Not too surprising, given that Starlink operates in Iran without a permit, "space pirate radio" style, and has something of a habit of making the access free when major protests happen and the government imposes a network blackout. Iranian government and Starlink have no love for each other, clearly.
It's a pattern by now: whenever a government wants to do something awful, it shuts down internet access - so that no one can hear it, see it or coordinate a response. And Starlink becomes a lifeline that the regime would rather people didn't have.
This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place. If you give a government a capability to restrict access to whatever it wants and enact a network blackout whenever it wants, it's a matter of time until it gets abused.
They "operate" in Iran because of OFAC issues general licenses under the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR Part 560) permitting non-commercial personal communications, including satellite internet for free expression. Starlink activation in 2022 protests and recent events exploited these, as Musk sought formal exemptions for "internet freedom."
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
Starlink isn't perfect, but at least it doesn't go for "it's so not our problem, we'll just make sure that every single VPN exit point Iranians use is GeoIP'd as Iran in our systems" like Google tends to, or "let's lick every authoritarian boot, we control the app distribution and our users will suck it up" like Apple does.
Not even Starlink has the balls to oppose the likes of Russia and China directly - they aren't operating there without a permit, sadly. But at least they don't kneel before every two-bit dictatorship and cave to every single "we want you to do censorship on our behalf" demand. Way better than what most tech companies do now.
I'm unfortunately inclined to not look at their actions so favourably. They operate solely in jurisdictions where the US state supports open destabilization, and dont where the political ramifications would be too high for the US. Makes them little more than an extension of the US imperialist structure.
And this makes sense for an organization thats so highly reliant on federal support, vs Apple and Google who only have to just stay somewhat in the states good graces.
As a private platform, SpaceX did try to draw a line with where their service could be used in Ukraine, but we're talking about Iranian protestors now, a different matter I think. If they were offering a firewall as a service, then what you're saying would be more true.
Apple and Google have done more than just stay in good graces of governments by getting rid of apps governments don't like, they haven't enforced their terms against X, and given tens of millions to Trump's ballroom.
Under packetloss my assumption is text is king, but I wonder if forward error correcting audio and video is actually better in some ways?
Media is information rich. Maybe we're beyond a samzdat moment and the value in comms is contextual immediacy of live feeds, text can squeeze alongside.
Long ago, broadcast quality TV was shipped as slow feed. Maybe a tiktok generation goes back there: use a phone on the street (probably surreptitiously) do post production and upload asynchronously on 30% packetloss or worse for redistribution.
You are acting like people dont upload videos anymore.
The people filming protests in iran are probably not in range of their home starlink connected wifi. They are almost certainly filming stuff offline then uploading it later, not livestreaming.
In my experience 80% packet loss makes most common protocols basically unusable. Yes you can still get data out...but many apps will just fail due to timeouts and other things.
I imagine the people with illegal starlink terminals are fairly tech savy and can use custom protocols. Living in Iran they probably already have a lot of experience with vpns and lower level protocols to evade censorship.
Matrix published a proof of concept a few years ago of an alternative transport layer designed to work over connections with a few hundred bits per second, and massive packet loss, while still providing E2EE:
Without knowing that much about this area, i think https://mosh.org/ is a traditional choice if you need encrypted communication in a high packet loss environment.
Wow this sucks! however if i were iranian brass i would do it too. IT/OT and IoT is not safe full stop. Pull the plug. It wouldnt be pretty over here either, also china already got us good (Volt Typhoon, OPM hack, why bother to list 30 or 40 more?)
Which governments are referred to as "regimes" is usually propaganda about how you should feel about them. Consider: all articles written about US using the words "The US regime".
I don't think I've ever read an article using the term "US regime," as that usually refers to an undemocratic or authoritarian government. You might want to clean up your information diet if you're reading lots of articles over the years with that term...
Yes it is a value judgement, but Iran's government is nothing if not oppressive and authoritarian. Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
> Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
I tend to believe the US is already past that point. It's just people are not really realizing that yet. Might take the next election for them to realize. That will be to late however.
I hope so much that this is wrong and the US turns out to be more resilient than it looks like from the outside though.
Regime refers to who holds power in a nation. It encompasses power holders in both formal and informal institutions which span beyond just the government. The major distinction is democratic versus autocratic regimes, with regime on its own referring specifically to the autocratic version. There are plenty of autocratic regimes which we (assuming everyone on the internet is American or at least from the West) are friendly with, like Jordan's.
> How likely is it that those "protestors" are US and Israel propped
It's almost sure that both US and Israel are meddling with the current situation. That doesn't mean the situation isn't also started by and wanted by the population.
For a comparison point in the past, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the US were grass-roots movements started by local people with legitimate claims. At the same time, opponents of the US like USSR were involved in stirring these movements, because of course they would.
There isn't much you can infer about the legitimacy of a movement by learning that the movement is helped by foreign intelligence agencies.
The best way you can avoid this kind of confusion is 1) make a society in which malicious actors don't have many latent issues to stir, and 2) make it so your country's intelligence agencies aren't malicious actors. There isn't much else to do.
Iran has a water crisis, and allegedly the economic situation is so bad that people are starting to wonder if it will soon affect their ability to buy food.
Even the Romans knew that if you wanted to stay in power you had to provide bread and circuses.
Very, but at the same time the Iranian leadership have been a really shitty government and ran the country into the gutter. People have genuine grievances.
The only way to believe this is if you're a Westerner being fed a purely US-centric media diet. Otherwise you'd know all the ways that the Iranian government has been failing their people recently and for a long time now, and how unhappy Iranians are with their government. You people act like people can't be upset at how they're being treated by their own government without being incited by an external actor. That's honestly quite the dehumanising and insulting way of looking at it.
Also, if the US wanted to do a regime change, they'd just move in militarily a la Venezuela and Trump would be talking about it non-stop. He's not the subtle type, I promise. We'd already know if they were involved.
I don't see any tweets about how the protesters are working for the US. Like, Trump would literally say how involved they are right now, and he isn't doing it. He's a child who's incapable of being subtle or not talking about how great his "accomplishments" are. Your link doesn't show anything relevant.
Starlink is primarily a military technology that is used both on a battlefield and to coordinate USA-backed "protests". Why, for instance, it just become free in Venezuela? Every country needs to be able to to defend itself from Starlink.
No, only US-backed puppets that US uses against Russia. For example, Russia has very good relations with Belorussia where the government wasn't lured into this role and did not let US to overthrow it.
Insane only for americans who refuse to accept the fact that their country, with some of their "allies", is the primary cause of wars and instability in today's world.
And who refuse to understand that providing means of communication to people of country X to organize military actions against the army and police of country X, is a military agression against country X.
It's a pattern by now: whenever a government wants to do something awful, it shuts down internet access - so that no one can hear it, see it or coordinate a response. And Starlink becomes a lifeline that the regime would rather people didn't have.
This is why all of those "national great firewalls" shouldn't exist in the first place. If you give a government a capability to restrict access to whatever it wants and enact a network blackout whenever it wants, it's a matter of time until it gets abused.
And no Tesla factories in Iran I suppose helps too :)
Not even Starlink has the balls to oppose the likes of Russia and China directly - they aren't operating there without a permit, sadly. But at least they don't kneel before every two-bit dictatorship and cave to every single "we want you to do censorship on our behalf" demand. Way better than what most tech companies do now.
And this makes sense for an organization thats so highly reliant on federal support, vs Apple and Google who only have to just stay somewhat in the states good graces.
Apple and Google have done more than just stay in good graces of governments by getting rid of apps governments don't like, they haven't enforced their terms against X, and given tens of millions to Trump's ballroom.
Media is information rich. Maybe we're beyond a samzdat moment and the value in comms is contextual immediacy of live feeds, text can squeeze alongside.
Long ago, broadcast quality TV was shipped as slow feed. Maybe a tiktok generation goes back there: use a phone on the street (probably surreptitiously) do post production and upload asynchronously on 30% packetloss or worse for redistribution.
The people filming protests in iran are probably not in range of their home starlink connected wifi. They are almost certainly filming stuff offline then uploading it later, not livestreaming.
I'm sure the Iranian regime would live to jam starlink, but i don't think we have any ability to know what is actually happening here.
The article claims 80% packetloss. That's still 1 in 5 packets getting through. That is annoying but not going to stop information getting out.
I also wonder, if all other coms are cut off, is it possible star link in the country is just overloaded?
https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/12/breaking-the-100bps-barri...
[Of course you could say the same thing about TCP i suppose depending on which congestion control algorithm is in use]
Yes it is a value judgement, but Iran's government is nothing if not oppressive and authoritarian. Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.
I tend to believe the US is already past that point. It's just people are not really realizing that yet. Might take the next election for them to realize. That will be to late however.
I hope so much that this is wrong and the US turns out to be more resilient than it looks like from the outside though.
Isn't this "son of the late Shah" a guy from the US?
It's almost sure that both US and Israel are meddling with the current situation. That doesn't mean the situation isn't also started by and wanted by the population.
For a comparison point in the past, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the US were grass-roots movements started by local people with legitimate claims. At the same time, opponents of the US like USSR were involved in stirring these movements, because of course they would.
There isn't much you can infer about the legitimacy of a movement by learning that the movement is helped by foreign intelligence agencies.
The best way you can avoid this kind of confusion is 1) make a society in which malicious actors don't have many latent issues to stir, and 2) make it so your country's intelligence agencies aren't malicious actors. There isn't much else to do.
Even the Romans knew that if you wanted to stay in power you had to provide bread and circuses.
Also, if the US wanted to do a regime change, they'd just move in militarily a la Venezuela and Trump would be talking about it non-stop. He's not the subtle type, I promise. We'd already know if they were involved.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2026-01-10/ty-artic...
Way worse outcomes.