Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout
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[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
Scroll down to Russian use.
Starlink receivers have been found in use in drones by both sides in the war.
There's a lot of Open Source intel on this.
As for use in long range strike UAVs I'm sure ukrainian units have specially registered units that will work anywhere but again, Russian long range kamikaze drones you have a smuggled unit that only activates once on ukrainian territory and be used for terminal guidance or reconnaissance. By the time the system spots a new terminal moving quickly in the wrong place the thing would have rammed into a civilian building somewhere.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-starlink-ukraine-gur-elon-mu...
https://kyivindependent.com/nearly-half-of-usaid-starlink-te...
Also, as I understand it, a big part of the reason USAID was fed "into the woodchipper" was because they were investigating SpaceX over Russian use of Starlink - see https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-enemy-usaid-was-investigating...
Thank God for the incompetence. It's like we're doing "Clown Show Mussolini".
The article you linked contains literally nothing supporting your accusation. Instead, it talks about an investigation targeting the aid recipient:
>The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine. Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals
Musk proved quite good at blocking Ukrainian Starlink access too, supporting Russia.
The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.
And good luck targeting enough Starlink satellites...
Beamforming is essentially yet another way to achieve gain, just like one does with a directional antenna. The Starlink terminal achieves a gain of roughly 33 dB, which means it talks (and also listens) in the peak direction at power levels that are around 2000x higher than what one would achieve with isotropic antennas. 2000x sounds like a lot, but it is actually not impossible to reach. Consumer electronics sends at most a few Watts of RF power, but serious jammers of the type used by militaries can run kilowatts. If you consider the peak power used for brief moments of time then you can get as high as megawatts - the famous AWACS aircraft briefly flash half a continent at somewhere around 1 MW, with average TX power of ~single digit kilowatt.
Is there really is no way to reflect signals off the ionosphere out of phase so after reflecting they interfere into a higher frequency?
Even Russians don't seem to be able to jam Starlink on the Ukrainian battlefields.
China, maybe.
Sure, if you want to try that and bankrupt Iran even more via its militarry rocket program, you can do that and maybe destray a handfull satellites, provided you can actually hit them and the rocket/s does not fail. And you might even get a nice casus belli as a free extra.
Because the atmosphere absorbs a lot of energy of the laser beam and focusing the laser beam to such a distant target is not easy. So you cannot just use some high powered lasers, as it would be just a bright spot at most. It would be different, if the laser would be space based, but that is out of reach of Iran's capabilities. They might have anti satellite rockets, but using them against US property in space would create other problems for them.
A simple 3 element yagi has <1% of the power to the sides. It has more of the power straight behind it, but still 1% or so of the main lobe.
Iran has lots of rockets.
Iran also has basically zero of their own satellites in orbit that they care about.
Spacejunk is a highly asymmetric tactic.
Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car, except Both cars are invisible most of the time. They’re moving 17,000 mph. The dart has no steering wheel only tiny nudges. If you miss by a few feet, you miss by miles.
Countries that can do this reliably aren’t showing off missiles they’re showing off navigation, sensors, computing. The weapon is the least impressive part.
Um no. Imagine rendering a highway unusable by driving a semitruck full of tire spikes down it and dumping them out the back.
No precision required.
If you actually manage to make it into an orbit (with a much much bigger and much more expensive rocket) you will most likely do the same (eg. not hitting the intended satellite) with the added bonus of littering random orbits over time and hitting random satellites.
And if you want to say "they will deny orbit for everyone!" - well, good luck without far too many orbital class rockets for anyone of their size to have.
Not to mention Starlink orbits being (as alterady state so low they are self-cleaning), GPS orbits being far too high to even reach, let alone to saturate with garbage & same for GEO sats.
It appears that we are very close to an unstoppable runaway process of collisions in space. On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets after ruining this one. On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS, it would be chaos if that were to disappear...
You can't get chain-reaction collisions to happen at such an outrageously high orbit. That amount of mass you'd have to put into orbit is just insane. It's like trying to crash the moon.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/spacex-lo...
And any weaponized junk schrapnel a DiY iranian ASAP missile would deploy would be sub-orbital and would all come down in a couple minutes.
Kessler syndrome has little to no effect on trajectories only briefly transiting any given orbital shell. The collision probability of anything going straight "up"/"out" is negligible.
> On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS
GPS is in MEO, Starlink is in LEO. There's absolutely no chance any material will be propelled up to MEO via a series of even very unlucky LEO collisions, as far as I know.
Compare that to the number of cell phone users which is very close to 100%. All estimates of the number of mobile subscribers or number of mobile phone numbers are greater than the total population.
And how do starlink recievers enter the country in the first place?
This is good that there is still a way to get censorship resistance even after all this perhaps joining it with other protocols which can work via bluetooth,wifi etc. and are more secure connecting to something like this, a secure internet access point could be developed but I don't know too much about it.
It doesn't seem much of a plan (very sadly, I wish there was) which could be uncensored that much, some other comment pointed this point too but if black market's the case, then they would just hide whoever is using this
They would also most likely be very less in amount, journalists etc.
But the average person, they are stuck without proper internet
I thought that there are materials which can build starlink and the only thing then you need is just subscription or something
It's just sad to see that black market is the only way.
It's usually smuggled parts if they're small enough. Someone outside of the country usually makes the subscription and they get paid somehow.
People in unfree conditions are crafty. Same with information. Suppressed information spreads using underground channels quite quickly.
For example, we knew almost immediately that there was some nuclear disaster in Ukraine even though the official channels didn't say anything for days.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-expands-sanctions-exception...
I don't know too much about starlink but is there a way that someone can pay for other person's usage and then build a starlink receiver or something from spare parts or like easy accesible parts from the world?
Because how would people get starlink device. I dont know the mecanism of startlink though or how it works
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here's an web.archive.org link if anyone's interested which works
https://web.archive.org/web/20250301050041/https://www.forbe...
Edit: WTF forbes still gives me a popup even in archive, strange, but its less restrictive overall in the web archive version so I am able to still copy and read the version
Starlink uses a pretty sophisticated phased array antenna, so not something you can easily build in your garage.
Social media is such a narrow lens that I would be cautious accepting that analysis at face value.
Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.
But its not about censorship in the usual sense really. Its about preventing peer to peer communication. With less than a percent of iranians having access to each other either locally or via foreign internet, they cut down their ability to organise significantly. Starlink doesnt offer a solution here. Starlink doesnt matter. Every starlink person could turn up to a protest and it would still be less impactful than previous protests.
You really think iran is going to bomb turkey (a nato country) over this?
Now if they actually did want to censor the internet, Suicide McBombervest or a missile or something would find that ground station. They simply dont give a shit.
The problem with starlink is when the taliban turn off the intenet, if you use it to concerning (tweet, talk to news channel, post a podcast), the governemt know.
And hamsters.
Don't underestimate the hamsters.
But seriously?
Things like HolePunch have a lot of potential here, but you'd need an Iran-only DHT, and it's just not deployed at scale.
One doesn't get to be the head of a business in a country like Iran without being a True Believer.
Russia's trying to censor some shit too by having outside ipv4 or something (dont know what its called) blocked and basically made a large intranet
But people could still buy vps and make it work somehow
So iran and russia are similar in that sense and this kinda puts things more into balance but I am sure that % of true believers/doing for self interest might vary or something
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunication_Infrastructu...
Translation tools claim (I don't know enough to verify) a literal translation is "Ministry of Communications and Information Technology". I.e. they handle telecoms & IT, or "communications technology and information technology" if fully expanded.
But why bother switching it around to "Ministry of Information and Communications Technology" then? Apparently because that's what the order we call it in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communications... which surprised me because I didn't even know that was a term and I've only ever worked in the IT and telecoms jobs - WHTMA (We Have Too Many Acronyms).
Not just protests, it's to prevent foreign interference (like CIA) from fueling civil unrest and spreading AI deepfakes, as seen in Myanmar and Brazil
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Kashmir has been the most unstable part of India and Article 370 although with flaws wanted to give Kashmir the stability it deserves but Kashmir had even its own flags and state etc. and thats why it got really messy and why the internet used to be shut down
Kashmir still requires people to specifically get a sim just for Kashmir. But you can get any large carrier to do such. There are even ways of generating e-sim and such, but there is genuinely lots of concerns and complaints in doing so and its very time consuming in a way but internet access has stabilized for the most part, you just require a special sim verification again to do such or perhaps buying a new sim specifically for kashmir but you can port the number as well but as I said, its really time consuming but possible to even do this without entering kashmir itself
But the Iranians are white. The name Iran is literally derived from "Aryan".
I would really love to hear from somebody who is not supporting the Iran protests to honestly tell me if I misrepresented their position and in which way
While I don't think they're right that Iran is ignored because Iranian protesters and the Iranian government are both perceived as white by Americans (or both non-white, depending on the person), it's undeniable that they use the perceived non-whiteness of Palestinians and perceived whiteness of Israelis as rhetorical ammunition.
This rhetorical device is a rather effective as Americans have a tendency to view everything through their own lens of "race"/color so casting the conflict as white people oppressing non-white people because they are non-white is a powerful argument that is easily understood by Americans.
That said, personally, I think Iran is ignored more because Palestine is sucking all the air out of the room than anything else, especially with all the graphic videos/photos. Sudan on the other hand... there's really no excuse for ignoring that.
>Sudan on the other hand... there's really no excuse for ignoring that.
Palestine has the focus because America tax dollars most directly fuel the conflict and it is the most one-sided.
Iran is an internal conflict and Sudan is a civil war - neither of which are as directly funded by the US. Also neither has a perceived clear solution. In the case of Israel, the US should have significant leverage that it does not have in those other conflicts.
Definitions of race are very culturally dependent. A few decades ago South Asians were regarded as caucasian (I have an American encyclopedia published in the 1950s that says so), a century earlier so were some East Africans (Somalis IIRC). The current western definition of white does not include them.
Similarly the current American definition of black includes people most of the rest of the world would not consider black - we sometimes have to be told that some people identify as "black" (what Americans call passing as white).
Aryans aren't necessarily white or black especially in the sanskrit context of things.
Iran provides substantial food, fuel, education and healthcare subsidies to the average citizen and has a very effective state bureaucracy which functions independent of political appointees. Pensioners' checks are issued regularly and social services are delivered by charitable "Bonyads", which are run by local mosques, which don't report to any government ministries.
She had frequent black outs with complete electricity downage for many hours a day and she was in a major city
One of the largest problems is that Iran's average income is so poor and the rising inflation and rising prices.
They didn't even have a battery or something which could store electricity while it came because the batteries were so expensive that one of them cost like 1 month of salary of average iranian.
Things were really tough, she told me about the education system and she had to recently move to govt school and she said that there were just not any books available.
She really disliked the regime. She was liberal and I asked her about hijab and she said that she was forced to wear in schools and that the only contacts that they usually did was with their brothers. The society is extremely strict to a point of no return.
The average Iranian person either barely scrapes by or was/is actively being suffered by authoritarian brutality from the ground reality of extremist islamist radicalism that their govt put them on.
The article claims that the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar that kicked off in 2017 has been substantively fueled by Facebook propaganda efforts, with strong links to Myanmar's own "security forces" (military).
> it's to prevent foreign interference (like CIA) from fueling civil unrest and spreading AI deepfakes, as seen in Myanmar and Brazil
In contrast then, you seem to allege that it was actually a foreign interference campaign by the CIA? Or am I misunderstanding what you're proposing?
Because if I'm not, I fail to see how what you linked supports that at all. Even your mention of deepfakes seems very questionable, as those haven't been a thing until late 2017, by which point this cleansing effort was already long underway. I further see that the US has formally condemned these events, although of course that does not rule out involvement.
The US wants a regime change, that's a fact, Trump has been very vocal on the matter, and the NSA has the tools to do what ever it pleases on the internet (e.g., PRISM)
You started off by listing a bunch of things that did not pass my smell test (and you have now walked back on), then followed it up by what's essentially a scattershot of vague gesturings. Why would I focus on what you tell me to? Not only is any of these not compelling, I do not find you a reliable narrator so far at all.
Social media is a new thing, but protests are old. People protested in despotic regimes prior to social media, and the triggering factors were basically the same as what is happening in Iran right now.
In fact, Social medias can make the co-ordination of protests and other information rather quickly. Its one of the few benefits of social medias. Social media with all its flaws still helps protests
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2020/11/iran...
If anything its easier to spread rumours without the internet to let people compare notes
Censorship, throttling, and (presumably) surveillance occurs at both layers. In some cases, also the region matters (Sistan and Baluchistan for example have experienced extended blackouts). In part that heterogeneity is because they still ideally want to keep businesses or VIPs online to mitigate the economic loss or logistical issues.
Consequently, the actual means of blocking tends to be on an ISP basis: some will simply drop packets, some will have left certain endpoints open, some will leave international DNS open, etc etc. All that changes when activists notice, exploit the opening, and then the ISP finds out. And then sometimes the TIC (the gateway) will impose blanket limitations or throttling.
My impression is that Iranian intelligence cares less about means than effectiveness, and ISP operators want to keep their license, livelihoods and lives, so they figure out how to meet the mandate. Given that this is something like the fourth blackout in recent years, they've gotten enough practice that there's few options out (that aren't Starlink).
Your international dns is interesting post, can dns over https still work like cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 (I don't think cf would work but still) or any other service?
Is there any iranian person in here hackernews who can test if international dns query works?
There are ways to send some very important data (although small so a little limited but I think in current time if it can help 1% it helps) that I saw that we can program dns to send each other arbitrary data as well
In fact there is a tool which can in fact run dns queries and create a sort of finger like protocol on it called dns.toys https://www.dns.toys/
Which can basically have some cli application like experience on top of dns and there msut be dns tools for communications as well.
And for fellow HN users from there, here's some great stuff: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://bitchat.free/
Its also not a prevalent technology compared to general.internet/mobile phone.
Organising resistance with it is the pipe dream of those who play with chips and antennas, but its not something thats going to happen when crowds and mobs form up in a situation like this. Not least because the hardware is not accessible to your average citizen.
[1] https://restofworld.org/2020/the-life-and-death-of-snet-hava...
How did that wirk out?
You need more of a plan than just get rid of a dictator.
I also fear that the looming, imminent war between Israel and Iran is going to make things works. I'm expecting Israel to start a conflict within the next 6 months (or sooner) with the aid of United States.
This is the weakest IRGC have been. Many of their allies have been crippled, they have water issues, economical issues and now protests.
I think that securing Venezuela's oil aids this, should IRAN attempt to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, it will allow Israel and United States to maintain reserves (to what extend, I don't know).
I think things are going to get difficult for Iranian people, no matter what.
Citing the relative GDP per capita number is reductive and doesn’t give a good picture of the average person’s life.
Iranians though, sure, things can change with or without the current govt
Which country is that? Last I checked, the Kurds were helping out the US a couple of years ago and got absolutely screwed.
Just take a look at what happened to Libya, sometimes removing a "bad person" will cause a far worse situation to evolve. Like literal human slavery.
I will never cease to be amazed at the amnesia that arises when folks in power decide now is a good time to sell a war to the people.
It only takes about 30% of the population supporting the regime plus military intervention to hold onto power. For some time now it seems that they've been below the 30% mark.
As for the rest of what you said, no notes.
I think their neighbor would disagree.
> sell a war to the people.
If you have to sell the war, then you have no business conducting it.
1. Even if removing <bad government> would be good for that country, that doesn’t give some other state the right to do it. We let these entities get away with murder because they are our friends and they have the biggest guns, that’s it.
2. Always interrogate the real reasons why a state is doing it.
Now only after that we get to the facts like all those times it ended horribly for the people that <state> was supposed to help.
they can censor IPv4 when they want, but they don't know how to censor IPv6. So they block it entirely.
This is the reason why they aren't blacking out IPv4
From my own experience, my ex gf was iranian. She was using discord via some psiphon vpn or something iirc idk how she got access to it but she had it.
I didn't trust psiphon that much so I asked her to install proton vpn and it did work. I wanted to play minecraft with her so prismlauncher but resources couldn't be downloaded so I made her download protonvpn so that she can play minecraft with me/install it (piracy was forced and also at that point necessary)
She was using tlauncher which somehow worked but tlauncher was russian spyware and prism launcher was open source
I talked to her about how she could use stablecoins crypto but crypto was illegal so ended up not suggesting it in the end to prevent inflation or talked to her about gold which is wild considering its like 3-4 months after we broke up but inflation is at 50% now.
Anyways the point being that protonvpn worked and other vpn worked too.
My question is, would things like protonvpn work after this blackout? I mean marco's and other comments in a thread explain to me that ipv4 can be blocked by them so I presume vpn's for ipv4 would shut down. And so vpns would most likely be using ipv6 which got blocked down
So does that mean that now Iranian people can't access vpns?
I also saw the other day some video about how when people called Iranian numbers from outside countries some random AI robot ass voice called and asked who are you and who are you talking to? And gave pause, and the most logical explaination to it was that the govt was recording these things so dont say anything to them. It was a creepypasta video.
Briar might help but Briar still leaks some metadata when I talked to their authors or heard about it online.
Instagram isn't blocked in Iran so are these social media apps still there after the blackout?
This raises so many questions and wtf is happening in the world
Internet participation is voluntary between countries.
I'm curious why this is the case? As far as I know the primary benefits of v6 is just the increased address space. Does it provide any privacy benefits? What would prevent Iran from doing the same censorship?
Another issue they may have however is v6 enabling internal p2p communications directly between users whereas legacy addressing with cgnat does not, although they could block this pretty easily if they wanted.
There was a recent post containing a (different) map of the protests that was flagged, but here goes
Mods this is not okay. Don't abuse your power flagging posts about maps of protests. This is not okay.
The discussion here assumes that the Iranian government is responsible for this blackout. I actually don't understand enough about network routing to undestand the OP dashboard linked to or be able to answer this question, but could it instead be the work of an opponent preparing to attack Iran?
Does everything stop or it's mostly business as usual minus some things?
I would imagine hospitals, tax offices etc need the internet to work?
"The internet was out. Everywhere. Across the entire country. No cell data, no wifi, no phone service, and as far as I could tell, there are no landlines in Afghanistan [...] But now the blackout was total. Our waiter was complaining to my guide that he couldn’t contact his mother in a western province. I saw other people in the crowded restaurant fiddling with their phones and looking annoyed. I asked my guide what he thought was going on. He shrugged."
"Without internet and phones, people can’t talk to loved ones, businesses can’t function, trade can’t function, and even government offices can’t function. Only the Taliban with their well-established network of short-wave radios can function. But still, if the internet remains off long enough in Afghanistan, the country’s economy and society may very well collapse. Afghans couldn’t get money from banks. Soon enough, would food stop being delivered to cities?"
Is this the first country which genuinely effectively is able to ban tor?
Because even in China, tor can work through bridges or some other methods and even Chinese firewalls aren't so extreme as iran right now.
Edit: forgot that north korea exists so I guess the second country but even in north korea there was this chinese interviewer or japanese interviewer who contacted people in north korea ig and those north koreans then interviewed for the first time completely uncensored north korea and it was brutal (a girl saying both her parents died and she was so so skinny i think) , they then went and smuggled the tapes from north korea to china and then to japan and then the company/production company or something blurred the peoples faces involved for anonymity.
There's also this 1 steam connection in north korea so its just gonna be a mystery if we ever see a north korean person using a tor but I am 99% sure that it wont but north korea also got 1 steam connection so you never know.
The reason they didn't do this for ipv6 is because ipv6 obviously has a lot more addresses and so they just ended up blocking it whole.
Atleast that's what I read in one of the comment threads discussions in here
I don't think that in iran there would still be any available ipv4 entry nodes that they would allow. They would filter/block it as well?
But you can reach the IPv6 internet through those too.
That's what bridges are for.
Blocking is a cat and mouse game. It depends how heavy handed they are about it, but unless they totally cut off the external internet, its unlikely tor is 100% blocked, although it might be effectively blocked for most people.
Other tools are much, much more popular, such as Psiphon, Lantern, MahsaNG, etc.
In the end I had suggested her protonvpn as psiphon had some issues.
How does Psiphon work and how does it compare with protonvpn? I still trust protonvpn (which has free access as well) more than Psiphon fwiw.
I'd at least keep an open mind for a while.
They attacked Iran a little while ago. But now they are playing it cool like a cucumber?
It was advantagous for them to strike when they did, so they did. Its much less advantageous in this moment, so it seems less likely they will now. Or at least not overtly.
> But now they are playing it cool like a cucumber?
Well yes. Countries tend to do things they think will make them more powerful. Sometimes that means blowing shit up, but that is not always the right play.
The "regime" is a republic with regularly held presidential (8 presidents in 45 years) and parliamentary elections. What would you like to replace it with? Monarchy
I would like the internet not to get shut down during the protest
Am I asking too much?
I'd think the regime thing refers to the Supreme Leader of 36 years and his Guardian Council, no?
The Guardian Council is an elected body with the power to remove the so-called "Supreme Leader", so his power is limited too and is not hereditary, unlike monarchies of Europe and Asia
We have ChatGPT. We are not dumb. Stop the propaganda.
The Assembly of Experts members are elected directly by the people every 8 years, and it operates independently of the Guardian Council once it's seated.
Who elects your king? Trump or Satanyahu
Again. I don't want a king. I want people not to die when they go protest. AM I ASKING TOO MUCH??
It seems like you are great at repeating propaganda points and don't actually live in Iran because otherwise you wouldn't have internet.
"Supreme Leader" does not elect anyone, he appoints the head of judiciary, according to the tradition and customs of Sharia law. People elect parliament, president and Assembly of Experts. The Guardian Counsel's only power is to certify minimum qualifications of candidates, according to election laws not personal prerogative of the "Supreme Leader".
Iran's "regime" is only 45 years old, the first 8 years of which was in war and the last 25 years, under sanctions by the Western "democracies". This is after 3,000 years of absolute monarchy or occupation.
You, your king and your Mossad handlers may control the internet, but will never be able to return to Iran.
All accusing random people of being an Israeli spy does, especially when all the evidence for it is just them trying to contextualize your misleading comments, is render you an untrustworthy narrator of a then-evidently dishonest narrative. As if you ran out of convenient facts, so you pivoted to convenient speculations. It is very clear you're here to paint Iran as something it isn't, absolving their leadership from being at any fault or having any responsibility for the protests discussed by handwaving away their significance in its totality. It is further very clear that you're not here to do so via any appreciable, honest means, and that you get hostile specifically in response to when you get called out for this, indicating both a strong and a willful bias.
I further don't understand all this "your king" stuff. What king? You even claimed their "king" is elected by "Trump or Satanyahu", when in an earlier comment you explicitly prided Iran on how it's not like European or Asian monarchies, with their hereditary processes. Surely you can appreciate the contradiction.
> (...) your king (...) may control the internet, but will never be able to return to Iran
I'm confused. So you're claiming
- the guy above has a king, so they're currently nationals at one of these places: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Belize, Bhutan, Cambodia, Canada, Denmark, Eswatini, Grenada, Jamaica, Jordan, Lesotho, Malaysia, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Solomon Islands, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, The Bahamas, Tonga, Tuvalu, and the UK. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_monarchs_of_so...)
- that king was elected, leaving: Cambodia, Eswatini, Jordan, and Malaysia (see the same link as previously)
- that king would have an interest to return to Iran, implying they must be former Iranian nationals: none of the aforementioned kings fit this bill
- that king was elected by Satanyahu, i.e. that king is an Israeli spy; as per the previous facts, this cannot be, there's no one remaining
- the guy above is an Israeli spy
I'm honestly mystified just what kind of character you're envisioning that could match all this, and why do you keep suggesting that he's presently a national at a place that clearly cannot exist, for being lead by a king with an impossible combination of characteristics. Even if you did not literally want to suggest a king, and that was sarcasm, that still doesn't clarify much. Is this some kind of political bravado specific to where you're from?
But who gets on the ballot is controlled by the Guardian Council. So it's like how you could get the first car Ford produced in any color, as long as that color was the color black.
Surely this is not new info to you?
> Who elects your king? Trump or Satanyahu
If you think this is a boxing or football match of some sort, please consult the forum guidelines. We're not here to beat each other (or you) down.
The first six of which to my understanding are token roles, sometimes de jure, but definitely de facto. This is unlike the role of the Iranian Supreme Leader, who according to my findings is heavily involved and has the license to do so.
I don't know what country Arabia is supposed to be.
> The Guardian Council is an elected body with the power to remove the so-called "Supreme Leader", so his power is limited too
You know that I considered and checked for all of this ahead of time, right? These loopholes are very on the nose.
The Supreme Leader directly elects 6 of the Guardian Council members, but also the judiciary chief, who elects the other 6.
The Supreme Leader is elected and kept in position by the people-elected Assembly of Experts, the applications for which are... filtered through by the Guardian Council. And considering they have never exercised their authority to as much as condemn but especially to remove a Supreme Leader according to my search, it's a reasonable conclusion that either everything is magically harmonious over there, or this authority in practice is a token one too.
I have also looked into whether these bodies are partial, and not only is this true covertly, it is true openly. Candidates that don't fit the bill on any of these levels are proudly filtered out in droves.
I'm really quite unconvinced you're here to inform with honesty in mind.
All European kings have the power to dismiss the elected prime ministers and are the nominal head of the armed forces. Iran "Supreme Leader" has never removed any elected presidents or members of parliament and has no authority over government expenditures or taxes, therefore is not responsible for mis-management of economy.
So those who call for his removal are not motivated by economic hardship but are politically motivated who can't win democratic elections
This is false. For Sweden, and Andorra this is both de jure and de facto wrong, for others, it is still de facto wrong. Did you even read the line you quoted?
In the UK, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and Luxemburg, their monarchs do not dismiss the PM at will. They act on advice, and violating that norm would almost certainly force abdication or abolition. They are formally involved in appointing or dismissing a prime minister, but only within strict constitutional norms (loss of parliamentary confidence, resignation, elections). Acting unilaterally would trigger a constitutional crisis.
> and are the nominal head of the armed forces
This is once again false for Sweden and Andorra, and once again, only ceremonially (de jure) true for others, and wrong in practice (de facto false). Did you even read the line you quoted?
In contrast with all of this, the Supreme Leader of Iran:
- is a direct, actual commander-in-chief for Iran's armed forces, and is actively involved in its operations
- can directly dismiss some high officials and initiate the removal of others, and has complete if indirect control over who gets to run for their positions to begin with, and how a removal process would turn out
> Iran "Supreme Leader" has never removed any elected presidents or members of parliament
Your scare quoting of Supreme Leader is unjustified to the extent I can tell: checking in with language models, it is a correct and reasonable translation. Ironically, it might even be risky to do for someone in and from Iran, as it could get interpreted as criticizing him, which afaik is illegal and routinely punished.
This is further not a claim I made or even suggested: on the contrary, I laid it out through several paragraphs why and how the election of officials is manipulated at the source, rather than at the destination. Did you even read the comment you're responding to?
> has no authority over government expenditures or taxes, therefore is not responsible for mis-management of economy
Yes he does and is. Not only are large swaths of national economic activity, revenue streams, and spending functionally outside the ordinary budget process and under his control, he has supervisory authority that can shape fiscal policy indirectly through oversight powers. He also routinely sets "general policies" that are binding on the executive branch and influence budgeting priorities. Finally, which was the key point, he has influence over who can get elected into the various "people-elected" bodies that actually drive such policies and implement them. Did you even bother to understand the comment you're responding to?
> So those who call for his removal are not motivated by economic hardship but are politically motivated who can't win democratic elections
Nice opinion! I personally have no idea who's being blamed in these protests, didn't care to read up on it. The economic hardships of Iran are of no controversy to my understanding though, so I don't know why you would put that in question.
Regarding political struggle, to my understanding, most parties and people who would run don't even get to run in the first place (did you read what I wrote?). So it makes little sense to discuss the capability of them "winning" an election, when they can't even run on it. Unless you meant to suggest you think they're justified in triggering an uprising, but then I don't know why you'd be against the protests.
Ah, well...
IPv6 is still blacked out
One characteristic of v4 is it's somewhat reasonable to do a straight forward block on a range of addresses to shut down access. This is still somewhat possible with v6, but harder as there's simply a much larger portion of ip addresses that can be all over the place. It's theoretically a lot easier for anyone that wants to bypass a simple filter to grab a new public IP address.
You'd typically block an AS - i.e. every IP originating from AS12345. That's just as easy on v6 as v4.
With v6 this is not the case, a given AS# will typically have a single large allocation and can make it larger if they need to, it won't be sold and moved and an entity can't trade it in to get a different allocation.
But, it is a new skill, and you can turn off v6 at small cost if you're already ok with heavily restricting v4.
no its not, its easier to block IPv6 ranges than IPv4 ones.
if someone want be block my ISP, they only need a single /32 rule with v6.
A lot of anti censorship organizations have trouble getting more IPv4 /24 for cost reasons or moving it around to different AS since they would go offline.
With IPv6, you can get IPv6 /40 from ARIN/RIPE no problem. You slice that up into /48 and just start bouncing it all over the place. When one /48 goes down, you move everything to another /48, switch providers if required and continue.
EDIT: They also tend to get multiple blocks as well for when ISP figures out to root /40.
No it isn't. Nobody is blocking ranges as they roll in, they're blocking whole ASNs at once. That's just as trivial with v6 as v4, actually v6 can be simpler because ISPs tend to have fewer large blocks in v6land.
Sure, Iran government may just decide to block that specific ASN but if it's they want to remain somewhat on the internet, they are stuck with "Smack entire broad ASNs and lose large chucks of internet" or "Block specific IP spaces."
Getting multiple blocks is harder - the RIRs will want justification for this, and would rather give you a single large block than lots of fragmented ones.
1.Talent pools in nation states are extraordinarily deep-- much deeper than they appear. Countries can suffer from brain drain for decades (or centuries!) but when conditions call for it, superbly talented people somehow manifest.
2. The correlation between talent and conscience is weak. Nation states always manage to find superbly talented people to work on problems many of us would recoil from.
About 2. also 100% true: intelligence/knowledge is totally independent of any other trait.
Literally every country does this. It's just perspective whether an individual thinks it's okay or not.
If you're on the side doing the indoctrination, you probably agree with it, or are indoctrinated yourself. We all are to some degree.
The same people who have unironically latched onto the idea of Meritocracy. A concept/idea that was literally conceived as a parody.
Looking at IPv6 its not 0 exactly, looks like probably censorship, only some devices allowed online? Some other comment mentioned there's calls to protest again today.