alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
It has been 120 hours (5 days) since the internet shutdown in Iran began. While international phone calls have started working again, data remains blocked.
I am looking for technical solutions to establish resilient, long-term communication channels that can bypass such shutdowns. What are the most viable options for peer-to-peer messaging, mesh networks, or satellite-based solutions that don't rely on local ISP infrastructure?
Comments
States like Iran have signal catchers, where they can get a rough idea where a signal is coming from through triangulation. The US military has had this for over 20 years now. Often these coordinates are fed in as targets into weapons systems.
If you're going the radio route these come to mind:
Meshtastic: 1W, one band, local. Useful if Iran doesn't know about it. But easy to jam and probably triangulate.
Wifi Halow: 1W, can possibly hop between bands, but probably also really easy to jam and triangulate.
WSPR: Possibly good, transmitters can hide in the noise floor, and can go long distances with 100mW of power, but slow. Probably triangulable, very easy to jam once located in the spectrum. Data can be transmitted and received with off the shelf components.
Military Radios: Very good. Transmitters can frequency hop, making triangulation and jamming difficult. Also encryption. You can easily transmit in the same frequency space that Iran would be using to avoid jamming. But also, mostly unobtanium. I have heard stories about US military radios showing up at Ham Fests.
HF radio. Highly depdendent on space weather, but generally I can communicate around the world with only 100 watts and a long wire.
Be aware though that transmitting on any radio is like turning on a giant, extremely bright light bulb directly above your antenna. Anyone with basic radio know-how will be able to hear you and locate you.
Old fashioned phone trees can be really useful IMHO OP. We used them when I worked in a school. If there was winter weather, you'd call say, everyone with a last name from A to G in the staff directory, someone else calls G to K, and so on and so forth.
You can combine the phone tree with literal runners -- so basically, someone takes their burner and calls suburbs A,B,C and D and then the runners go out and pass the word about the protest or action.
For dense areas, mesh applications like BitChat (Jack Dorsey) could bypass the need for a network with p2p bluetooth mesh networks. And works with existing devices, vs something like meshtastic which needs an installed base (afaik).
V.92 dial-up. Slow and expensive, but it's Internet access.
some DNS tunneling solutions work (dnstt for example). Also, many people have smuggled Starlink are are providing proxies inside Iran.
Ideally cjdns or similar can be used inside the country to create an alternative encrypted mesh network inside the borders, with some "exit nodes" out.
WiFi Halow is a longer range protocol (still probably not long enough). But something like this can get people connected: https://openmanet.net
Maybe https://meshtastic.org?
Couriers and USB flash drives can be pretty effective. They're high latency but can be very high bandwidth. Look at the El Paquete network in Cuba[0] as inspiration. Self-contained HTML/JavaScript SPAs can provide navigation and the likes of TiddlyWiki[1] can allow for collaboration. A network of couriers can move as fast as road traffic and distribute stuff pretty widely.
Contents can be re-shared locally over ad-hoc or mesh WiFi networks even without Internet access.
Encryption and steganography can obscure the contents of drives from casual inspection. You can stuff a lot of extraneous data in Office XML documents that are just zip files and look innocuous when opened.
1. For current events content add descriptions, locations, and timestamps to everything. The recipients need that context.
2. Even unencrypted files can be verified with cryptographic signatures. These can be distributed on separate channels including Bluetooth file transfers.
3. Include offline installers for browsers like Dillo or Firefox. Favor plain text formats where possible. FAT32 has the broadest support in terms of file system for the flash drives. Batch, PowerShell, and bash scripts can also be effective in doing more complex things while not needing local installation or invasive installations on people's computers.
Problem is that most methods involve making your location known openly. The Dark Forest book of the Remembrance of the Earth Past explains why it is not a good idea to do so in the current circumstances
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An important factor to consider when answering this question, is that the average monthly wage in Iran is only $200 to $500 USD/month.