I live in Iran and I am lucky enough to have a connected link right now, but this is the last link among the others I lost in the previous hours. I was wondering is there any stable solution like satellite internet or something without direct affiliation with government for people like me, desperate enough to ask questions like this.
It is based on Arabic script, but it has quite a few differences. There are a couple of extra consonants (گ چ پ ژ), some letters are different (ک vs ك), (ی vs ي), etc. Some letters simply do not exist in Persian (ڤ). There are quite a few differences between the two.
Fun fact: during the era of Windows 9x, Windows did not have good (any?) support for Persian, but it supported Arabic. Since Iran is not a signatory to any international copyright treaties, that was not a problem. A company in Iran called Borna Rayaneh essentially patched Windows 95 and later 98 to make it work with Persian. Their patched Windows version was ubiquitous in Iran. It would take a couple of years and Windows versions until Windows' default installation was good enough for everyday use.
Unfortunately Borna made some engineering decisions in making their version whose result has been a mess whose effects could still be felt almost a quarter century later.
In order to make things work for Persian, they took the Arabic version and tweaked it just enough to make it usable. One of the things they did was taking an Arabic font, removing glyphs that Persian did not have, and replacing them with glyphs it did. Remember, this was the pre-Unicode days. This was the easiest way to make it work, as opposed to creating a new encoding system. Their fonts (called series B, because their names all started with B) are still widely used today, and they are far from ideal.
For example, you open a document that has all ک encoded as ك. But the font shows it as ك, so you don't know anything is wrong. You search for a word with ک and it doesn't find any matches. And if you are a non-technical person, you get the impression that search doesn't work and start looking through the 582-page document manually to find the word you are looking for.
Normalizing Arabic and Persian code points (to the best of my knowledge by manual replacement of one with the other, not built-in standard library functions, because they are actually different and the only reason they are sometimes mixed up is historical decisions) is a must if you want to implement any sort of search in a website or an app.
> Since Iran is not a signatory to any international copyright treaties
Getting off from a tangent, how does that work? Your copyrights are ignored on any other country? Or do your people do something to get some kind of "international copyrights"?
I imagine it does not make much difference for patents, is that right?
> Your copyrights are ignored on any other country?
Essentially yes. If a work is produced outside of Iran, it does not have any copyright protection in Iran, vice versa.
As an example, since Harry Potter was quite popular in Iran, multiple (at least six IIRC) publishers translated it to Persian for the Iranian market. One publisher could not take another one's translated version and re-print it—the translated version was produced in Iran and enjoyed copyright protection in Iran. But the original English version was fair game for anyone.
Just in case it is not quite clear what Borna Rayaneh did to fonts to add Persian support: they essentially took Arabic fonts and wingdinged them until they looked Persian.
Also the sentence saying "But the font shows it as ك" should read "But the font shows it as ک".
Arabic has both, but they're pronounced differently from Farsi. (ي) is a (y) sound (like seed) whereas (ی) is either an (a) sound (like bat) or an (ay) sound (like may).
Not really. Arabic has U+0649 (Arabic Letter Alef Maksura), while Farsi has U+06CC (Arabic Letter Farsi Yeh). They look similar, even identical depending on the font, as long as they are standalone. When they are in a word though, it gets more complicated.
The important difference between U+0649 and U+06CC is how they look when they are connected to other letters. The former is always dotless. The latter is only dotless when it is not connected to another letter from the left. Here is an example:
U+0649 (Arabic): ى لى ىد لىد
U+06CC (Farsi): ی لی ید لید
It's kinda similar to how Turkish I's are not the same as English I's. English capital vs small form is different from the Turkish one, so different code points is necessary:
English: I i
Turkish (dotless): I ı
Turkish (dotted): İ i
Because Turkish uses separete letters for capital and small letters, only the different forms have their own codepoints. Because in Farsi and Arabic different forms of letters are implemented as ligatures, you need a different codepoint for each of them. You cannot reuse standalone U+0649 for U+06CC.
So to recap, Turkish has dotted İ and dotless I and they always retain their dot status. English has one I that will be written with or without a dot depending on how it is placed in the sentence.
Arabic has dotted ي and dotless ى and they always retain their dot status. Farsi has one ی that will be written with or without dots depending on how it is placed in the word.
Makes sense. Historically, all Arabic letters were dotless as you probably know. I wonder if this made it into Farsi script somehow, for this case at least.
The writing system is based on Arabic (with several extra letters, and several retained from Arabic used only in loanwords), but Persian is a completely different language.
People from Iran are from many different ethnicities, including Arabs [0]; although Arabs are one of the smaller ethnic minorities of Iran. Only about 60% of Iranians are Persian [1].
The preferred term for the language is “Persian”. The word for the language in the language (Like “English” in English or “español” in Spanish) is Farsi.
Ahamd from NetFreedom Pioneers, developers of Toosheh, here:
Toosheh is a satellite filecasting service. We transcode any digital data into a .TS/MPEG4 format and broadcast it over our satellite channel on YahSat over Iran and the Middle East.
Viewers of the Toosheh channel can record the broadcasting video and use Toosheh extractor on their android phone or PC to extract the transmitted content out of the recorded video. It's free, secure, untraceable, and most importantly the ONLY way to send digital files in case of total Internet Shutdown.
Toosheh is sending over 5Gigabytes of data over 2 hours.
Toosheh extractor software could also be used to browse a package of blocked websites that are blocked in Iran i.e. BBC, Radio Farda, etc..
Using Toosheh application people can locally share the content with others over WiFi.
If you think you could organize people quickly enough, maybe a meshnet? Or if you can get your hands on a few high-powered radios, you can transfer bits through them, though slowly, and you'd require cooperation from others (or just use them to talk with other people, but that's probably not what you're looking for).
Considering IRGC counter intelligence is likely constantly monitoring for radio signals it’s probably not a good idea to do so.
A mesh radio network could easily look like a cell of foreign tasked assets spying on the country especially if any of the peers would be near strategic POI’s.
In a western country you might pay a fine after clearing up a misunderstanding even if does get you pulled out of your bed in the middle of the night. In Iran on the other hand your fate will likely be quite different...
In the thread Toosheh is mentioned, a satellite filecasting service that operates in the middle east. It can be received with a regular TV satellite dish.
This is an interesting notion and one I never thought about before - there is nothing preventing another state from beaming internet down to citizens of Iran (or any other nation that shuts down internet but lacks technology to shoot down a satellite...
If Elon Musk was to put satellites over Iran, what kind of ground infrastructure would be required for someone to connect? Can it be a radio that fits in ones pocket but can easily be connected via USB or some other ubiquitous interface? The goal here is to have something so easy to hide and transport that the government can maybe find it from 50% of the population at best.
Protests are about the increase in the price of petrol, a multi-faceted situation. Just one aspect is the money to be made from smuggling fuel:
"According to foreign-based economist Mehrdad Seyed Asgari in an article on Radio Farda's Persian website, the price of one liter of gasoline in Iran is currently about 8 cents while the price in the destination of smuggled fuel in Turkey, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Pakistanis, Iraq, Afghanistan and Armenia is at least 1.23 US dollar. This means that every liter of smuggled fuel brings in a profit of more than a dollar.
The astonishingly low gasoline price in Iran is because the government subsidizes more than 90 percent of the cost; just the opposite of what many other countries do when they heavily tax fuels to reduce consumption.
The devaluation of the Iranian currency in the past one year has made gasoline at least three times cheaper in dollars. That has made smuggling even a more profitable venture."
Another aspect is that the subsidised price of fuel benefits the upper-middle class:
"Another problem is that this subsidy comes out of the country’s wealth but mainly benefits those who have a car and can afford to drive a lot. The richest 10 percent of the Iranian population benefits from the subsidy 11 times more than the poorest ten percent.
In 2016, 43 percent of Iranian families had gasoline fuelled cars. The other 53 percent do not own a car, so they do not benefit from the gasoline subsidy. The shocking reality is that the richest urban families own at least one car while only one percent of the poorest rural families have a vehicle."
If the aim of the price increase is to redistribute wealth, who is doing the protesting? (Facetiously, I suggest that it might be privileged youth who go cruising the streets at night.)
The protests are too widespread to be classified as just a 'rich-people's thing'. The regime would not have bothered to suspend the internet if they were so limited. I guess the poor may pay less, but they can afford the hurt less too.
In Chile, protesters have a slogan: “This protest is not about 30 pesos, but 30 years”. I think this is the case here. The Iranian economy never did very well, and limiting one of the few things the regime gave to the people was bound to lead to a reaction. That said, these types of protests usually produce little political effect.
"With the sexes segregated at school and boys and girls discouraged from socialising together, trying to get to know members of the opposite sex is a huge preoccupation for Iranian teenagers. They hang around shopping malls, in cafes and parks, parade up and down boulevards and spend lots of time cruising around in cars."[0]
I once saw a TV doc on life in Iran. The night-time cruising reminded me a lot of the film "American Graffiti". I imagine Iranian youth would not be happy with any increase in the price of fuel.
I take your point though that widespread protests signal more than just the discontent of youth.
Increasing the fuel prices will affect everyone, though maybe differently. Transportation costs will increase significantly since labor in developing countries is cheap. This means consumers product prices will also increase.
Another angle: This might the tipping point of the inflation crisis Iran is going through. The increase in oil prices might not be significant for the average person, but it might be what pushed people over the edge.
This type of event should make us all concerned, not just because of the oppression people of Iran are being subjected to, but also because the exact same thing is happening in many places in the world, eg China, but even more importantly, because it could very easily happen to so-called "free" societies.
The problem is that internet is not as decentralized as everyone seems to think.
To wit: sites seized by the FBI have a very hard time getting back up, but that's far from the only example.
A really "free" internet needs two things:
1) a decentralized, blockchain-based DNS. This is actually not hard technically, but it is hard to deploy when the incumbent DNS system is ingrained everywhere like a cancer.
2) a routing infrastructure where every participant offers global routes (a mesh network). This is technically harder, especially in less densely populated area (unless we build a secondary, tor-like internet on top of the existing one).
The day this type of infrastructure (every user a router) comes alive, censorship will get much, much harder.
At this point there are enough wifi tethering capable mobile phones all over the world to run a mostly decentralized internet.
Also Lightning network is capable of sending messages, but the infrastructure is just being built. Without micropayments the incentive structures wouldn't be there to build the decentralized internet (which of course means mostly centralized in practice, but increased fees instead of disrupted network in case of government action).
At the same time Lightning Network needs people to adopt Bitcoin, in which the adoption is about 10M people all over the world, which is in the 0.1% order. At about 2x / year growth, it will take about 6-10 years until it gets practical.
LN nodes need to be active all the time or you lose your money, right? I doubt anyone in these types of countries would risk there - either losing their money or keep a detectable node active all the time.
Furthermore, if they're not gifted coins, they'd have to convert from $LOCALCURRENCY to Bitcoin (at the very least for bootstrapping), and I don't see how that conversion could be made secretly given the control these governments have.
Even if phones could be used as relays, or directly link to satellites, the government could always make the technology illegal on its territory.
Right now, couldn't a rogue Iranian ASN already allows internet access for a few selected people? (Who knows, maybe they even have undeclared optical fibers which go beyond frontiers)
Some protesters may have a privileged access, but they don't talk about it to keep it up.
Decentralization or not, a government can always ban a technology or a subset of it
One thing I wonder about in events like these: what is the larger priority of government in following through with these actions, stemming the free flow of information or mitigating/limiting the citizens' ability to resist and organize? I tend to think it's more the latter but both elements probably play a role. I must say that I appreciate the people who run Tor relays that help these people in autocratic/theocratic nations access information, despite the risks associated with being the 'exit node' for nefarious requests.
It's not about Iran, but there was an interesting article / analysis called "How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression" - you may guess from the title how it answers your question.
Apparently they want to use the additional revenue to help needy families.
> "Many people in oil-producing Iran see cheap gasoline as a national right and price hike sparked worries about a further squeeze on living costs, despite assurances from the Iranian authorities that the revenue raised would be used to help needy families."
>Apparently they want to use the additional revenue to help needy families.
>despite assurances from the Iranian authorities that the revenue raised would be used to help needy families.
I don't see how those two statements are connected at all. Smart people don't even trust statements coming from American politicians, and Iran is a second-world country.
> I don't see how those two statements are connected at all. Smart people don't even trust statements coming from American politicians, and Iran is a second-world country.
It's not like every country that used to be under the USSR's umbrella has untrustworthy politicians. There tends to be more than average, yes, but that's true for the US as well.
Actually, does that include Iran? I think you might mean they're a third-world country.
I wouldn't trust a government that shuts down Internet access in response to protests to do the right thing and help needy families who don't have a voice.
If they do end up helping needy families, it will be at best to secure support for the regime but that's like a best case scenario imo.
If they are increasing prices, I suspect they are violating the embargo and selling oil to other countries.
Iran is by far the most stable and wealthy country among its neighbors, which makes our ability to enforce sanctions on them pretty ineffective. Sure, we can mostly stem the flow of high tech from America and Europe from going in to Iran, but do you think anyone in the 7 countries that border Iran gives a fuck about enforcing US sanctions?
> Iran is by far the most stable and wealthy country among its neighbors, which makes our ability to enforce sanctions on them pretty ineffective
That's entirely false. US sanctions have crushed the Iranian economy, sending inflation skyrocketing and including slashing its oil exports by 85-90%.
Iranian oil exports have gone from 2.7m barrels per day in April 2018 to an optimistic couple hundred thousand now. Reuters reported this Summer that oil exports collapsed to as low as 100,000 barrels per day. So you're saying the US doesn't have an ability to enforce sanctions?
Here's a visual example of it in action (their production figures):
The US can immediately crush Iran's most important economic segment via sanctions.
In October the IMF forecast that Iran's economy would contract by 9.5% for 2019, one of the worst economic outcomes in Iran's modern history. The World Bank's figure came to a 8.7% contraction.
The same IMF report says Iran is suffering 35% inflation. The Statistical Center for Iran says it's 47%.
The riots going on in Iran say it's all broadly true.
Iran is also not the most stable or wealthy nation among its neighbors. They're clearly no more wealthy or stable than Saudi Arabia or Turkey (both of which have their own issues). Turkey for example has a real economy not dependent on oil exports and a $10,000 GDP per capita. Iran's GDP per capita is below Iraq at $5,500. Read that again, Iran's economic output per capita is now below Iraq.
Though I don't think it discredits your overall point, as far as I know, the US and Pakistan (which borders Iran) are allies and the US has given tens of billions in aid since 9/11. When you're getting that kind of a money from a foreign country, the tendency seems to be that you keep toeing the line that pleases the hand that feeds.
They had a nice scam going for them though, you have to give them that. Get $$$ to keep "searching for OBL" somewhere in the wilderness, meanwhile they knew exactly where he was.
The only surprise here would be that only 17% of the fuel is smuggled, but there's no way in hell it's that low. Perhaps 17% is smuggled by non-IRGC-connected entities.
As far as I know, Iran has little gas refining capability, so they must purchase gas from abroad. With the continuing effects of the embargo it's tough for the government to subsidize the low gas price with less cash coming in.
The Iranian government forces all ISPs in the country to singlehomed to and be downstream of DCI, the government run ASN. If you don't do this, you don't get an international transit connection, and men with guns come to take your routers and arrest you .
If Iran goes offline, all the connections that would have routed through it now route around it, so the internet is resilient. i.e. it's resilient for all of Iran's neighbors who will be unaffected.
The network was designed to be resilient and continue existing even if the individual nodes are brittle. Iran taking their nodes offline doesn't destroy the entire internet.
That was the point (in the DARPA context of this thread) -- nuke takes out a city, network still functions and routes around it. So signals are still getting from SAC to DC or whatever.
this is where Starlink will help ? That makes me think that some sort of P2P wireless sneaker net can be engineered, something along lines of the wireless app that was used during umbrella protests - FireChat.
When threatened a regime will jam the signal, track transmitters, make them illegal, throw people into torture prisons for posession and/or kill owners. It will make it harder for the regime but a cornered totalitarian will do everything to control this. Maybe they could include a "stealth mode" for passive receiving, but that brings a new bag of problems with it.
I think the solution here is not more tech but killing the despots.
