Iranian regime tries to shut down Starlink

Not too surprising, given that Starlink operates in Iran without a permit, "space pirate radio" style, and has something of a habit of making the access free when major protests happen and the government imposes a network blackout. Iranian government and Starlink have no love for each other, clearly.

It's a pattern by now: whenever a government wants to do something awful, it shuts down internet access - so that no one can hear it, see it or coordinate a response. And Starlink becomes a lifeline that the regime would rather people didn't have.

This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place. If you give a government a capability to restrict access to whatever it wants and enact a network blackout whenever it wants, it's a matter of time until it gets abused.

Under packetloss my assumption is text is king, but I wonder if forward error correcting audio and video is actually better in some ways?

Media is information rich. Maybe we're beyond a samzdat moment and the value in comms is contextual immediacy of live feeds, text can squeeze alongside.

Long ago, broadcast quality TV was shipped as slow feed. Maybe a tiktok generation goes back there: use a phone on the street (probably surreptitiously) do post production and upload asynchronously on 30% packetloss or worse for redistribution.

The article seems quite speculative.

I'm sure the Iranian regime would live to jam starlink, but i don't think we have any ability to know what is actually happening here.

The article claims 80% packetloss. That's still 1 in 5 packets getting through. That is annoying but not going to stop information getting out.

I also wonder, if all other coms are cut off, is it possible star link in the country is just overloaded?

Wow this sucks! however if i were iranian brass i would do it too. IT/OT and IoT is not safe full stop. Pull the plug. It wouldnt be pretty over here either, also china already got us good (Volt Typhoon, OPM hack, why bother to list 30 or 40 more?)

How do these tens of thousands of Starlink terminals get smuggled into Iran?

Which governments are referred to as "regimes" is usually propaganda about how you should feel about them. Consider: all articles written about US using the words "The US regime".

How likely is it that those "protestors" are US and Israel propped and the plan is to do another regime change via this route?

Isn't this "son of the late Shah" a guy from the US?

Starlink is primarily a military technology that is used both on a battlefield and to coordinate USA-backed "protests". Why, for instance, it just become free in Venezuela? Every country needs to be able to to defend itself from Starlink.