NetBlocks says Iran blackout enters day 16 as arrests target Starlink users

NetBlocks says Iran blackout enters day 16 as arrests target Starlink users(iranintl.com)

43 points by ukblewis 63 days ago | 18 comments

With internet being practically shut down by the “government” except for a very few individuals connected to the regime, my family in Iran has no means to get the alerts about the areas that are getting or gonna get bombed or have been bombed and maybe able to the non existent shelters.

rationalist 63 days ago | |

Does your family work at military installations?

Is the U.S. (or other) government posting somewhere publicly that they're going to be bombing some military installation in X minutes/hours?

oceanplexian 63 days ago |

Surprised the US hasn’t set up some kind of DTC-via-loitering drone technology to allow stock, unmodified cell phones to bypass the internet restrictions.

With air superiority they could do it indefinitely. It could be backhauled via Starlink, each one acts as a Stingray-style cell tower and you launch a couple of them over every major city. Would be slow for tens of thousands or millions of users, but quite technically possible. The same technology would also be practical for disaster relief anywhere else in the world.

gruez 63 days ago | |

Doesn't GSM require mutual authentication via ki that's stored on the sim card and only known to the operator? Getting stingrays to work is easy mode because all it has to do is relay the traffic while capturing the IMEI/IMSI in the process, but if you want to act as a real cell tower that's much harder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_card#Authentication_key_(K...

echoangle 63 days ago | | |

I don’t know how many people in Iran have devices with eSIM support but with that you could probably do it. You would need internet access once to activate it but after that you could use the mobile network (and also provide a WiFi hotspot to other people to activate the eSIM).

kgwxd 63 days ago | |

What motive would they have to do that?

Sabinus 63 days ago | | |

Giving Iranian civil society the ability to show the world what the government repression is like, and to organise resistance.

thereisnospork 63 days ago |

Someone should dig up the corpse of project Loon to deploy networking balloons over warzonez. Would be perfect for psyops/intel gathering.

woleium 63 days ago | |

i believe they range too tar and too high

alephnerd 63 days ago |

Internet access in Iran was already spotty after the massacres in January [0]

[0] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/internet-shut...

text0404 63 days ago |

Flagged. Can we please not boost obvious astroturfing campaigns? [1]

"According to The Wall Street Journal, "[some] journalists at Iran International have complained that management is pushing a pro-Saudi, anti-Islamic Republic line". WSJ quoted a former correspondent at the TV station commenting that "a systematic and very persistent push" was made during her time there. Azadeh Moaveni of New York University has charged the channel is an arm of Saudi Arabia: "I would not describe Iran International as pro-reform, or organically Iranian in any manner". Historian Lior Sternfeld [he] stated, "Just as Al-Jazeera promotes Qatari interests, so does this channel promote Saudi interests regarding Iran", while noting a softening in Mohammed bin Salman's attitude towards Iran from around 2021. By 2026, in the estimation of the international relations scholar Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Iran International was possibly being backed by Israel." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukblewis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_International#Editorial_i...

throwawayheui57 63 days ago | |

So is this a lie? Is netblocks also lying? Is everyone astroturfing?

text0404 63 days ago | | |

I'm asking for critical thinking skills. This two-sentence "article" is literally just a screenshot of a chart on NetBlocks (which does its own reports, FYI, of which this is not one). Iran International is a Saudi-funded mouthpiece which astroturfs opposition to its enemies. The user who submitted it is not on HN for curious discussion and is solely focused on a pro-Israel, anti-Iran submissions.

HN should not be used as a platform to manufacture consent for war. This is not original, nor is it news, nor does it provide us with any developments. It is a transparent attempt to chip away the credibility of an enemy of Saudi Arabia.

You yourself have questioned sources before [1]. So what's your issue here? Why is it only acceptable for you to point out potential bias?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849715#46850128

> Curious who funds mintpressnews.com

> It’s a blatant translation of Islamic Regime propaganda websites.

> see KhabarOnline, IRIB, etc.