Iran plans to unplug the Internet, launch its own "clean" alternative | Hacker News Reader

Iran plans to unplug the Internet, launch its own "clean" alternative

arstechnica.com

92 points3lit3H4ck3r89 comments

There is a bitter irony in how the technology that was supposed to bring us to a Friedmanite border-less world is also propelling us towards an Orwellian one where the power brokers can achieve omnipotence and force projection without, eventually, requiring the buy-in of a single human being.

The problem is that techno-authoritarian systems, e.g. what N Korea is approaching, are very stable once properly assembled. The "human" regimes, i.e. liberal democracies, have to constantly fight against slipping into that horror. We need to find a way to change this equation because it asymptotically solves for a very dark future. From a systems theory perspective, the solution is ironically a random and sufficiently destructive agent - a joker.

> There is a bitter irony in how the technology that was supposed to bring us to a Friedmanite border-less world is also propelling us towards an Orwellian one where the power brokers can achieve omnipotence and force projection without, eventually, requiring the buy-in of a single human being.

I disagree with this. You are still free not to use technology even in an "Orwellian regime". The Internet hasn't made things worse. Would you rather live in a country with no Internet at all or a country with their own Internet?

The same network technology that makes the internet and applications on it possible enable mass surveillance, the intelligent processing of that data, and efficient execution on it as well. It isn't an either or question but an and one.

Thus, it isn't that one can choose not to use technology and thus avoid its Orwellian repercussions as much as the existence of the choice in the first place implies both use cases (promoting freedom/connectivity and facilitating surveillance/oppression) exist. Your decision to participate or abstain has little bearing on an ambitious dictator's.

No Internet at all is surpassing a propaganda net.

In order for people to stand up against oppression it helps when they can "feel the pain" and not have it muffled by some cheap painkiller substitutes.

Nord Korea is not as stable as it seems, they are really much defined by their foreign policy. Technology there is comparable to Cold War times. UAE or Saudi Arabia is a much better example for something like that.

NK stable? they depend on aid from the rest of the world to keep them from collapsing and selling their weapons to terrorists, let alone attacking SK.

The only reason they haven't been nuked yet is because it's right next to China, and because they are so miserable sending them some food scraps is cheaper than bombing them.

I treated North Korea asymptotically with respect to technological development and authoritarianism. I should have been clearer about that beyond using the word "approaching". Sorry about that.

Think of an authoritarian country with universal surveillance and the ability to dispatch fully automated enforcement. That system is very stable at eliminating chaotic subsystems before they become threatening. It is also remarkably resilient in its ability to contract to its power base, re-charge, and then re-project from a solid platform (think Assad and his Alawite base except with no question of wavering loyalty). This makes it resilient even during tail events.

"The only reason they haven't been nuked yet is" that they would retaliate against South Korea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1928023

burgerbrain 506 days ago:

[...] there is an absolutely absurd amount of conventional artillery positioned at the DMZ just a few dozen kilometres away from Seoul. If all out war were to occur the city, with it's 25million or so citizens, could be levelled in hours.

Internet is not propelling us towards an Orwellian reality and this decision by Iran is a testament to that -- it turns out that even petrodollars-fueled authorities can't control the Internet to a satisfying degree. It's also very difficult to gauge the value of mass surveillance because it leads to considerable problems with data analysis. While this report is a little light on data for obvious reasons, it offers an interesting perspective:

"The federal government is drowning in data now. The decision-makers have the ability to ask certain kinds of questions. But they cannot possibly handle the amount of specific information that has been computerized."

http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1118.html

Wow. This is kind of like "The Truman Show" in a way. Imagine, being born there now, and your whole life you "access the Internet", without even realizing it's not actually the Internet.

Truly warped.

How do I know if I'm using the Real Internet even now??

What government would let a social news website through?

Oh that's easy. Every social news site has a groupthink--if it doesn't have one naturally, crowdsourced moderation, i.e. upvotes and downvotes, will end up creating it. You just set things up so the groupthink either agrees with The Agenda or gets angry at issues that don't impact the ruling party's agenda. Then you have the illusion of free speech and democracy without any actual risk to the power structure.

For instance, people on HN seem to get really worked up about the TSA, sexism in the tech industry, the war on drugs, and the privacy implications of Facebook and Google. If you were trying to protect a totalitarian state, do you really think any of those would be part of the agenda? Things like the TSA and war on drugs could be deliberately bad policy designed to distract the easily outraged. As for Facebook and Google, the worst thing they're going to do with your personal information is target advertisements at you. A totalitarian state would probably just build a system like Echelon.

As for Facebook and Google, the worst thing they're going to do with your personal information is target advertisements at you.

Sure, I bet that is what everyone is complaining about. It certainly can't be about the possibility of your private information ending up in hands that could do you harm with it, right? I mean, who in their right mind would be afraid of how a bank or an employer or a court or a government agency might use some innocuous bit of information they thought was private? After all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of...

Facebook and google are opt-in. You can stop using them anytime you want (use ddg instead of google). You can't decide which country you born in.

That's still rather irrelevant to the agenda of our hypothetical totalitarian state. You know, the one that taps the Internet backbones and data mines it all anyway. I'm not saying its unworthy of criticism, just that it's not a fundamental challenge to the Powers That Be.

Smart dictatorships have always recognized the value of bread and circuses at keeping people occupied.

This is actually the situation in North Korea now. For the few who can access computer at all.

Oh God, and what're they gonna do next, build their own microprocessors? Let's be real, they're going to become the next North Korea if this and their other isolationism plans succeed...

No, next they'll build nukes and ballistic missiles. Not just for isolationism but for attacking their neighbors and manipulating world's oil supply.

It is hard to see how a war with Iran can be avoided.

EDIT: Anyone who is downvoting, please post an actual reasoned response on what exactly you disagree with.

These are people just like us who are interested in self-preservation. Do you have any idea how many times the U.S. has completely screwed up their economy?

The world isn't fair mostly because people can't stop fucking with each other.

For one thing, the regime has been a fairly rational actor that does what's necessary to stay in power. You need to look at what they do, rather than what they say, which often has more to do with domestic politics.

There's no doubt that actually launching a nuclear first strike would be the end of the regime, and they know it. But they still quite rationally want a nuclear deterrent so they can achieve a balance of power with Israel and insurance against an American invasion.

So war is not a foregone conclusion, even if they really manage to build a nuclear weapon, and if they could credibly threaten to deliver it, which is much harder and not at all certain.

Consider that a nation like China values stability and plays for the long term, and yet they've been willing to continue backing Iran. Clearly China has evaluated the Iranian regime and decided it's stable enough to rely on. My money is on China knowing what they're doing.

The push for war has everything to do with the US and Israel wanting to maintain overwhelming military dominance. Iran is not a realistic threat to the existence of Israel or US security. But it's a threat to American regional hegemony.

Just for what it's worth: you are presuming China is backing Iran for the long term, when they could be using it as a bargaining chip against a different conflict with the US / western powers. E.g. Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, the Koreas, to name the ones just bordering / within China. That said, I agree Iran has acted rational to their means, but as the country tends dangerously close to provoking an Israeli attack, one might alter that viewpoint.

> But they still quite rationally want a nuclear deterrent so they can achieve a balance of power with Israel and insurance against an American invasion.

Israel is no threat to Iran. The worst they could do is make limited air raids, and the only interest they'd have in that would be to destroy their nuclear program. So the Iranian nuclear program only increases the risk of Israeli action.

As for the US, there's no rational risk of US action if they don't develop nuclear weapons. Iraq is no precedent, if only because Iraq was already in an untenable situation with the economic and military sanctions, and the last thing you do if you want to become Iraq is give the rest of the world a reason to impose sanctions. Developing nuclear weapons and violating human rights are both fantastic ways to get sanctions imposed.

Of course, these arguments are a bit wounding to the national pride, but you're saying Iran is acting rationally, not pridefully.

> Consider that a nation like China values stability and plays for the long term, and yet they've been willing to continue backing Iran. Clearly China has evaluated the Iranian regime and decided it's stable enough to rely on. My money is on China knowing what they're doing.

By that logic, North Korea is a stable and reliable regime. There's something more going on here. Charitably speaking, maybe China thinks they can keep some control over Iran, the same way they have some control over North Korea, by fostering dependence.

It's a power play between east and west. China uses Iran and N.Korea as a leverage against the west. Russia does something similar with Syria.

It's got nothing to do with Iran, N.Korea or even Israel ultimately. It's certainly got nothing to do with human rights (if so, why hasn't NATO invaded Darfur?) I'm going to stop now because this is becoming too political.

I didn't say human rights were a sincere motivation, just that they're a useful pretext, one of the cards on the table that one could play. Largely I think you're right.

Even if they did that. So what? Do you think Russia cares about manipulating their gas supplies? They only care as a far as market forces go, and they know others will quit buying from them if they make it too expensive, and that's about it.

But who gets to decide that Iran is not allowed to do whatever the heck they want with their oil supply? Is Iran indebted to the world to give them oil? Maybe the world should just find an alternative if they don't like it. That's not a reason to start a war. And if people really understood that this is the real reason and not some imminent nuclear threat, they'd probably be against the war, too, and learn to deal with the situation, and adapt.

On nukes: I believe that they would only go as far as build them (if even that) and start threatening other countries.

The reason they will probably never use them is that if they do, they're pretty much screwed - the US and NATO will finally have a clear reason to start a war with them and they'll go the way of Iraq for sure. They don't have the military power to oppose any serious attack from NATO, at least from what I can see.

Russia and China stepping in would be the only possible game changers, but I don't see a reason for them to side with Iran as it is now, either...

P.S. Is it me or downvoting seems flawed here - one downvote and the comment is out of sight?

I don't think Iran has ever attacked another country. OTOH, there is a country that attacks Iran's neighbors and tries to manipulate the world's oil supply. Thankfully there's no way China would let them start a war with Iran.

A middle eastern country with weapons of mass destruction... where have I heard that before?

If you provided an argument with a little more detail and substance, then I'm sure you'll receive the reasoned responses that you crave.

Until then I'm just down-voting you for baldly stating something that contradicts most reasoned analyses that I've read.

Keep in mind that Iran has had two major data security compromises (that we know of) targeting their nuclear enrichment facilities, slowing down their timetables and costing them quite a bit of money.

If I had to come up with tactics for preventing any further problems like that, "let's look at the example from China" would certainly be on the table.

So why are they connecting the nuclear facilities to the Internet anyway? And why can't they just built an intranet only for the nuclear facilities. Sounds like a false reason with a different agenda behind it to me.

They aren't. If memory serves, the infection vector for Stuxnet was supposedly a flash drive.

So why do they think that isolation from the internet will make things safer for them?

IMO it's entirely because they're worried about another Arab Spring. If they control the only Twitter and the only Faceburqa, it becomes much more difficult for protesters to organize on that scale.

The actual article quotes the government official as saying the Internet incites “atheism” and other supposed moral evils. :)

The title here slants the discussion somewhat. Reporters without borders presented it this way in their 2012 report;

"Several times in 2011, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, true to his nationalist policies, announced the creation of a national Web, a "clean" version of the Internet with its own search engine and messaging service. This may mean two different types of access, one for the authorities and another for the rest of the population"

To me that implies stricter use of firewalls and launching national services for search and email. That's somewhat different to re-inventing the Internet, which I feel the title here implies.

(I live in Iran an know quite a lot about this "national" Internet thing. Also check out this other submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3432816)

I haven't read this article yet, but believe me, they want to shut down Internet badly. They've been planning (and building the infrastructure and testing it) for the past three years.

But you're quite right, they can't shut down the Internet completely, it will be there. But, the "national" Internet will be faster, and all official websites (news agencies, banks, etc.) will be forced to support it. I'm sure you won't believe it, but right now there's a cap for Internet access speed in Iran (128 Kbps: 128 Kilobits per second, or 16 KiloBytes per second). If you're a student or you can make a reasonable argument, you can go as high as 1 MBps (and an unmetered 1Mbps access costs about 130 dollars per month, so for most people it doesn't worth it). Now, imagine a cheap, 7 Mbps "national" Internet for everyone. The Internet can't compete with this new intranet...

[Edit] fix typo

"128 KiloBytes" per second is a 1Mbit connection... That's more than enough for most people unless you're a heavy video user. I think mine is about 8Mbit, but I doubt I'd notice if it dropped to 1Mbit.

I'm not arguing for the cap. I'm just confused that you think a 1Mbit connection is somehow comically slow?

Sorry. I don't know how I made that mistake... I meant 128 Kilobits per second (16 KiloBytes per second). The best you can get is 1 Megabits per second (128 KiloBytes per second).

I have a 256 Kbps connection. It's really, really slow. It took me 2 days to download OS X Lion from Mac App Store (about 3.5 GB).

Very unlikely they would cut themselves off entirely. No email to or from Iran seems self defeating. I suppose they won't outsource censoring to the West. ;)

'The organization says that the system "consists of an Intranet designed ultimately to replace the international Internet and to discriminate between ordinary citizens and the 'elite' (banks, ministries and big companies), which will continue to have access to the international Internet."'

As long as those with power are not willing to give up their own access to the internet, hackers will find a way to break the system.

If only hackers can break the system, they won. See my other comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3821517

This is not about how easy is for hackers to circumvent the system, this is about how effective is the system in stopping information flow for the masses.

Watch out for western governments/corporations that may want to "borrow" those kind of ideas.

Good luck with that: the great firewall of China doesn't works, you don't need to be a hacker to punch a hole through that POS system and the Iranians don't even have the manpower to make a firewall like that so whatever they do will be even lamer and full of holes.

Besides there's the social factor: the Chinese are cool with their government for now because despite all the crap you hear they are still much better off than 20 or 30 years ago. Iran on the other hand is doing like shit, the embargo has destroyed their economy and the people has already revolted before, and the ayatollahs are scared shitless about the Arab Spring.

This might be the last straw...

But the great firewall of China works so well. Yes, it's trivially circumvented by anyone who knows how things works, but the vast majority of Chinese people don't fall in that category.

The purpose of these systems is to keep the general population in the dark, it's not targeted at knowledgeable intellectuals. You can't keep them in the dark anyway and they already know. It's only point is to stop knowledge dissipating to the masses.

I have a Chinese friend who is an average computer user, and knows about proxies that can bypass the firewall. I'd argue that the majority, especially young people, know how to bypass it whether they are hackers or your average computer user.

If a chinese has a foreign friend and is able to communicate with you in English, then he/she is no where near average. He/she is probably an average among the middle or upper middle class, but definitely not an average among all chinese. However the bigger problem in China is not that they don't know how to bypass the firewall but that most people simply don't have the motivation to do so even if they know. The chinese version (copycat) like Baidu(google), Weibo(twitter) or youku (youtube) etc is simply good enough or better for them.

The thing is, knowlegable intellectuals (at 60 years after the revolution at least) are going to be upper class folks who benefit from the system. They are either already on the regime's side or have no interest in changing the status quo. The worst you'll get is thoughtful and considered reform, which is healthy and good for the regime rather than fundamentally subversive.

Parallel how educated Americans' exasperation with the TSA or War on Drugs has less impact on the current political situation than the specter of gay marriage....

How does it work, though - isn't it trivially detectable that you are using a proxy? Maybe they don't block you, but you end up on some interesting government internal lists?

such a wonderful country and great people, but government of crackpot thieving crooked perverts

clearly the U.S. centric propaganda has gotten to you. which 1st world government isn't filled with crackpot thieving crooked perverts?

Most of them.

Power may be corrupting some of those who manage to get to the top, and some of those who get a majority of votes may not be the brightest, but most 1st world gov'ts are pretty honest. Not only because we have free media that is watching every step these people do and will make them resign at the smallest mistake.

But, if you think that "they" are that bad, then you can just become one of "them" and do it better. I would recommend your local Pirate Party to start.

As a person from former Soviet Union country I find downvotes for your comment both sad and funny.

> most 1st world gov'ts are pretty honest

This is true, in the same way that I'd be honest if you were to ask me a simple yes/no question, and I responded with a page-long expression that took a day to evaluate to the actual answer. Which is why ...

> you can just become one of "them" and do it better

... is doomed to fail. The problem isn't morals, it's unbounded complexity. People are just the substrate that the bureaucracy runs on. Feeding it ever-more people and resources (exponential technological growth) only compounds the fundamental problem - when something is not understandable, it's completely unaccountable.

Read this and you'll stop being pessimistic :)

http://falkvinge.net/2012/04/09/we-are-winning-how-pirate-pa...

It's only 5 years since the Pirate Parties started (first in Sweden), and it looks pretty good (in Germany they have now double diggits in the polls). Another 5 years and Pirates will be part of the gov't of several EU countries, I would guess.

No, their government isn't full of crooks and thieves. It's far worse, the Iranian government sincerely believe that they're actually making their citizens' lives better by what they do. Material riches won't soothe them:

  Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the
  good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be     
  better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent 
  moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes 
  sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but 
  those who torment us for our own good will torment us  
  without end for they do so with the approval of their own  
  conscience.

  C. S. Lewis

For the love of IETF please just call it Intranet.

Iranet, or the Intehranet.

Good. Let them blackhole themselves.

This will obviously just motivate brilliant hackers to find brilliant ways around brilliantly moronic "policy."

If they're physically removing access to the Internet, the only way around it would be to physically restore access, which isn't exactly a matter of breaking through some firewalls or firing up Tor.

The only realistic way I could see this working on a large scale is a very wealthy, motivated, and low-profile hacker somehow managing to string in fiber across the border from neighbouring countries, set up multiple wireless access points, and get a mesh network going across the country.

On a small scale (say, for a hacker and his buddies or an underground resistance force), I suppose you'd only need to get a decent wireless-N access point near the border (in Turkey, perhaps?) broadcasting a WPA-encrypted hidden network, then have specific people in strategic locations running cheap wireless-N routers configured with Tomato or DD-WRT to act as repeaters. Obviously this isn't foolproof (hidden networks are easy to find if you're looking for them), it would be easy to cut off if it were discovered, and it would be slow as balls, but if you could manage to get a large enough chain going everywhere it needed to be, and its use were coordinated well enough to ensure that it would only be used in urgent situations (and only through Tor), then it could prove to be an invaluable resource.

But yeah, Iran's people need another revolution, fast.

»The only realistic way I could see this working is....stringing fibre across the border

Or satellite Internet.

Ah, yeah, I thought I brought that up but evidently not. Yep, satellite would definitely be an option, but somehow I feel like that would need to involve opposition powers beyond even a wealthy hacker in Iran.

Dialup, unless voice lines are dead.

Can Iran block satellite internet? Maybe US drones can "airlift" Wi-Fi access as the Internet Age's "Radio Free Iran."

That would be interesting. We tend to think of resistance coming from within with these sorts of things, but it would really be something to see another nation (or private entity) begin a blatant campaign of getting Internet access into Iran in every way possible (super-powered Wi-Fi and 4G blasted all along the borders, free unrestricted satellite Internet to everyone who owns or can ghetto-rig a dish, millions of concealed mesh-networked routers all over the country (with dishes attached), thousands of proxies to the Internet planted within the Irantranet, etc.).

Edit: justincormack brought up an awesome point too: dialup. If we could get a black market for high-compression modems going, and possibly use the modems to fortify the mesh network routers as a secondary Internet source to the satellite dishes, this could end up being fairly robust.

I would love to see the CIA or some other organisation put a few billion into this if Iran really goes through with the plan.

Supposedly, they'll still have an Intranet, it should be possible to tunnel internet connections over it to some hidden bridges.

If it succeeds, governments everywhere will be lining up to license the technology.

If they were to go through with this, it would mean the end of economic growth, trade, and commerce with the rest of the world. It would be very hard if not impossible to transfer any large sum of money for trade purposes, unless they intend on giving merchants the ability to use the internet exclusively for payments.

In reality though, a modern business is dead on arrival if they can't outside of the country for customers.

It's April's fool (Doroogh-e Sizdah in Iran).

The Internet, as it currently is, needs to die. Just put a bullet in it's head an move on. It was a great starting point, but it's all monkey patches and quick 'fixes'; ala https, dns, et al.

I auctually wanted SOPA to pass. Maybe it will get people thinking.

Same thing North Korea's done. They have a nationwide intranet where some organisations such as universities can request content from the Internet to be downloaded onto it.

It seems weird to me that the Iran-linked Hezbollah organization is renowned for its technological savvy, yet their allged paymasters are Iran.

Just because they cut off the general public, doesn't mean their governments and/or covert ops units won't have access.

A terrible blow for freedom in an already oppressive regime.

Does this mean their public IPs go back into circulation?

What if we had lots of such parallel "internets" that are all accessible from around the world. That lets the user choose which "internet" to connect to.

Something that can reduce the ICANN and the US control over the current network. After all, competition is always good.

We now have such underground networks that is piggybacking on the existing internet.

But you're pretty much describing the Internet as it is now :-)... Each country having their own Internet separate from the rest of the world is counter-productive - I remember Russia wanted to introduce their own domain names in cyrillic and create some sort of Russian-only net a decade ago - the idea wasn't very popular with the people...

If all the internets are accessible from anywhere, what exactly is the difference to the current situation? Each country already has its own infrastructure, which forms their own net, and is connected to the real internet. So is it really just separate IP/domain "namespaces" that you want?

Will not happen. It would just make more people in Iran to become active in the oposition.

You have a rational mind, but my country isn't run by rational people...

What they say publicly may not sound rational, but its pretty rare that somebody just ends up in the driving seat by chance.

Hundreds of billions of Oil dollars helps too!

another North Korea?

"launch its own "clean" alternative"

If I lived in Iran I don't think I would be renewing my ISP plan any time soon.

errr did anyone forget that our perfect western world is doing the exact same thing? sigh

why do all the dumb nerds on here think they can comment on things they have absolutely no idea about either. regardless of how little wisdom most of you have, you don't even know the facts.

also leave iran alone you monsters

I guess your username speaks it all.

Very constructive argument that told both sides and explained points very well, really got me thinking, thank you. :)

Now how could Iranian play Diablo III?

I'm quite sure this won't be their greatest concern.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com