Hacker News Reader

Comment by falaki | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it [1] to no avail. Using these terminals activists and journalists continue to upload videos of demonstrations to social media which has enabled analyses that show demonstrations are very wide spread [2] and continue to grow.

[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink....

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre28d2j2zxo

View on HN

Probably the goal of the blackouts is to hinder organizing on social media, discord, whatsapp, etc, not to prevent news getting out.

They are almost completely inaccessible to the average Iranian. A friend of mine who has come a long way to fight Iranian censorship told me that they essentially don't exist.

There are ~100,000 users, about 0.1% of the population: https://www.newsweek.com/starlink-usage-iran-skyrockets-brea...

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.

How are there so many users, see my other comment but i will ask here as well but starlink's american company and sanctioned iran so how do the details really work?

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.

Tools to evade state surveillance and censorship are explicitly exempted from US sanctions against Iran.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-expands-sanctions-exception...

As long as starlink isn't forced to geofence an area, anyone can buy a terminal anywhere and smuggle it in as any other drug or contraband. The mini's are about the same size as a laptop

Black market. We had satellite dishes in Eastern Europe during communism. Bribe some people, shell out some insane amounts of cash and it can be done.

If black market's the only reason that activism/journalism/outside contact is even possible in the country

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.

As someone who grew up in late Communist Czechoslovakia, you underestimate the black market. Its capabilities were only comparable to the Secret Police itself (StB in our case).

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.

Stop worrying. You don't have to liberate everyone. The Iranian regime will screw itself up by attacking Israel.

It's usually smuggled parts if they're small enough. Someone outside of the country usually makes the subscription and they get paid somehow.

Possibly the number of users is even larger, if people can share a terminal. Wifi 802.11s Mesh with Batman routing scales very well to huge sizes.

This is already assuming terminal and account sharing. I meant to link this story, the original source: https://www.iranintl.com/en/202501060034. The stat is based on 30,000 unique users. I don't know how many actual terminals there are, probably a few thousand.

They must be smuggled inside the country and the dictatorship can say anything they want and charge if they get caught so they must be very few in numbers

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

Starlink receivers are actually very complicated. They make use of a bunch of high-end FPGAs and a bunch of other expensive and uncommon components. See this teardown: https://youtu.be/h6MfM8EFkGg?si=m-sN6UW4nh8_HzPR.

Yes, there are NGOs and organizations that sponsor these and pay for them. Here is an example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/12/18/inside-...

Forbes asking me to pay

Elevate Your Journey Invest in your success with unlimited access to trusted, in-depth journalism for less than $1/week. Become a member today to continue.

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

No problem using uBO and FF

> 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?

Starlink uses a pretty sophisticated phased array antenna, so not something you can easily build in your garage.

I wonder how easy is it to get contraband into the country. The country's huge, and with the current govt not being the most popular or financially well off, I guess there are quite a few border officers willing to make some extra money.

Starlink receivers aren't built out of common readily available components. It's fancy RF stuff.

Those who have one surely keep that fact secret.

Where are the ground stations Iranian traffic is using?

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.

My starlink in Afghanistan downlinks in Sofia.

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.

> 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.

You really think iran is going to bomb turkey (a nato country) over this?

No, because they arent trying to prevent all communication with the outside world, they are trying to prevent organisation within their country. Leaving 0.1% of users online is acceptable.

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.

Of course they do give a shit. Last thing they want is Turkish boots on the ground, a country way closer culturally than US or Israel.

Importantly Turkey is a very powerful country that is right in the area. Even without its nato allies, turkey is probably peer to Iran. Israel was restrained by having very limited ability to strike so far from their homeland. Turkey wouldn't have that problem.

yes

Isn't it possible to jam the starlink receiver?

Yes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.

The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.

Bouncing signals off of the ionosphere is most definitely not an option here. The bandwidth of the signals that Starlink needs in order to provide service are far wider than the range of frequencies that bounce off any layer of the ionosphere. If you could get a 10GHz signal to bounce off of the F layer, you'd have a lot of very excited amateur radio operators who would start using that instead of the moon as their reflector.

Thanks for your comment, I know the ionosphere is used in Electronic Warfare but I didn't realize it was so limited in frequency.

Is there really is no way to reflect signals off the ionosphere out of phase so after reflecting they interfere into a higher frequency?

Just to add more details.

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.

This assumes you're jamming very close to the dish. The trouble with jamming is you have to deal with the inverse square law so you really can't deny very much area. If they have a fleet of hundreds of high power modern directional jammers they could degrade this or other networks, but they're just not going to have that kind of sophistication.

Oh, I was thinking of jamming the receivers of the satellites. Should have written it explicitly, it is indeed not clear.

Either way, you'd need to jam several with quite a bit of power

Possible, yes, but the Iranian government almost certainly isn't capable of doing so, much less across the entire country.

Even Russians don't seem to be able to jam Starlink on the Ukrainian battlefields.

China, maybe.

Huge idiot here with an honest question: with starlink, could a rogue actor just point a bunch of high-powered lasers at the satellites and brick them?

In short, likely no(unless the satellites are really sensitive). Otherwise lasers would have negated the fear of ICBMs long ago.

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.

Cheaper to launch a barrel of metal trash to the Starlink orbits. Or a few barrels. Iran has rockets for that.

There are 9400 active Starlink satellites & they can be launched 28 at a time on a partially reusable rocket. The orbit they operate on is largely self cleaning due to being quite low. The satellites operate in many planes and bands + form a mesh network with laster interconnects.

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.

you might be able to hit one but it'd be pretty impressive, like firing a bullet and hitting someone in another country impressive

I'm not a rocket scientist, but I guess even a single lunch in the retrograde direction should be enough. You lunch a box of ball bearings with a plastic explosive to spread them out, and then just wait. The cloud will pass over Iran every 12h or and will stay in orbit for quite a few weeks, since the orbit is even higher than ISS reboosting once a month, and balls are highly aerodynamic compared to the Starlink flat sails. The cloud won't be very big, but it will repeatedly swipe through quite a lot intersecting prograde orbits. I guess the chance would be quite high. Iran can also split payload into smaller boxes and "deploy" then in sequence while the second stage is firing, then detonate them, to spread out even more.

Multibeam too, right?

>targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam

And good luck targeting enough Starlink satellites...

I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.

> Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming.

Musk proved quite good at blocking Ukrainian Starlink access too, supporting Russia.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66752264

The Russians are themselves heavy users of starlink.

Can you provide a source for this claim?

Not the person you asked, but here's a couple of sources that back that claim:

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...

>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...

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

Thx for posting the USAID article. The brazenness of it all is astonishing.

Thank God for the incompetence. It's like we're doing "Clown Show Mussolini".

Here, have a video of the russian cavalry with a Starlink attached to a horse. Yes, you have read that right. 2026 btw. https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1q7i... Also: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/01/08/russia-sat...

Start here:

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.

I guess it is to a degree unavoidable - ukrainian units are using a lot of crowdfunded starlink terminals on the front, so even if you geo fenced usage only to the virtual cells outside of Russia controlled territory, you would also disable ukrainian sets at the front. So if Russians smuggle sets from other countries, they might not be really easy to tell from the "good" sets crowdsourced by the ukrainians and used at the front.

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.

It doesnt matter where starlink terminals came from, all end up registered with Ukrainian MOD. Btw Poland pays subscription on ~50K of those.

Just the latest one

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/2009240533944947050

Twitter is a good source for this sort of evidence. It’s Musk, all the way down.

Yes, with the caveat that you'll need decent line of sight to it.

I've got to think it's easy to find starlink receivers--I know they use a directed beam but they must give off a bunch of lateral noise, right? Or does Starlink use the same frequency bands as other common equipment such that it would be difficult to distinguish starlink signals from others? If the government was motivated they could surely start finding these receivers, right?

Well the better your beam is directed, the less lateral noise there is.

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.

Is 1% still quite a lot louder than other things in the same band?

From what I read, the Russians were targeting Starlink terminals based on the built-in wifi access point not the Starlink frequencies.

I read the satellite has an omnidirectional antenna?

Destroy the satellites? I mean all that have to do is screw up the trajectory of some of the satellites to cause exponential collisions...

Iran does not have that capability. But that would also be an act of war.

No, it wouldn’t be an act of war, it would be “a military operation”.

Flinging spacejunk pollution into orbit is extremely simple if you have rockets.

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.

They don't have that many rockets that are capable of orbital flight let alone an ASAT capability.

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.

> Imagine trying to hit a specific speeding car by throwing a dart from another moving car

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.

Um, no - if you do this on suborbital trajectory you totally obliterate a bunch of empty space for the <10 minutes until all your garbage falls back.

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.

they do have satellites. I'm less sure about how much they care about them - but they are not cheap

That's my point. They have so few that sacrificing them would be irrelevant.

Ah yes, Kessler's space shredder, something to be feared by all satellites!

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...

Starlinks are in self cleaning orbits & are actually being moved even lower due to solar minimum & better capacity:

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.

> On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets

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.

GPS is in geosynchronous orbit, insanely far from the Earth's surface.

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.

Nitpick, GPS is about halfway to geosync. Your point stands.

> social media which has enabled analyses

Social media is such a narrow lens that I would be cautious accepting that analysis at face value.

in 2019 internet shutdown happened just before crackdown on protests

Reply on news.ycombinator.com