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Same Surface, Different Weight

https://www.robpanico.com/articles/display/?entry_short=same-surface-different-weight
1•retrocog•2m ago•0 comments

The Rise of Spec Driven Development

https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/02/06/the-rise-of-spec-driven-development.html
1•Brajeshwar•6m ago•0 comments

The first good Raspberry Pi Laptop

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/the-first-good-raspberry-pi-laptop/
2•Brajeshwar•7m ago•0 comments

Seas to Rise Around the World – But Not in Greenland

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/greenland-sea-levels-fall
1•Brajeshwar•7m ago•0 comments

Will Future Generations Think We're Gross?

https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/will-future-generations-think-were
1•crescit_eundo•10m ago•0 comments

State Department will delete Xitter posts from before Trump returned to office

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/07/nx-s1-5704785/state-department-trump-posts-x
2•righthand•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Verifiable server roundtrip demo for a decision interruption system

https://github.com/veeduzyl-hue/decision-assistant-roundtrip-demo
1•veeduzyl•14m ago•0 comments

Impl Rust – Avro IDL Tool in Rust via Antlr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmKvw73V394
1•todsacerdoti•14m ago•0 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
2•vinhnx•15m ago•0 comments

minikeyvalue

https://github.com/commaai/minikeyvalue/tree/prod
3•tosh•20m ago•0 comments

Neomacs: GPU-accelerated Emacs with inline video, WebKit, and terminal via wgpu

https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs
1•evalexec•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Moli P2P – An ephemeral, serverless image gallery (Rust and WebRTC)

https://moli-green.is/
2•ShinyaKoyano•28m ago•1 comments

How I grow my X presence?

https://www.reddit.com/r/GrowthHacking/s/UEc8pAl61b
2•m00dy•30m ago•0 comments

What's the cost of the most expensive Super Bowl ad slot?

https://ballparkguess.com/?id=5b98b1d3-5887-47b9-8a92-43be2ced674b
1•bkls•31m ago•0 comments

What if you just did a startup instead?

https://alexaraki.substack.com/p/what-if-you-just-did-a-startup
5•okaywriting•37m ago•0 comments

Hacking up your own shell completion (2020)

https://www.feltrac.co/environment/2020/01/18/build-your-own-shell-completion.html
2•todsacerdoti•40m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Gorse 0.5 – Open-source recommender system with visual workflow editor

https://github.com/gorse-io/gorse
1•zhenghaoz•41m ago•0 comments

GLM-OCR: Accurate × Fast × Comprehensive

https://github.com/zai-org/GLM-OCR
1•ms7892•42m ago•0 comments

Local Agent Bench: Test 11 small LLMs on tool-calling judgment, on CPU, no GPU

https://github.com/MikeVeerman/tool-calling-benchmark
1•MikeVeerman•43m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AboutMyProject – A public log for developer proof-of-work

https://aboutmyproject.com/
1•Raiplus•43m ago•0 comments

Expertise, AI and Work of Future [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsxWl9iT1XU
1•indiantinker•43m ago•0 comments

So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/books/mass-market-paperback-books.html
3•pseudolus•44m ago•1 comments

PID Controller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional%E2%80%93integral%E2%80%93derivative_controller
1•tosh•48m ago•0 comments

SpaceX Rocket Generates 100GW of Power, or 20% of US Electricity

https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/2019932764515234159
2•bkls•48m ago•0 comments

Kubernetes MCP Server

https://github.com/yindia/rootcause
1•yindia•49m ago•0 comments

I Built a Movie Recommendation Agent to Solve Movie Nights with My Wife

https://rokn.io/posts/building-movie-recommendation-agent
4•roknovosel•49m ago•0 comments

What were the first animals? The fierce sponge–jelly battle that just won't end

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00238-z
2•beardyw•58m ago•0 comments

Sidestepping Evaluation Awareness and Anticipating Misalignment

https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/
1•taubek•58m ago•0 comments

OldMapsOnline

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en
2•surprisetalk•1h ago•0 comments

What It's Like to Be a Worm

https://www.asimov.press/p/sentience
3•surprisetalk•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

From stealth blackout to whitelisting: Inside the Iranian shutdown

https://www.kentik.com/blog/from-stealth-blackout-to-whitelisting-inside-the-iranian-shutdown/
163•oavioklein•2w ago

Comments

alephnerd•2w ago
Iran has been rolling out the National Information Network (essentially a whitelisted internet) for a couple years now after the Green Revolution [0].

Iran has a surprisingly robust domestic ecosystem of hyperscalers [1] and telco infra [6][7] built out over the past decade with limited outside involvement and a severe sanctions regime, and have even started exporting Iranian IT services to Uganda [2], Kenya [3], South Africa [4], Venezuela [5], Russia [9], and China [9]

My understanding is that during the current 5 year plan in Iran, they are trying to fully transition the Iranian internet to the NIN, as all ".ir" domains are supposed to be hosted on the NIN.

If someone wants to find a techno-authoritarian state I'd say Iran is probably closer to that vision than most other countries, as a large portion of their leadership are Western-educated (Stanford, MIT, UPMC/Paris VI, Supélec, UNSW, etc) Computer Engineers and Computer Scientists by training (eg. Iran's VP did his PhD under Thomas Cover at Stanford [8] and Rouhani's Chief of Staff studied EE@SJSU). Even Iran's NSC and former IRGC head (who's daughter is a surgeon at Emory - so much for marg bar amreeka) was a CS major turned Kantian philosophy PhD.

[0] - https://citizenlab.ca/irans-national-information-network/

[1] - https://www.arvancloud.ir/fa

[2] - https://tvbrics.com/en/news/uganda-and-iran-to-boost-ict-co-...

[3] - https://mail.techreviewafrica.com/public/news/1361/kenya-and...

[4] - https://www.samenacouncil.org/samena_daily_news?news=64545

[5] - https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/08/06/752585/Iranian-fibe...

[6] - https://zmc.co.ir/

[7] - https://www.rayafiber.com/en/home

[8] - https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1011657

[9] - https://www.kharon.com/brief/iran-sanctions-maximum-pressure...

jimbohn•2w ago
Kinda envious of them that, due to sanctions, they end up with hyperscalers. Europe will never get hyperscales while being too tight with the US, and any protectionism at the service industry level would make the US go more mental than it already is.
alephnerd•2w ago
It's not only because of sanctions. It's primarily because their leadership have deeply technical backgrounds. Most of my peers who ended up in policymaking roles in Europe (and in some cases the levers of power) all had a humanities or legal background and never worked in or adjacent to the tech industry.

Assuming Iran didn't follow the path that it did, Iran would have also ended up becoming a tech hub like Israel became today.

But this recognition should not be used to glaze a regime that has officially admitted to killing at least 5,000 protestors [0] in just 2 weeks and in reality killed significantly more people than that.

Being adept at understanding the applications of technology doesn't make one a humanist.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/iranian-offic...

jimbohn•2w ago
Agree with you on pretty much everything you have said. The background of policymakers in Europe really annoys me. Just to be clear, I wasn't glazing Iran or anything.
larodi•2w ago
The background of most everyone in Brussels seems so wrong for the technological realities nowadays. I believe this sentiment is shared by a lot of people, and now it unfolds in Europe plainly lacking behind in technology. Which is such a shame given history of discoveries and advancement that was going on on the continent for centuries.
jimbohn•2w ago
The whole European political elite and ruling class feels like a quasi-aristocracy (something the US is slowly moving into as well, with political dynasties and such) that is used to go to some big-name art/humanities place and then slide into the bureaucracy ladder. Totally detached people, and it's a pity because we really need Europe to be better.
viking123•2w ago
The failures fall upwards into Brussels usually, sadly then you get very much second rate politicians that were even hated in their own countries.
viking123•2w ago
I mean most countries send their failures there, also people who are not liked in the respective countries usually slip there for comfy jobs.
hshdhdhj4444•2w ago
Iranians have a 5+ millennia culture of being highly educated, technical and creative.

That expertise wasn’t just gonna disappear in a couple of decades.

And yes, the Iranian regime is brutal and terrible. This was one time the opposition was strong enough that they may have had a chance and yet our fellow in chief decided to launch incendiary words, which only allowed the regime to paint the opposition as western funded, while not providing any actual support (there’s a reason Israel, which is at least led by competent leadership, kept quiet about the protests in Iran because they understand how their words of support would undermine them).

myth_drannon•2w ago
Iran is rich in natural resources(gas,oil), one of the richest actually. No country so rich can become a tech hub like Israel/Singapore (which just had no other options for development).
gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
A subtle reason for preferring negotiations towards mutually beneficial ends-- sanctions can supercharge tech adoption
jimbohn•2w ago
Yeah, or even just protectionism. Most economists I've heard say that protectionism doesn't work, but I feel like China being quiet and protectionist in the infancy of its key industries was like the move of the century for them.
gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
Protectionism and sanctions form a kind of virtuous feedback loop :)

https://incyber.org/en/article/iran-between-isolation-and-te...

>The Iranian Information Technology Organization (ITOI) even set precise rules to evaluate candidates based on three different standards: ISO 27017 (cloud security controls), ISO 27018 (protection of personally identifiable information), and NIST SP 900-145, which concerns the American definition of cloud computing. “They want a comprehensive offer with its three components— IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS https://incyber.org/en/article/iran-between-isolation-and-te...

baxtr•2w ago
Not sure tbh.

China could have been like Japan per capita. Protectionism puts a big cap on economic growth potential.

gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
I might have missed something here

"current dollar valuations are more appropriate. Nominal GDP measured in these units are plotted in Figure 2." https://econbrowser.com/archives/2009/06/how_important_i_2#:...

(What do those bumps correspond to?)

baxtr•2w ago
Yes you have missed something. I wrote per capita.
gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
That's tough. I did miss that. Cross my heart and hope 1 child policy will payoff as well as WWII
bjourne•2w ago
Take a look at a plot of China's gdp per year since 1980. A curve can only get so exponential.
baxtr•2w ago
Japan was leveled to the ground by 1945.

What’s the excuse for not having the same GDP per capita 80 years later?

The curve became exponential way too late. And only after they (partially) opened up.

energy123•2w ago
They went from 100% communism to 90% capitalism, then had exponential growth, and we are supposed to believe the growth was because of the residual 10% communism.
baxtr•2w ago
Exactly.
direwolf20•2w ago
When comparing a growth rate between 90/10 and 100/0 the difference is apparently explained by the 10
baxtr•2w ago
It’s 100/0 and 10/90.
direwolf20•2w ago
America is 100/0 and China is 90/10. One of them is doing much better, and the difference is apparently explained by the 10.
baxtr•2w ago
If you are of the opinion that the people in China are living a better life we can stop the conversation. In that case we don't have any common ground for a fruitful discussion.
bjourne•2w ago
Japan was an industrialized country even before WWII, China was not. Moreover, both Japan and China used protectionism to nurture domestic industries.
viking123•2w ago
If they had allowed the western tech companies, these tech companies could easily control the information atmosphere and incite riots for instance.
somenameforme•2w ago
This is what Japan's GDP/capita [1] looks like. I assume you're around my age because we grew up in a time when Japan was set to become the next economic super-power, and it looked like it might even surpass the US. But sometime around 1995, their economy peaked and they've been in pretty bad shape since then. Their current GDP/capita is about 25% lower (and falling) than it was in 1995. They work as a great argument against people who insist to just always buy the dip. What goes down does not always come back up.

By contrast this [2] is China's GDP/capita which is something really close to a vertical line. But for all the talk about economic systems, I think it's just because of good leadership and a motivated population. There's plenty of capitalist countries that aren't going anywhere, and there's endless examples of hybrid/social economic systems that have also gone nowhere. So I think there have to be explanations outside of the economic system itself.

[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

[2] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

energy123•2w ago
Neoclassical economics is quite clear that targeted protectionism is desirable under certain exceptions.

As for China, they would be more wealthy without the meddling of their government. There's no reason they couldn't be like Taiwan, but bigger. The Chinese people got to where they are in spite of their anchor.

pydry•2w ago
I remember half of the neoclassical economics focused articles about China from the late 90s and early 00s predicting that by not following ricardian comparative advantage China was shooting itself in the foot.

They kept predicting collapse, too.

Nobody talks much about the ricardian theory of static comparative advantage today. China's rise kind of invalidated it.

America was taken by surprise by its rise because of this. The cordial relations and trade flipped almost overnight to hostility once it was realized that China's economic power now rivaled that of that of the US and was poised to grow even more.

energy123•2w ago
How do you know those economists were wrong? It's easy to conflate China's size with China's success. They liberalized their economy a great deal since the 1980s, which is responsible for the success they have had. That doesn't mean they couldn't be even more successful with further liberalization. Like a larger Taiwan.
imtringued•2w ago
Not really. In neoclassical economics protectionism is only justified as a necessary evil and it is always a form of militarism (spending money to weaken or defend against your enemy), rather than building yourself up.
somenameforme•2w ago
Median wage in Taiwan is something like $14k, less than many urban areas in China, though obviously higher than the very rural areas in China. [1] It's a Reddit link, but it's using first party government data. I'm linking to it since just linking to a site in Chinese would not be very informative for most.

Huge GDP/capita in certain places is because of outsized industries that don't really translate to the average person. Ireland is another example where it's nearly twice as 'rich' as the US by that same metric, but it's just a nuance of it being an international hub for tax avoidance, not because the Irish are doing especially well.

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/1jmhhk1/realistic_s...

Symbiote•2w ago
> Iran has a surprisingly robust domestic ecosystem of hyperscalers [1]

This is already repeated by the Google Search AI summary, which is unfortunate since your reference (from 2012) doesn't seem to back it up.

alephnerd•2w ago
Much of this capacity only started getting built out after 2012. Heck, Arvaan Cloud was only founded in 2015 and operated under the radar hidden from the sanctions regime until 2020.
culi•2w ago
That first link you shared is fascinating. This group also published this incredible report on an AI-enabled influence operation aimed at toppling Iran

https://citizenlab.ca/research/2025-10-ai-enabled-io-aimed-a...

ifwinterco•2w ago
This is the issue for any US/western regime change operation in Iran (whatever one may think of its moral merits or lack thereof).

Iran is not Syria, there's a lot of wily people in the leadership and they won't be rolled over so easily

viking123•2w ago
Yeah, wonder why Trump doesn't threaten North Korea? Because they actually have achieved all this, internal internet completely sealed, nuclear weapons and developing ballistic missiles to reach the USA.

So actually.. getting the nukes was the right play for them because eventually they would get sold out by China or Russia. Having nukes gets you to shake hands and send love letters to Trump. Frankly Trump sees Europeans as total cucks and has more respect for Kim Jong-un

If Iran actually had nukes, the Israeli lead bullying would immediately halt.

pjc50•2w ago
Everyone seems to have forgotten the independent French nuclear deterrent.

I should probably put an outside bet on the next country to get the Bomb being Poland, maybe by 2050. They've only just started building a civilian reactor, but weapons would make strategic sense for them.

viking123•2w ago
I remember back when Poland was joining NATO, they basically said that we want in NATO or we will build our own nuke.

Not sure if Trump understands that he is playing quite a dangerous game in terms of nuclear proliferation because if the US deterrent goes away, the small countries will start thinking about it.

galangalalgol•2w ago
Good analysis out there indicating sweden could beat Poland there. Finland and Germany also on the likely list. Then in the east Japan and sk. The npt is dead. The French government being completely gridlocked with a nonzero chance to go authoritarian itself, along with the us stepping away guarantee this.
triceratops•2w ago
> Good analysis out there indicating sweden could beat Poland there

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_progra...

ben_w•2w ago
I would say the next country is likely much sooner than 2050, because 24 years is longer than the timelines for China, for India and Pakistan given when they became independent even assuming they started on that immediately, I think for Israel but it's hard to be sure given the secrecy, South Africa arguably but IIRC they didn't complete it, and obviously the USSR, USA, France, and the UK.
ifwinterco•2w ago
Yep at the end of the day, this is 1940s/50s technology. It's complicated but not that complicated
gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
Very tangentially (For those prone to normie-sniping :)

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/19/in-iran-the-us-...

alephnerd•2w ago
Similarly tangentially related - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/iranian-offic...
gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
What?! that's literal sniping
alephnerd•2w ago
This conversation and thread is about the Iranian NIN. If you want to talk about Gaza, you can post that to HN and start the discussion there.

It is irrelevant with regards to conversations about the Iranian NIN and is essentially a form of whataboutism.

gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
That article I linked was about Tehran, first photo is of Tehran, though it might look like Gaza
hshdhdhj4444•2w ago
Jeffrey Sachs in other places has admitted Trump cannot think in terms of strategy so ascribing any strategy to whatever the U.S. has been doing in Iran is a categorical mistake and the entire article appears to be a case of p-hacking to try and fit the facts to the authors’ pre-determined narrative.
gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
True but remember J D Vance, just to pick a convenient example, probably has a stronger finger on the pulse
baxtr•2w ago
> Had authorities withdrawn IPv4 routes, as they did with IPv6, Iran would have become completely unreachable, as Egypt was in January 2011. By keeping IPv4 routes in circulation, Iranian authorities can selectively grant full internet access to specific users while denying it to the broader population.

As of late, we’ve seen a few measures like the restoration of transit from Rostelecom and the return of routes originated by IPM, as the country appears to be moving towards a partial restoration. At the time of this writing, the plan appears to be to operate the Iranian internet as a whitelisted network indefinitely.

I’d call that digital apartheid.

alephnerd•2w ago
That's pretty much their plan - to create an Internet-e-Paak or "Pure" Internet. This all started back during the Green Revolution.
gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
Very tangentially (For those prone to normie-sniping :)

Picture of Tehran (hybrid warfare)

https://archive.ph/2026.01.21-041206/https://www.aljazeera.c...

trhway•2w ago
The Rostelecom mentioning isn't just an accident - in Russia they have been practicing whitelisting more and more by turning the Internet off, except for whitelisted sites, under the guise of safety measures during drone attacks (which is like almost every day/night), various high level visits, mass public events, etc.
gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
RIC exchange tech amongst themselves

https://eh4s.eu/publication/sino-russo-iranian-tech-cooperat...

lucasRW•2w ago
"under the guise of safety measures "

>> Like in Europe then. :o)

"It's to protect the children"

breppp•2w ago
Not going to defend the islamic republic with its massacres, but if there is no racial element there is no apartheid, no need to overload a precise term.

This is simply turning down methods of communications to reduce protestors ability to coordinate and enable mass killings

Braxton1980•2w ago
Couldn't they just not kill people in mass?
direwolf20•2w ago
For some reason this is never seen as a viable solution
adzm•2w ago
Hopefully this is something we can agree upon
baxtr•2w ago
I understand what you are saying and I was thinking about it when I wrote my comment.

I still stand by the term. Apartheid literally means "apartness". Even though the segregation in this case is not on a racial basis they still classify their population into two major blocks. Some have full rights, others have none.

dominicrose•2w ago
Apartheid isn't only about race. It can be about genre. It obviously exists in Iran. There's also a long history of Persians vs Arabs, an weaponised islam.
IOT_Apprentice•2w ago
Do you mean Sunni vs Shia? I don’t think that is a reasonable statement by you. Will you also apply that term to Ireland?
dominicrose•2w ago
I don't apply the term to everything I mentioned Arabs because they are the occupying force in Iran. They even brought Iraqis to repress the population. That is today but there's also a long history in Iran/Persian. Ireland also has a complex history but I don't know enough about that.
UltraSane•2w ago
Iran treats Jews as second class citizens and prevents them from all leaving.
IOT_Apprentice•2w ago
I’m sure you have proof of this. Prevents them how? Iranians have been traveling in and out of their country for decades.
UltraSane•2w ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/07/pr...
larodi•2w ago
Perhaps next time brave Persian people will figure a way to do all of it without internet, as it turned the weakest point of the whole effort.
trhway•2w ago
weakest point is fire guns on one side and no guns to speak of on the other side. To understand the scale of Iranian killing - for 23 days of protests up to 20K people killed - that is half of the killing rate in Ukraine war which is a full scale war with a 1000km battle line and more than 1M of soldiers shooting at each other.
jimbohn•2w ago
Just to be clear, I think you meant to say it's half the civilian casualty rate in Ukraine. Aside from guns, it seems like the Iranian government also pulled in foreign mercenaries to shoot on their own citizens, geez.
gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
No worries, we might have full-scale soon https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/21/us-iran-threaten-br...
trhway•2w ago
No, fortunately civilian casualties in Ukraine are significantly less than that (except for Mariupol where 20-50K civilians were killed during 2 months of fighting in 2022). It is the soldiers deaths, 500-1500/day each side.
jimbohn•2w ago
Ah, I see, I misread the part about rate, my bad.
larodi•2w ago
okay I can't wait to see then how this works out in the USA where guns can answer from all directions. Is this you're implying? what is discussed here is lack of internet, not the fact that fcuking regime obnoxiously killed thousands of protesters shooting them in the face like rats. Is this what you came here to read, because it's not all over the internet and quite apparent for everyone?

But, wait, this is Iran ran by the revolutionary guards... What did anyone expect? Was it right to tell this people - help is on the way, when there was none?

Sorry, downvote as much as you like, but I'll reiterate - the brave Persian people will do it better next way, as they now know tis entirely up to them, no help comes. And they are super brave to do what they did, where did you exactly got wrong what I wrote??

Honestly - the weakest point is and will always be communication, once you loose it you fire in the dark. Like many other revolts, this also was heavily dependent on internet coordination, means controlled by the government.

trhway•2w ago
Revolutions have been succeeding long before internet. They did usually have had guns though.
larodi•2w ago
Sure. Revolutions of the past mostly. Some had succeeded with less bloodshed also. But let’s think for a moment / internet is the first thing going down when modern revolts ignite - not only in Persia, but also in India, Africa, Mianmar and others…

So perhaps being able to organise is much more challenging to the status quo than having a pistol in every house. I would also argue 21st century revolutions are perhaps a little different from others before.

I can easily imagine a very massive cyber revolt where communications are brought to a standstill for the ruling elite. But while imaginable is hard to enact in practice and someone else in the comments noted many top Iranian officials had an IT or engineering backgrounds which makes them better prepared and the whole effort much more challenging.

navigate8310•2w ago
> To mitigate the costs of its shutdown, the Iranian government has created an internal national internet and appears to be in the process of building a “whitelisting” system to allow certain individuals and services internet access while blocking the rest. If these measures successfully enable an unpopular Iranian government to remain in power, we can expect to see them replicated elsewhere.

Another emerging country to watch out for is India. Sliding democracy by suppressing any form for free speech in main stream media and overwhelming propaganda on social media that drowns genuine critics is very chilling.

Braxton1980•2w ago
If you want things to change we need to start going after the source of the governments power, the people that vote for them. T
navigate8310•2w ago
Trickling dose of brainrot propaganda and general level of incompetence of the people has made everyone numb. Youths for all care finding love and reels, boomers are content with whatever situation they are in as they consider it an ideal. Almost everyone is not made aware of anything that brings about 2 sides of any story. Empowering and thought provoking debates are frowned upon. The government will try to self-destructive itself, in order to disapprove critics. It is this mentality and situation the present government and bureaucracy amplifies and exploits to the maximum extent. I'm not critical of the present machinery but any successive legislature and judiciary will do the same.
g-unit33•2w ago
Even if 90% of the country marks the box against the regime, they’ll still announce a 90% 'landslide' victory. Voting doesn't matter, when you print your own outcome
Braxton1980•2w ago
What percentage of the Iranian population supports the government? 10%? I doubt that
bakugo•2w ago
Agreed. If we want democracy to prosper, we clearly need to start punishing people who vote incorrectly.
doublesocket•2w ago
I don't think OP was implying punishing voters.
pphysch•2w ago
What is "going after [...] the people who vote" supposed to mean?
Braxton1980•2w ago
Boycotts of businesses, cutting off family and friends, etc

I said "we" as in the people not the government

bakugo•2w ago
> Boycotts of businesses, cutting off family and friends, etc

You'd think that, after the last decade, people would've learned that demonizing and ostracizing your political opposition is not a great way to get them to join your side.

Braxton1980•1w ago
That's exactly what the Republican party did and they now control all three parts of the US government.
Braxton1980•2w ago
So you disagree but you didn't offer up a counter argument or ask me any questions.

Why do you think I'm wrong?

doodlebugging•2w ago
It would be easier if the people who built the tools that will be used for oppression simply disable those tools or turn them on the oppressors.
leosanchez•2w ago
> Sliding democracy by suppressing any form for free speech in main stream media and overwhelming propaganda on social media that drowns genuine critics is very chilling.

Hearing about this and calls about imminent genocide from the last 10 years. India never had free speech. There is plenty of propaganda on the other side too. YouTube is full of anti-govt. propagandists.

ipv6ipv4•2w ago
There has been much prognostication about the internet blackout but it misses the real issue. The internet blackout only works perfectly when there are no media backed journalists on the ground. The absolute absence of any reporting from foreign journalists on the ground anywhere in Iran is striking.

There was even some reporting from Tiananmen Square in 1989, and from Baghdad in 1991.

News media has ceased to be a meaningful investigative endeavor.

andruby•2w ago
It's depressing really. Unfortunately the business model for media companies isn't what it used to be.

These days, I think the business model is selling influence rather than selling subscriptions and generic ads.

dominicrose•2w ago
Immediately when the blackout started an Iranian living abroad told me there will be a massacre. No journalists needed to know that but journalists do bring credibility to a claim. The tiny part of the population that is whitelisted is spreading lies, which doesn't help.
jltsiren•2w ago
There are plenty of Western journalists in Iran, but they are subject to the same internet blackout as everyone else. Embassies can use satellite communications due to diplomatic immunity, while journalists are just average nobodies who face extra scrutiny due to their jobs.
jraby3•2w ago
Why can't they use starlink?
jltsiren•2w ago
Starlink is illegal in Iran. Being a foreign journalist is a huge red flag in totalitarian countries, making it harder to smuggle in illegal devices than for the average citizen or visitor. And because journalists are probably under surveillance by the regime, it's harder for them to obtain Starlink terminals in the country than for the average person.
IOT_Apprentice•2w ago
The government was ignoring Starlink until it was being used by western clandestine agencies & Israel to foment violence and burning down property. People were being paid for each act of violence they committed, by those spy agencies.

The Iranian government then used Chinese tech to block Starlink, shutdown the external internet and the violence stopped.

otterley•2w ago
> People were being paid for each act of violence they committed, by those spy agencies.

Do you have evidence of this? At least in the USA, mobs angry at the government will conduct arson and property destruction without being paid a dime.

ethersteeds•2w ago
TFA mentions one reason: the "recent Iranian law that would equate the use of Starlink with espionage, punishable by death"
pjc50•2w ago
Are there? It seems like an extremely dangerous place to do journalism.
cmclaughlin•2w ago
I would be surprised if there many western journalists left in Iran…

Here is an excellent podcast from a Washington post journalist that was captured and held as a hostage - it’s called 544 days (that’s the amount of time he was jailed there)

https://crooked.com/podcast-series/544-days/

hkalbasi•2w ago
As an Iranian in Iran who is now connected, I have a request: Please tell google make colab available behind the safe browsing IP. Google's safe browsing IP is usually the #1 whitelisted IP in internet blackouts. Having colab on this IP allows tech people to ssh into their servers, and bootstrap connections based on the available protocols at the time.
gsf_emergency_6•2w ago
On the small chance that cloudflare is also whitelisted.., you might want to try a cloudflared tunnel..

Good luck! i hope you will soon be able to call your congressman

https://archive.ph/2026.01.22-082913/https://www.aljazeera.c...

bjourne•2w ago
Doesn't using ssh from colab violate their ToS?
direwolf20•2w ago
If this happened, they would blacklist it.
slumberlust•2w ago
In the absence of a perfect solution, we should do nothing? The entire scenario is a cat and mouse whack-a-mole arms race. I'd support doing something to give the citizens a leg up.
direwolf20•2w ago
You can run a Google Colab proxy on your website. Predictably, they will block your website because preventing access to wrongthink is more important than ensuring access to rightthink.
RandyOrion•2w ago
There is a dedicated thread of record and anti-censorship resources of the Iran Network Shutdown [1]. Hope it helps.

[1] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/561

GaggiX•2w ago
A friend of mine (from Iran) managed to send me a few messages on January 18th via Telegram (Telegram is very popular in Iran) when the situation was though to be resolving and then nothing, blackout again.

And even when the blackout was not present, my friend had to used some complex V2Ray server (in Iran) to another server (in Germany) to connect and it was shared by other people, so if he cannot connect probably 99% of other people in his area cannot also connect outside.

metalman•2w ago
I get a sense that the Irainian government is playing a sophisticted game with there internet shut down and restarts, and are getting highly compitent advice from other countrys.perturb and observe, adjust and repeat. It is also fair to say that the current internal situation in Iran is 95% focused on the economy, and the only difference between there and the US, is that you get shot in the face, a bit less in the US, quantity, not quality.
samejewagain•2w ago
Do you realize how much hatred your country draws to itself by what it says its attempts to fix the world (Iran, Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela, and so many others)?

Many of you are genuinely deceived by such claims, though I can only imagine the depth of ignorance / self deceit required for that.

Others repeat them knowing they are lying, thinking to themselves that the important thing is that they themselves are not living in the midst of civil wars caused by foreign interventions, and that eventually what is robbed from the miserable prople who are living in such hell, will trickle also to ther own pockets.

But the residents of the countries you bomb, either by yourselves or using the hands of others, and even these "others", they do know what is happening..