSSEC brings. AFAIK, your favorites all wither solve different problems (relevant problems, yes, but not the same) or have strictly lower assurances (AKA, they are subject to the exact same flaws, and are either worse or not better of for each one of them).
DNSSEC defines stub resolvers, both validating and non-validating. Validating stub resolvers do their own supplemental recursive lookups to confirm DNSSEC validation. Non-validating stub resolvers do not: they strictly determine DNSSEC trust by checking for the "ad" header bit in the response from their upstream recursive resolver.
Every operating system, Linux distribution, and application that I'm aware of defaults to having a non-validating stub resolver (if it enables DNSSEC validation at all). This renders DNSSEC validation as performed by the overwhelming majority of systems vulnerable to the risk we're flagging here.
Probably I should figure out a way to have my pfsense box though dynamically generate the blocked IP's based on one of these dynamically updated lists...
Or kill a lot of people if they rebel. Which is what Iran did just before the pandemic, and which the media only briefly covered. They machine-gunned people in the streets by the thousands and the West barely batted an eye.
It was as bad as Tiananmen Square in 1989, but you'd never know it going by the media coverage then or since.
Of course, Iran has parallel structures with IRGC specifically made for those situation.
The internet was built for fail-over to maintain communicatoin during a nuclear event.
The internet is less concerned about being a p2p network, which it clearly is not. A totally ad-hoc p2p network would be interesting, and more resiliant in some ways and lossy in others. It probably makes sense to entertain such a model. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Totally agree with you though. It's a big problem with the _increased amount of centralization_ in traffic flow / routing. That and BGP is wack.
Shutting down the Internet will disrupt not only people's communications but also systems' communications at various levels, including the systems of interest of the oppressive, of his/her family or political allies.
It would be so much easier and safer to the group in power to just "maneuver" bigtech instead. I remember when Facebook's general manager in the country I live was arrested[1], then blackmailed, to provide authorities means for them to access WhatsApp messages without confiscating the actual phones. Fast forward today, they are confiscating phones whenever they feel like reading private messages from anyone[2].
I liked how other folks reacted to my original comment posting their technical view. I didn't know DNS was such a weak link and a clear point of failure to the Internet. I wonder if protocols like BitTorrent could survive DNS restrictions, allowing people to communicate via shared text files thrown within a folder. My guess is that since it has survived the copyright crisis back then, it could be used for other crisis as well. Frankly, I'm just suspecting.
[1] https://jornaldebrasilia.com.br/noticias/brasil/executivo-do... [2] https://jc.ne10.uol.com.br/colunas/jamildo/2022/08/15065135-...
? Its on every news page I have looked up.
Or, you know, it could be that Iranian women just want that freedom back that was taken from them some 40 years ago. It's not like they've had to cover their hair and follow islamist rules for all of history. If you have any trust in pictures left, go look it up. You'll find plenty of photos of Iranians looking very much like Westerners 70 years ago.
I understand the love for conspiracy theories, but this one is just lacking any effort.
Definition of conspiracy theory
: a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators
You have no evidence that this is likely to be Israel. Just speculation. This is conspiracy theory by definition.
Was it actually Israel? Was it just angry women? Nobody truly knows, least of all me or GP.
https://gulfnews.com/world/americas/the-new-middle-east-and-...
Iran banned abortion in 1979. There's been a baby boom since. The country is lopsided towards young people. People who don't want the repressive government. They want women to live freely. Many of them want the gay people of their country treated equally. It's an insult to them to say this revolt isn't grassroots. There's so much anger from people who just want to live quiet, normal lives in freedom. Without the rule of clerics and morality police.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a Mossad and/or CIA agent on the ground in Tehran is providing some assistance. That's what they do in times of unrest in an unfriendly country. But "some assistance" is a far cry from fomenting. This is mainly an Iranian effort.
At least in the last 10 years, the protests has been motivated by economic situation. people don’t like the government but they also remember how bad the last revolution was, iraq-iran war after it on top.
Iran’s banning of abortion matters far less than gov successfully promoting lower number of children through the 90s. Matters far less because numbers, easy to verify.
@dang my other comment is dead. Flagged or not according to guidelines?
I'm in faraway Nigeria, and I'm seeing this stuff on the news much against my wishes even.
Hopefully this will somehow be a step towards more freedom in Iran.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360056052052-Pr...
https://twitter.com/KianSharifi/status/1572885353551339521?t...
Hiding video traffic with other traffic is hard since it's easy to assume "long persistent video-like upload with consistent throughput over something like srtp" is video and get a few false positives and no false negatives.
That would be MY back-of-the-envelope approach to doing internet censorship in a totalitarian dictatorship. But I'm not convinced it's the best way.
But really for a company like FB you could just blackhole their entire IP range(s) and/or AS (AS32934?) which would take everything offline very quickly.
[1] - https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypt-that-sni-firefox-edition...
[2] - https://esnicheck.com/
[3] - https://serverfault.com/questions/976377/how-can-i-set-up-en...
It removes plausible deniability, which means no more domain fronting bypasses.
It's not enough to be "secure", you need to be able to hide in plain sight.
GitHub has: https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...
A couple of takeaways. First, holy shit. Communications software is powerful enough to put fear in the hearts of political rulers! Second, insofar as sanctions are designed as punitive measures against a government who's actions our government doesn't support, it makes no sense to restrict their access to goods and services their government finds disruptive. In fact, we'd probably want to give them extra.
Well, yes, is this a surprise? Did you miss the "Arab Spring?" Or the Rohingya massacres?
It's a double-edged sword. It can give you a revolution whether you need it or not or whether it's justified or not.
Eventually we will find a new equilibrium, but right now we're in choppy waters.
Of course it is. No government wants people to get falseful information from unapproved sources.
Yes. Encryption software can also defeat courts, judges, governments, militaries.
The title is corrected now.
before it was, [Social Media] banning Iranian users.
| As a former WhatsApp engineer, I don't think WhatsApp even has any mechanism to do such a thing. It's probably an unintended artifact of its infrastructure that the Iranian government has exploited, and knowing the WhatsApp team, they are probably already working on a fix.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/did-twitter-violate-us-sanctions...
(Reference/entry point for legal aspects about this: contracts are also invalid if they're purely unidirectional. If I remember correctly there's a LegalEagle YT video about this, but you can probably dig this up elsewhere too.)
Bridgefy was never able to find my Android device and vice-versa.
When was the last successful overthrow of a despot in a middle income country? Euromaiden 2014?
> "Yesterday's vote was an impressive display of democratic elections," said João Soares, the president of the OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly and Special Coordinator for OSCE short- term observers.
It seems election were pretty democratic unless you can provide some evidence to the contrary.
Also, parliament voted his removal without reaching the needed majority, according to Ukraine's own constitution, so the removal itself was unconstitutional.
That's the only thing that counts, not your assumption on how Ukraine would behave, especially 12 years after said elections.
How are the sanctions impacting you as a SWE?
Why HN?
How was your summer, do anything fun?
People are doing their best and the riots are intensifying. But the riot police is using warfare to scatter them and when it does not work, they fire directly into the crowd, killing and wounding many. People have no way to fight back.
Sanctions are a serious problem for a SWE who lives in Iran. It's almost impossible to work for a foreign company. 40+ years of 40%+ inflation has hurt the economy so bad that more and more people are going down the Maslow's hierarchy. Lots of internet services (youtube, facebook, twitter, telegram, to name a few) are blocked by the government. Many others block requests from Iran because of sanctions. You cannot download java from the official source, you can guess the rest. Any paid service is out of question, as the country is shut off from international money transfer. Even after migrating to a western country, I still cannot work for any of the big American companies, until I become a PR of this new country. While I was working in another country, banks were afraid of opening an account for me and eventually gave me an account with no internet banking and no credit card.
I've been checking out HN for many years. It's the only remaining social network of like minded people, that has managed to stay clean of what infects others.
When I was in Iran (and while it's just a few years ago, things were much better at that time), I would go hiking, camping, biking, played tennis, much like what I do now.
This is something that gets to me about sanctions. It seems they prevent everyday citizens just wanting to work and live from doing so, while the government elites still get to enjoy themselves because they can easily find ways to circumvent it. What's then the point?
It eventually makes things hard enough for the normal people that they revolt and (hopefully) replace the government.
FWIW, I believe that sanctions serve to
1- Limit the reach of a regime's activity overseas. Iran's government was supporting several militant groups in the middle-east. Sanctions also had a huge effect on the country's nuclear program.
2- Force them to negotiate. That actually worked with Iran (but Trump reversed it)
One is the government's violence. They shoot people with rifles, arrest them and kill them in the prison, do everything they can to scare people off.
Another is government's total control over communication. In 2009 they shut down the internet and SMS for a week. They did that again recently. When people cannot communicate, they can't organize.
Another is a lack of leadership. The government has successfully removed (killed or imprisoned) anyone people trusted. Intolerance plagues cooperation of opposition groups. Maybe that's because of the history of Iran, maybe part of that is fueled by the government (it maintains an army of supporters in cyber space, spreading misinformation, hatred, and everything else they can do to prevent a large scale movement, some times masquerading as opposition)
The country's entire internet traffic passes through an organization controlled by the government.
The telecom companies were sold to the military (we have two military branches, one is made to support the government, to to defend the country) and they control all communication, shutting down the service when necessary. They can even shut down specific regions when a riot is happening there.
The government sends EM noise in urban regions to block satellite TVs. This cannot be done easily to block something like Starlink due to spread spectrum modulation, but as the government controls official import gateways, there is no simple way to buy the equipment. Also, anyone with such a connection should take extreme measures to stay under radar. For most of them it's not easy for a normal person to even know they are revealing their identity, as many domestic service providers (food delivery, ride hailing, etc) have servers inside Iran and should cooperate with the government to share user data with them.
Super low bandwith (literally just text messages) but it goes direct to iridium satellites. Plans arent super cheap but I imagine you could afford one for example if you really needed it.
IMO they don't in the big picture. I agree with the points made in the adjacent comment (reality), but if you look at the frequency in which these protests happen, it's increasing and with each occurrence they are gaining wider support. Not only that, but in the recent protests, even smaller cities with more conservative population are now joining the fight. They wanted reform initially, now they have become more radical in nature. It's only a matter of time.
Or, I don't know, maybe it's because of the numerous memory safety issues we encounter. Perhaps we should use a borrow checker in our revolution compiler ;)
There is a fairly, if not pervasive let's call it vocal technical sentiment that blockchain and related crypto technologies, in some form, are government/oppression-proof; that it provides financial and communication paths and channels that are so firm they withstand attempts by government to shut them down and infiltrate. And that therefore they would "solve a lot of problems" in an oppressive / troubled society.
I come from a country that suffered a civil war, and I've always felt that was naive... Blockchain feels like a complex stack with myriad potential points of failure and accidental reveal for a normal citizen. More to the point, I feel many people are underestimating just how totalitarian and ruthless a government CAN get - a) in locking down through technological means by owning and monitoring infra and coming down immediately to anybody downloading/using/sending software/hardware/protocol/tokens/packets/dns/whatever that is even remotely suspicious, and b) their ability and willingness to apply violence quickly and mercilessly on mere suspicion, happily just as an example and upon a potentially innocent person, and therefore its quick and chilling effect on populace. Or to put it other way - there are places on this Earth where I would not personally dare install some software or send some data, and I'm reasonably technically competent; the risk and impact are just too high.
What's your and your friends' perspective? Are there bullet-proof / safe technological means? What's the risk ratio and success for subverting government whether via blockchain or VPN or Signal etc?
Thx for any thoughts you might contribute :)
Well said. I read your comment and I know immediately that it comes from first hand experience :(
I'm not aware of any technological solution to censorship by a government that's persistent enough and has firm control on everything. Unfortunately, there is also no way to overthrow a government that's ready to kill citizens, not without foreign aid.
Iranian government has the ability to inspect all packages. Of course the contents of the ones that are encrypted cannot be read, but they can do lots of analyses based on everything else and aggressively block anything they don't trust. When they are at this level, no network technology can have a large impact, because if it does, they just shut down everything like they did before.
Technologies like Starlink are harder to control, but the equipment has to be imported and doing that in scale with all the control they have is not feasible.
Edit: i've just read the article. disheartening series of events. my country philippines has flaws but damn i can still say i'm lucky in a lot of ways.
Maybe you live in Iran and just happen to REALLY like cooking Chinese food? And so do ALL your friends :-D
> The last time the Islamic Repubic cut off the Internet in Iran, they brutally massacred 1500 people, just 3 years ago. I beg you please save my people (crying while typing)
-- https://twitter.com/AsingleNight/status/1572930406709530624
> We are covered in blood, don't forget us, they want to suffocate us. Please be our voice.
-- https://twitter.com/dokhtr81/status/1572907289774006272
It's heartbreaking, and I for one do not intend to let it go. Enough is enough.
https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1572273975639642114
ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b 2048 -N "" -C "devzat" -f ~/.ssh/.id_devzat
ssh -i ~/.ssh/.id_devzat some-name@devzat.hackclub.com
Host devzat devzat.hackclub.com
Hostname 150.136.142.44
Port 22
# Port 443
User some_name
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/.id_devzat
LogLevel VERBOSE
Another reason why we need sideloading ..
I don't know what the right move here is. Nobody who thinks there's an obvious right answer is worth listening to.
But if the answer is trite snark that summarizes evil vs obvious good, they haven't done that work, and I won't listen, no.
I would rather American companies not get so comfortable with blatant censorship. While we do still have some degree of censorship (and a whole lot pf privacy violation), it’s still generally seen as a taboo and not as a moral or necessary thing.
Once the social standards change however, the goalpost moves and it becomes harder to maintain the same freedoms we had before.
I mean, maybe, but since the US has the least-restricted speech of basically any nation, you are de-facto asking for a nationally partitioned internet. That's a big change.
That would be a little ironic since it was the US who pushed for such laws in post-war Germany in the first place.
Meta will not violate American law. As citizens, our most effective tool is our government of the people.
The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms, and not our representatives and laws... it's insane, to the say the least. I'd prefer to elect the people to protect my freedoms, not hope a for-profit advertising company will do so automatically.
> I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws.
I would also like a world where problems don't exist, but that doesn't change the real world. It's a naive take. The world is complicated.
> Meta will not violate American law.
This is both demonstrably false and borderline meaningless.
False because they have and will, unless you're suggesting Meta/Facebook has NEVER broken a law. It's just a question of whether they got charged/sued for it.
It's meaningless because laws can be highly interpretable, unenforceable, impractical... and the playing field is constantly changing, so there's always a new opportunity for new types of violations.
That isn't to say laws are meaningless, obviously they are extremely necessary and must be enforced, but the public response to those ambiguous situations is what would help determine the next set of laws/norms.
> The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms...
Parent comment doesn't suggest this. "Corporate culture" has little to do with it. American culture is what would change, has changed, and is changing. When the tooling is developed to carry out efficient, sweeping censorship, it will be used. With more use, we become more comfortable with it and even see it as a necessary evil. Currently there is public outrage when a tech company censors information. How long will this remain interesting enough to draw our attention? TSA in airports after 9/11 is a good example of this.
Example:
>> I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws.
>I would also like a world where problems don't exist, but that doesn't change the real world. It's a naive take. The world is complicated.
What in the hell kind of reply is this? How dare you. (On the day that the EU fined Google 4 billion Euros, largest in history, demonstrating laws and governments of people, no less). Your nonsensically dismissive reply is immature and entirely unfit for this community. Take this tripe back to reddit.
Shame on you for how you behaved here.
All I will say is that in being offended by a rather benign comment, you have yourself committed what you accuse me of.
We're all looking for ways to censor spammers or belligerents from internet forums. It could easily start there and spread to other areas.
We had a breakdown in our consensus mechanism — because the government partnered with corporations to censor rather than allow public debate.
The nation is still bitterly divided.
Or would you like to have Iran or Pakistan or whatever intervening in the domestic issues of the West?
I can't go to a museum, admire the bravery of, say, Sophie Scholl, and then go "ah yes, but at the end of the day it's not really anyone's business", and you cannot both have the dignity of a person who accepts the responsibility they have just by virtue of being human and shut yourself off.
At the end of the day, it's just a rationalization for kicking away the ladder. You don't care what happens to them as long as it doesn't happen to you or people you love. That is what it is, and all it is.
It's a massive regression from 2002 - 2021, but this is not true. The Taliban has moderated somewhat from 2000 (somewhat), and frankly would be very happy to make tactical deals with the west to help counter ISIS.
Google got hacked by inside actors planted in their physical offices by the Chinese government. It's one of the very few times that Gmail's security was compromised. At the time, Google did not have the security countermeasures in place to protect against such an attack so they responded by severing the physical ties so such an attack could not be repeated. Once the BeyondCorp initiative had completed and they had the technology necessary to firewall pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights from other pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights, they reopened business in China because the risk model had changed.
This just isn't true? It was an IE 0-day.
How long do you think US companies could operate in the US if they weren't government-obedient? Or any company in any country for that matter.
It is and always has been the intersection of realpolitik and greed.
I mean, we are discussing hair here, so it is a (bitter) laugh to imagine that they are going to let citizens have access to an unfettered network ...
From the same site: Iran smartphone imports (sept 2021 - sept 2022)
1 Samsung 48% 2 Xiaomi 28% 3 Nokia 12% 4 Apple 6%
Also GlobalStar only covers the continental US and a little farther......
Depending on how strict they are you might be able to smuggle in a Garmin inReach and connect to Iridium now (or an actual Iridium or Inmarsat satellite phone or modem)
Yeah, authoritarian governments will just allow that to happen, let alone the cost of such a device is out of reach for most of these people.
Hopefully not, because the Arab Spring didn't do much in the long term, just the US & allies profited from it by getting rid of Ghaddafi, while the whole of northern Africa isn't faring much better today than before that flash in the pan.
I just hope this civilian revolution actually tears down the Iranian religious dictatorship for good. And hopefully in my lifetime I can experience seeing the Saudi scumbags getting the boot as well. Wouldn't that be great.
Also, restricting information and frees speech is something that western governments routinely do. Sometimes to skew election result in favor of the ruling regime.
Supporters of the regime see it as stopping 'misinformation'. I'm not sure if they actually believe that or if it is just convenient cover for unethical and immoral conduct.
the social network's censorship is unbelievable.
interesting that it works
might as well make it a national holiday for the purge