
How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet - howard941
https://www.wired.com/story/iran-internet-shutoff/
======
squaresmile
> Still, he and other analysts emphasize that it's difficult to know exactly
> what has happened...

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

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

Here's the NetBlocks article: [https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-
disrupted-in-iran-ami...](https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-disrupted-in-
iran-amid-fuel-protests-in-multiple-cities-pA25L18b) It looks like network
connectivity is going back up.

[0] [https://medium.com/filterwatch/is-layered-filtering-the-
futu...](https://medium.com/filterwatch/is-layered-filtering-the-future-of-
irans-national-information-network-efa47574b910)

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
howard941
I don't see the Usenet connection to RSS. Could you flesh it out a little bit
please? Before the governors used the fear of pr0n to encourage willing ISPs
to kill netnews it was a nice free distributed "town square" kind of service
that came along with an ISP account. The ability to download article headers
via NNRP is the only obvious commonality with RSS.

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

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

~~~
dataanalyst1
can you expand on that? "They could tell you about the state of so many
countries based on their interactions with other operators there."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[0] [https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/24/spacex-reveals-more-
starli...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/24/spacex-reveals-more-starlink-
info-after-launch-of-first-60-satellites/)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

