[naryJane]

I appreciate the final paragraphs which suggest a solid method for those inside the country and under this oppressive regime to remain connected without surveillance. I wonder how many are up to this, and what active resistance or movements inside the country look like these days.

[joecool1029]

Synapse sucks to run and it doesn't minimize metadata collection. It's not a great choice unless you're running it outside the country where they can't seize the server (but then you have all the problems of not being able to access it when the country is cut off from the rest of the world). It's a pig on resources which means it has to be run on hardware that can handle it, barely runs on SBC's.

Other stuff is weird in their post and suggests they are speaking for Iranians without actually knowing any online. I know a few from the Cellmapper community and SMS is very much not expensive. 1000 SMS costs around 0.03USD worst case: https://irancell.ir/en/p/3771/tariffs-and-voice-packages-en

Finally it's not really that Starlink uses proprietary encryption that's special. They can use any sort of common encryption standard and there's not much Iran can do but locate and seize the terminal since they don't have the keys to it. I imagine at some point they were start looking for signal emissions in known Starlink bands and use that to locate terminals. Allegedly Russia has a detection system 'Kalinka' already built: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/tech/russia-and-chin...

[znano]

It's better than SMS, isn't it? In these situations perfection is not viable.

[justusthane]

Does it, though? It doesn’t mention whether or not hosting your own encrypted messaging platform is illegal, what the repercussions are, or how to hide that you are doing so.

I found the whole article to be unfortunately light on both technical details and practical details, and certainly wouldn’t suggest that anyone use it as a guide.

[Vulturus]

I was wondering myself, if it isn't very dangerous to host those kinds of services in an opressive state such as Iran? Hosting a site on Iranian IPs certainly sounds easy to track and I'm sure a Starlink receiver also makes substential RF noise. Anyone has any information about how likely is the Iranian government is to shut down such a site/service? Also, doesn't encrypted traffic in general (like Matrix servers) fall into this category?

[immibis]

> whether or not hosting your own encrypted messaging platform is illegal

Matrix isn't meaningfully encrypted, so it's mostly irrelevant, hooray!

[Cthulhu_]

> I wonder how many are up to this, and what active resistance or movements inside the country look like these days.

Hard to find that out, as I can imagine outlets like HN are actively monitored as well - if an Iranian account would be like "hello I am in the resistance movement", they'd be painting a target on themselves.

But the US is heading this way too if I may put on my conspiracy thinking hat; "we" already knew, but the Snowden leaks confirmed that the NSA and co are inside all of the major internet companies, probably including Starlink.

When the shit hits the fan, it is us techy internet peoples' responsibility to ensure information continues to flow freely, be it through access to information (like these local portable wifi network devices that have a small internet full of knowledge like Wikipedia pages), communication (the Matrix servers mentioned in the article), and communication to the outside world.

On that note, what would be the next option if for example the US cut itself off of the global internet and Starlink? Ham radio / whispernet? I mean I'm pretty confident that at the moment there's just too much freedom still for an internet shutdown to be viable, but having the knowledge is important nevertheless.

ok conspiracy hat off. Disclaimer, I don't live in the US, but my grandparents did live through WW2, during which people had secret radios because the Nazis confiscated all of them to try and keep people uninformed. The radios were essential for the resistance movements, with public BBC broadcasts containing secret messages informing the reistance of e.g. sabotage supply drops. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance for a good starting point, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_during_World_War_II for the rest of Europe.