The Mullah's like the Soviets before them will find that once they lose the ability to block the truth their expiration date is only a matter of time.
The Soviets were brought down by the humble FAX machine. When the United Auto Workers reached out to Lech Walesa of the Solidarity union and said what is your biggest problem he reportedly answered secure communication. So the union sent him hundreds of FAX machines and that is how Solidarity was able to coordinate their protests and share information.
What these guys in California are doing with their satellite channel and accompanying software is important. Now they need to enable the former leaders of the green revolution with a mesh network in each city in Iran. The answer once again could come out of Detroit where they're the world's leaders. All they would need is the funding, doubt it will come from the Feds but maybe from the UAW once again?
That's wishful thinking. I can't say much about the Soviets, but the regime in Iran, or at least a chunk of the people in power, understands how to balance their power and freedom (critically the "freedom to get rich", despite, and often because of massive corruption) and the perception and hope of freedom in the wider society and they adapt well to new circumstances. They are much more sophisticated than you portray them to be in your comment. If they weren't as good in adapting, they would have been gone many times by now.
Source: personal [unfortunate] experience of having been born and lived there for a the first couple decades of my life.
P.S. Also note that a lot of (and I'd say the majority of young) even non-technical people know how to circumvent internet censorship and are regularly on Facebook and social media, so it's not exactly a social revolution happening just today. In fact, I see this type of system without direct user choice of the content, just another form of centralized, controlled, media, which is a step down from normal internet over some sort of proxy/VPN (albeit slow). (I don't want to detract from the technical contribution; just putting it in perspective of the existing available techniques in wide use over there.)
> The Soviets were brought down by the humble FAX machine.
Assuming your description is accurate, this is still only sort of true.
The Soviets were such a disaster that their downfall was greatly overdetermined. Without fax machines, they would have been brought down by something else.
"Old age" used to be an official cause of death. There was a period when we started doing autopsies on people who had died of old age, and discovered (keep in mind this was new information at the time!) that in every single case, those people had died of some malfunction that would have killed anyone else, old or not.
But, after a spree of autopsying people with the goal of preventing death, we figured out that there were basically no implications to this. What happens when you're old is that everything is failing all the time. Remove a 20-year-old's ruptured appendix and they'll probably go on for several more decades; if you fix a similarly severe problem in an 80-year-old, they're unlikely to get one more decade, because a completely different problem will kill them shortly afterwards.
Anyone interested in the UAW/FAX story might also like to read about George Soros and his efforts to aid samizat production in the eastern bloc by providing xerox machines
> And Yahsat’s satellite hovers over the Middle East, making it harder for the Iranian government to jam the satellite’s signal as it’s broadcast directly down to Iranian dishes.
Are some angles harder to block than others? Or do they just mean that satellites are hard to block in general?
Satellite dishes have, by their very nature, a narrow "beam width" of reception. That's so that they can pick up the weak signals coming from satellites (which, having limited sources of power out in space, can't produce as strong a signal as terrestrial broadcasts), and it's why they have to be carefully pointed in order to receive that signal.
In order to jam a signal and prevent someone from receiving it, you have to overpower it by aiming a signal of your own on the same frequency at their antenna. Since satellite dishes have such narrow reception beams, though, that means in order to jam them you need to get your signal out in front of the dish, so you can aim it directly in. If the dishes are pointed to the side, at a satellite near the horizon, that's not so hard to do. You just need to get your jamming transmitter up on a tower in the way and Bob's your uncle.
If those dishes are pointed straight up, on the other hand... well, there's not much you can do without a capable space program. Iran is not exactly known for their extensive space program. :)
If you aim at a satellite very low over the horizon it would be easier to do disturb your reception with a terrestrial transmitter on the horizon line(?)
It's always possible to saturate a satellite transponder by illegally uplinking to it. The Iranian government paid the Cuban government to do this a few years ago. I think they were jamming BBC content.
More likely run by people in the Gulf who hate Iran (i.e. Saudi), or even a single somewhat-rich Iranian who is angry at what has happened to his country.
(Not because CIA shouldn't fund something like this, but because they're too dumb/slow/bureaucratic to, and if they were doing it, it would cost way more than $100k)
The problem is that American defense contractors don't get a slice of this pie, while exporting arms for whatever reasons = $$$. There is also the political pressure from some such leading luminaries as John "I can't feel my feet!" McCain to throw weapons at every problem.
I agree though, this is pretty clever. It's not quite the RoK building a giant bank of speakers on the DPRK border, but it's probably more effective.
>>There is also the political pressure from some such leading luminaries as John "I can't feel my feet!" McCain to throw weapons at every problem.
omg, it took me a while to decode that bunch of words, super power-packed words indeed. Hilarious and witty.
Thanks for making that comment. It captures the sentiment of some section of US which is very much eager to use weapons no matter whether it makes much sense or not.
This is similar to Outernet/Lantern (https://outernet.is/), though Toosheh has the neat feature of being able to reuse existing satellite receivers, which is obviously very useful here. They also seem to have a much larger bandwidth budget (1GB per hour with Toosheh vs 1GB per day with Outernet).
This is a great idea, could we move the top 100 viewed internet videos of they day into a daily satellite packet and take the pressure of the pipes, nice :)
You'd think they could come up with a more efficient way of broadcasting content than just rebroadcasting the same content over and over again hourly.
A more interesting approach would be to use a data carousel with erasure codes. That way you could tune in anytime and be done once you've collected enough blocks to reassemble the wanted files. You could even vary the allocated bitrate for each file, starting with a higher bitrate to get early birds fast access and then lowering the bitrate as more and more people already completed their download, but still allowing stragglers to catch up.
Since this is just a curated collection of content, it has very little to do with the Internet, unlike the title suggests. At the very least they should add some level of interactivity, so that users could vote on content to be sent and/or submit content for broadcasting like other similar satellite data casting systems already in use.
And what would be the channel for that feedback? Surely any such system would risk detection of the user, particularly for a non-technical user who may make a mistake in the (needed) security/privacy software/access needed for such a back channel?
As for a more complex data transmission scheme, do all satellite receivers support it?
Don't let great be the enemy of good. Create a tor website, and provide a text file with the link in all downlinks. If people don't know how to use tor or can't access the site, that's fine, but if they can access it, they get additional features.
Provide a simple feedback form or voting system. It doesn't have to be perfect, these downloads are already hand assembled by someone each day. You aren't obligated to use all suggestions, or even the most popular, but use it as a feedback mechanism to inform your choices.
> And what would be the channel for that feedback? Surely any such system would risk detection of the user, particularly for a non-technical user who may make a mistake in the (needed) security/privacy software/access needed for such a back channel?
How about using that nifty Tor browser they keep rebroadcasting to access a hidden service website to vote and issue requests? Hidden services cannot by definition be accessed without Tor and are thus more secure from prying eyes, even when used by non-technical users.
> As for a more complex data transmission scheme, do all satellite receivers support it?
The satellite receivers just store the transport stream. The data is extracted by parsing the transport stream with a Windows program. You can implement whatever scheme you like with software.
You are welcome. Just do it in a secure way and don't store any information. Make submitting and voting completely anonymous. Don't require logins and don't log anything to protect your users. Use plain HTML and don't use JavaScript.
Even if the above makes the voting easy to rig, it's more important to ensure anonymity than perfectly accurate voting results. And even with biased voting data you can figure out what the users are interested in. If nothing else it will help you cull content, as lack of interest is also a good indicator.
> a video game that includes lessons on Iranian constitutional rights
It's been noted regarding the Soviet satellites that only a tyrannical government needs to shoot to keep people in; one might likewise argue that only a tyranny tries to stop its people from learning their rights under that government's constitution.
Before we get too full of ourselves, we might consider what a public school makes of teaching the First, Second, Ninth and Tenth Amendments …
Years ago I was using http://www.skygrabber.com and similar apps to get free internet. I remember I got OpenOffice, JDK, .NET SDK and terabytes of random data while I had no internet access whatsoever.
Skygrabber works with DVB cards and are used to receive from satellite data streams. Toosheh works with the existing TV satellite receivers. The data is not sent through the TV channel stream instead of the conventional data streams.
I didn't bother to check but if it's like SkyGrabber it works that way:
Internet via satellite is just like a big local network, when you request data it get sent in space unencrypted, you only have to read it...
So you basically download what other people are downloading without any way to control what to download except with filters that filter text, css, jpg, small files... since this is most of what people get (browsing the net...).
The data is encrypted that's actually how satellite internet works unless you have the resources of a nation state your packets will be mingled with everyone else's the receiver on your end reads all the packets but can only decrypt the ones intended for you.
The uplink varies in the past the uplink usually used to go over dial-up/ISDN or even slow speed DSL but today terrestrial transmitters are quite common in most modern Satnet installations.
The data files are encoded and embedded within the TV video stream. This method is different from using data satellite channels which require using a DVB card. With Toosheh, users can use their TV receivers to receive the content. The decoding to data files is done using the Toosheh software.
> low and expensive—a gigabyte of data costs around $1 in a country where many people make only hundreds of dollars a month.
"Hundreds" is ambiguous, let's conservatively say it's $200. So half a percent of your income went to a plan with 1GB of data. Here in Holland the average (gross) wages was €3073 in 2012 (most recent numbers I can find), and in 2012 €50/month for a plan with 1GB internet was pretty normal. So the Dutch are playing 3-4 times as much of their relative income for data, excluding the fact that they probably pay higher taxes and that 'hundreds' probably means more than $200.
Respectfully, but there were no bandwidth caps in the Netherlands in 2012 [1]. Furthermore, € 50 is an exessive amount of money to be paying for only internet, even in 2012. Perhaps you have mobile internet in mind?
It wasn't stated explicitly in the article but the assumption was that the user will receive 30GB of content by downloading everyday. That makes it $30 a month which is roughly 5%-10% of the average household income. This is mostly useful to show that browsing content on Internet is still a relatively expensive activity for a lot of people around the world.
Didn't look at your numbers closely but I agree that prices for cellular internet are very, very high in Europe. I moved to Germany 2 years ago and I currently pay 37 euros or so for 2GB (horrendously slow, on Edge most of the time). Contrast this with when I go back home (Morocco). I pay 10 euros for 12 Gbs of extremely available access (and many hours of calls for few euros more). I rarely finish it even when on Apple Music for hours a day.
I honestly do not know which plans you refer to. Remember that I mentioned 10GB is worth 10 euros in some other countries (actually less, since I pay 100 Moroccan dirhams, which is less than 10 euros, and yes, it is blazingly fast, I stream Football matches through it). Can you think of any plans even remotely comparable in Germany? I'd switch in a second if there is one; I do not pay for my device and my contract is month-by-month.
I'm not using any ad blocker! I'm not letting you run scripts in my browser. Why do you need to run scripts to show a static magazine article, with ads or not?
You aren't getting my dollar, but you would have gotten some impressions ($$$) and I would have read the article if you didn't act like a retard with your website.
Yeah felt the same thing. Turned off the adblocker, still won't load because it wants to load a ton of privacy invading scripts to track everything about you. Yeah it's fine, your article might be interesting, but it's not that interesting. Get a Google cached version if I really want to read it.
If you're not running scripts then you are effectively blocking ads even if that wasn't your intent. So your impressions were not generating any direct revenue and were likely not even being measured by analytics and counted as a page view.
Sure but that rules out most kinds of ads. Even contracting directly with clients to show their ads, the client is often going to want to run the ads through a third party server so they can easily track all the different campaign they're running and check that the publisher is providing as many impressions as promised.
I think basically you'd end up with a lot of sponsored content and "Brought to you by..." type sponsorships interwoven in the site so they cannot easily be blocked.
I'm using NoScript with GNU IceCat and I don't see any message. I also use SpyBlock (which IceCat comes with) and Privacy Badger; I tried disabling both of the latter two, and still didn't receive the message.
The script detecting adblockers can't fire if you have scripts turned off :)
They could just have the overlay default-on and use a script to remove it, or stick it in a noscript tag, but that's another order of dickishness I've never seen outside of local newspapers, who sometimes put a meta redirect in their noscript tags for this precise purpose...
Government has no control over receivers since those are already banned and people buy them from underground market. Selling, buying or installing receivers are all illegal and punishable. Having said that, majority of Iranians are watching satellite TVs.
We are talking about millions of dishes. This is where law ridicules itself and impossible to enforce. There are some police raids once a while, but not effective.
But not useful for their original purpose (in this case, suppressing satellite TV usage). Just useful as general leverage against targeted people, which the Iranian government is not short of anyway.
The actual purpose is not to supress satellite TV usage but to keep the population in sufficient fear of powers-that-be. You can do many things, just don't stick your head out.
The article says "Satellite TV, however, has become common in even small villages, with as many as 70 percent of Iranian households owning a satellite dish."
Satellite dishes are not illegal because satellite TV is not illegal. (Edit1: I am wrong.)
Satellite dishes are illegal in Iran or at least were up until 1996. I lived in Iran during the 90s and I recall my uncle's dish was confiscated and he had to pay a hefty fine. But you don't have to take my word for it. There is all kinds of evidence to support that: http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iranian-police...
Ah... my mistake for assuming that. (I edited my post.)
Regardless, my focus was not on the legality of dishes, but the amount of people who have them.
With 40-70 percent of households owning a satellite dish, even after being illegal for over 20 years, it seems unlikely that Toosheh is more "dangerous" than the limited internet that Iran already has.
I vaguely recall that you hide dishes on top of roofs in places that are not easily observable, for instance a big water tank on top of a building with an open top can have a dish mounted on the inside.
Well I don't mean an American-led "freedom" revolution. I mean the people need to rise up against the mullahs and do to them what they did to the regime before them.
They tried that recently. Sadly it ended with many students in prison :(
Unfortunately Iran is going to have to go through a slow revolution. Where the elders die off and the young take power. In some ways this is better than a Big Bang revolution like we want - it lets them gradually establish the system they want. Even if it's not the system we wish they had.
The Soviets were brought down by the humble FAX machine. When the United Auto Workers reached out to Lech Walesa of the Solidarity union and said what is your biggest problem he reportedly answered secure communication. So the union sent him hundreds of FAX machines and that is how Solidarity was able to coordinate their protests and share information.
What these guys in California are doing with their satellite channel and accompanying software is important. Now they need to enable the former leaders of the green revolution with a mesh network in each city in Iran. The answer once again could come out of Detroit where they're the world's leaders. All they would need is the funding, doubt it will come from the Feds but maybe from the UAW once again?
https://www.alliedmedia.org/dctp/digitalstewards