[RiverCrochet]

I wish this article went into more details on what the "National Information Network" is. I would guess it's at least a set of nationally managed DNS servers that will always resolve national IPs even if upstream global DNS is cut off.

Looking at a bigger picture though, honestly I think we're seeing the end of the raw global Internet for the masses. 20 years ago, it seemed impossible, but here we are.

It's simply not going to be possible to meaningfully use the Internet unauthenticated and unapproved in a few years. Costs to reach mass audiences online will increase until only the big players can do it, and it'll be their platforms or nothing. There's going to be no room for anything that those with millions and billions of dollars don't want or can't make money off of in some way.

Overall, this makes me want to reduce the role of the Internet and tech in my life. I don't need the fastest data plan, latest PC, newest phone, or whatever AI trend is hot to use the apps I need for daily life or to line up events and meetings with others that I actually know.

[joecool1029]

> Looking at a bigger picture though, honestly I think we're seeing the end of the raw global Internet for the masses. 20 years ago, it seemed impossible, but here we are.

This is defeatist. You're probably right 'for the masses' but there will always be those networking and collaborating and bypassing whatever restrictions get put in place. I have online contacts in 'firewalled' regimes that use v2ray/shadowsocks or whatever the thing of the now is to get around the restrictions.

There's a ton of cheap tools now that can be used for running local or citywide networks, hams have their own packet radio stuff. There's now all those new LoRa networks that only really popped up in the past few years.

What I'm trying to say is the stuff is there and it's accessible, but it's only going to be a minority of people that use it just as it's a small minority that comments on posts like this (people like us) and even smaller yet again that write content on how to do it and create those tools to begin with. But it has always been this way....

[Ray20]

>there will always be those networking and collaborating and bypassing whatever restrictions get put in place.

I don't think so. It's just a question of the severity of the punishment for violating regulations. A couple of small fines for an unlicensed networking and collaborating - and there will be no one left.

>There's a ton of cheap tools now that can be used for running local or citywide networks, hams have their own packet radio stuff.

The issue has never been in the technical plane. The equipment for building and operating networks has become dozens of times more accessible over the past couple of decades. The problem is in the increasing number of regulations that purposefully lock all clients into a few select controlled service providers. They have a goal and they have the tools to achieve it, so it's only a matter of time before they reach the minority of network-enthusiasts.

[dvdkon]

> It's just a question of the severity of the punishment for violating regulations. A couple of small fines for an unlicensed networking and collaborating - and there will be no one left.

I don't think you give people enough credit. There have been dissidents in totalitarian regimes the world over, even when the punishment was death or being sent to a labour camp.

You might think that unlicenced networking isn't important enough, but I think many people would see it as the start of China-like censorship. Especially now that we've had decades of a mostly-free Internet, I don't think people will react kindly to politicians taking it away.

[LadyCailin]

I dunno, the reaction to the anti-porn laws in Texas haven’t gotten too much pushback, as far as I’m aware. Sure, keeping kids off porn is good, but do you trust the Christian nationalist government of Texas to only define porn as the thing that needs logged identification?

[dmbche]

I think it's trivial for people to circumvent this ID, no? So no need to pushback. Kind of like everyone going 120 on the highway

[nickthegreek]

how is it trivial to circumvent?

[Ray20]

> I don't think you give people enough credit. There have been dissidents in totalitarian regimes the world over, even when the punishment was death or being sent to a labour camp.

You probably know very little about totalitarian regimes? The thing is that they usually have a rather weak legal system, governed by the principles of lawlessness. This creates strong incentives for dissident activity:

- You won't be caught, because the police are interested in breaking their own laws, and not in finding criminals - If you are caught, there is a chance to buy your way out, because the police are more interested in receiving bribes than in jailing a dissident who has violated something unclear - Even if you are completely law-abiding, you can still be detained as a dissident, because they urgently need to catch a dissident today - You can't be completely law-abiding citizen, no one can, laws doesn't supposed to be workable. And if you break a bunch of laws just because you breathe, it's easy enough for you to break just another one - And even if you obey all the laws you can, what awaits you? A miserable, half-starved life that can be cut short at any moment for any reason - You don't receive social stigma and disapproval, because the majority of society clearly does not approve of the persecution of dissidents

The point is that severe punishments, including the death penalty, are used under totalitarianism precisely because of impotence in the fight against dissidents.

But we are talking about completely different regimes. Regimes with laws that work. Regimes with extremely efficient bureaucracy. Regimes where people have very much to lose and where they clearly know what they need to do to avoid losing it. And regimes with a system of totalitarian surveillance of all citizens. People won't need to be executed. Just a small fine EVERY time - and very quickly there will be no one left.

> but I think many people would see it as the start of China-like censorship.

The start has already begun, and as I see it, China is a children's party with tea and custard cakes compared to what awaits us.

[dvdkon]

I based my comment mainly on my knowledge of communist Czechoslovakia and other East Bloc countries. There the country was hardly lawless and the state was pretty efficient in its efforts to find and punish dissidents. Laws were being bent and corruption was high, but I'd never heard of anyone bribing their way out of dissent charges. There were plenty of people who were relatively well-off and/or were willing to snitch to rise in the ranks.

Totalitarian regimes don't need to be failed states. These countries had functioning rule of law and bureaucracy before WW2, and this apparatus was fully used by the new totalitarian governments. So I think they're the closest model that we have for how our ("western") societies might work after sharing undesirable information is made an offence.

[cess11]

The impact of that minority might still be decent.

Pirate radio isn't new, and hardware has gotten both cheaper and more sophisticated since kids drove around in cars with haywire FM transmitters.

[ZoomZoomZoom]

> What I'm trying to say is the stuff is there and it's accessible, but it's only going to be a minority of people that use it

Exactly. This is why the tech has to be made resistant to surveillance and censorship by default. Until usage of alternative connectivity and circumvention methods sticks out as a sore thumb (turns out, for most tools it does), it applies a constant pressure on anyone under oppression to stop, increasing the risks for those who continue to use them.

[coderatlarge]

it seems to me that a nation determined to control wired network traffic within its borders cannot be circumvented. if they can control the ISPs and observe packet flows then they can just obstruct any connection they cannot conclusively prove is acceptable.

it seems then that store-and-forward ad hoc p2p (ie extremely high unpredictable latency) is the only option for those who can reach some node with a connection to the outside (maybe laser near the border). or perhaps really clever steganography with outside partners assisting.

[baby_souffle]

> it seems to me that a nation determined to control wired network traffic within its borders cannot be circumvented.

Starlink/Kuiper and the geostationary satellites are an alternative. Not perfect... but far better than *nothing*

[bigfatkitten]

None of the major mobile satellite networks work without the terminal’s position being known.

[coderatlarge]

i believe the base stations for those can be triangulated leading to knocks on the for for unsanctioned traffic.

[ashoeafoot]

There is also the travelling salesman hauling in external culture like games and movies via SSD. Wish there was a protocoll to deaddrop large file requests smuggled into a country.

[coderatlarge]

yes massive store-and-forward :)

[robertlagrant]

> Starlink

Only when (if) Stalink removes the need for base stations and just sends the traffic directly between satellites.

[ACCount36]

It already does that. That's how Starlink works over the ocean.

[coderatlarge]

does that mean the authorities can’t locate someone transmitting or receiving to/from starlink? in many places the consequences of detection could be dire…

[robertlagrant]

Oh, cool. I haven't kept up to date. That's amazing.

[mschuster91]

> hams have their own packet radio stuff

We got basically three different things. First we got APRS, mostly used for position reports (go on aprs.fi for a map). That is pretty nice but unusable for anything more than a SMS worth of things, and you need repeaters and not just internet gateway collectors to actually have something that's resilient.

Next thing is AX25, the technical foundation behind APRS. Yes you can use it to create actual data links, but it's about modem speeds so virtually useless outside of toying around.

And finally there is HamNet but it's line of sight based and not cross routed to the internet, and identically to all things ham radio, encryption is banned by law.

And on top of that, you can expect regulatory agencies to crack down on ham radio fast and hard, should it be used for political dissency motives at scale. It's already against ham practice to talk politics, especially with people in repressive countries - we don't want more countries other than Yemen and North Korea to just blanket ban ham radio.

[kortilla]

> but it's about modem speeds so virtually useless outside of toying around.

I don’t understand this sentiment. For exchanging information, modem speeds were great. Wikipedia, forums like this one, instant messengers, etc all worked fine

[mschuster91]

> Wikipedia, forums like this one, instant messengers, etc all worked fine

The problem is, websites got wasteful. You're not going to get any modern website - including Wikipedia - to load in anything close to usable waiting times over a modem speed constraints. HN and maybe Old Reddit are an exception but HN is a niche forum and Old Reddit is probably going to get dumped once Reddit manages to port over all features that were only exclusive to Old Reddit for like six years or so. IRC is all but gone, in no small part "thanks" to Freenode going down the drain and Slack/Discord/Teams eating its lunch.

[icedchai]

Also, keep in mind that APRS is generally 1200 baud (though I did see some mention of 9600 now.) This is way worse than anything most people experienced during the dialup Internet days.

[mschuster91]

I was talking about AX.25, that allows for higher bandwidth than its subset APRS or POCSAG. But yeah, not that much, 9.600 baud is all you're gonna get on UHF/VHF, if you stick with HF it's 300 baud...

[icedchai]

If we go back to 1990's tech (example: BBSes, IRC, gopher, HTTP sites with little to no javascript), possibly fine. Today I see static web sites built with heavyweight JS frameworks that load multiple megabytes. You'll be waiting for minutes.

[swores]

Am I right to assume that it's easy to locate the source of ham radio signals?

i.e. if there's a blanket ban, can you use your radio hidden in your house or can the government easily find out that the user they've noticed on the airwaves is located there and knock down your door?

[mschuster91]

> can the government easily find out that the user they've noticed on the airwaves is located there and knock down your door?

Sadly, yes. A bunch of SDRs spread over the whole country with precise clocks or a scheme like the one used in ADS-B MLAT reception (that's based on using the internal SDR clocks without requiring precise clocks on the host) is enough to use multilateration to hone in on any kind of signal, even looking up in raw signals in the past.

If I were to guess, I'd assume that even in nominal democracies the secret agencies are already running such monitoring stations so it's probably already the case that, should need be, all communications can be triangulated.

The HF bands are all small enough to be sampled whole with a single cheap RTL-SDR each, a KiwiSDR can sample literally all of them at the same time, only the VHF/UHF bands need more dedicated equipment (e.g. a BladeRF) - all of that is inside the range that hobbyists can easily afford.

[swores]

Thanks!

[Tangurena2]

Very easy.

"Huff Duff" is WW2 technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_direction_findi...

The units used for detecting and locating clandestine transmitters started WW2 as large truck mounted facilities to hand carried units (with antennas) that fit inside suitcase-sized containers.

Modern ham groups engage in transmitter hunting as part of organized events. Bunny hunting and fox hunting are alternate names for such activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter_hunting

How to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN-c5DQFuhI

Governments use much large automated facilities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circularly_disposed_antenna_ar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FRD-10

[swores]

Thanks!

[ridgeguy]

It's very easy, has been for a long time. See the story of Israeli Eli Cohen, an operative in Syria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Cohen

[swores]

Thanks!

[rs186]

Live in China/Iran for a few years and see if you would still post this same comment.

[MangoToupe]

I don't think personal reprisal because you posted something critical is generally the most scalable or realistic concern. It seems far easier to just let citizens know that if they're disruptive, you don't have protections; for everyone else, who knows if others can even see what you post?

The current american administration clearly wants to stamp down on disruption, too. If they can't deport us I think they'd be fine with prison or working us to death. Future administrations won't be so dumb to think this is just related to criticizing Israel, either, but anything.... disruptive.

[Aurornis]

> Looking at a bigger picture though, honestly I think we're seeing the end of the raw global Internet for the masses. 20 years ago, it seemed impossible, but here we are.

I feel like I’ve been hearing this for decades. During the initial wave of Napster-era piracy debates a lot of people assumed the end of the free internet was near because corporations wouldn’t allow it.

> It's simply not going to be possible to meaningfully use the Internet unauthenticated and unapproved in a few years.

I will take the opposite of that bet any day. Certain countries like Iran will impose their restrictions, but if you think the average country is going to restrict internet access in only a couple of years I don’t know what to say.

[walrus01]

> I wish this article went into more details on what the "National Information Network" is.

It's AS12880, the state owned telecom company which all ISPs are obligated to be downstream of. It operates Iran's international links to other global scale ISPs via Turkey and other paths.

https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/12880

https://bgp.he.net/AS12880

And its also government run counterpart, the "TIC"

https://bgp.he.net/AS49666#_asinfo

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=AS12880+i...

[hexomancer]

I wrote a blog post which hopefully clears up the "National Network": https://ahrm.github.io/jekyll/update/2025/06/20/iran-interne...

It is way more than just DNS.

[alephnerd]

Is Google's AI Mode working? That might solve the problem you mentioned.

[hexomancer]

Well, the internet is not national anymore (for now!), but isn't Google AI Mode US only? Anyway, the only google service that did work at that time was google search as far as I know nothing else worked (no gmail, maps, etc.).

[alephnerd]

Ah - I didn't realize Google AI Mode is US Only!

> the only google service that did work at that time was google search as far as I know nothing else worked (no gmail, maps, etc.)

Yea, sounds like they resorted to a hard whitelist. How were other Internet services impacted in Iran? My understanding is payment is increasingly tap-to-pay or via digital wallets within Iran? How was that impacted during the shutdown?

[hexomancer]

Well, Iran is sanctioned as fuck, so no global payment system works in Iran anyway. All the payment systems used by Iranians are local so they work even in national internet.

[alephnerd]

Yep! What I meant was during the recent conflict, was the domestic payment system working? How brittle or robust was it during that, especially given that my understanding is that Iran has transitioned to a cashless society?

[immibis]

The current global Internet is an anomaly in space and time, and it's held together by spit, prayers, and the hope the reliability gains from multiple redundant paths outweigh the reliability losses from so many distinct actors being involved. It would be quite easy for any major government to cause major problems in global connectivity. So far, they mostly seem content to only cut themselves off, and the ones with the power to mess up the global net don't seem to want to. But the NSA was diverting a whole lot of intra-Europe traffic via the USA at one time so they could snoop it.

[alephnerd]

> more details on what the "National Information Network" is

Some sources [0][1]

> I would guess it's at least a set of nationally managed DNS servers that will always resolve national IPs even if upstream global DNS is cut off.

Yep. Along with an entire ecosystem of domestically created and regulated search engines, DPI, centrally managed certs, AV, networking backbone, etc.

It's similar in intention to the Great Firewall in China, except much more restrictive.

Imagine corporate IT restrictions and posture being deployed nationwide on all endpoints, that's how these kind of initiatives tend to architected.

SSE/Zero Trust, DPI, Cert Mgmt, etc are all dual-use, and it's essentially a logistics and organization problem.

[0] - https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1107324.pdf

[1] - https://www.article19.org/data/files/medialibrary/38316/The-...

[Spooky23]

Probably a good thing.

End of the day, what happened to Slashdot 20 years ago happened to society - an endless stream of trolls and jerks ruined everything.

[basilgohar]

This is just pendulum swinging between centralized and distributed. This is true for "online services", the Internet, computing (mainframes, PCs,cloud, mobile, etc.). If it swings one way, it'll swing back eventually. Just look for the innovations that make one option viable compared to others.

[one-note]

The only way to have global uncensored sharing of information is shortwave radio. Always has been, always will be.

[znano]

Yeah, also a good source of getting information from the world in full internet shutdowns.

[voidUpdate]

Couldn't someone just jam an active shortwave band?

[one-note]

Sure. You play cat and mouse with SNR. Not trivial, but easier than the same with cut cables.

[LocalH]

Triangulation exists to locate such stations

[one-note]

Did I say untraceable?

You’ll be found on the internet too btw. But far more easily.

[mensetmanusman]

Maybe, or Starlink and software destabilize the authoritarians.

[znano]

Yes, they will, im saying it with such certainty because of how much they're scared of it. It shows when they criminalize it and call it "spyware".

But no matter what they do there will be light at the end. it cannot always be night.

[ogurechny]

Even 20 years ago the so-called “geeks” were reacting to those news with “We can fix that!”, and indeed were making the tools. They were often primitive, but modern ones are based on those developments and collected knowledge.

Today's crowd is full of lickspittles who are constantly searching for someone or something to kneel before. Money, power, or at least flavour-of-the-month fame. A lot of work was put into spreading those ideals, and not teaching anything “outdated”, “dissenting” or “controversial”.

So you're not just waving the white flag even before anyone intimidates you personally, you're actively working for that cause, willingly or unwillingly.

Something tells me that you were not using 56 bit encryption when posting. In a different world, you would, and lament how pathetic and insecure it is to let someone calling themselves “government” have access to everything, but how understandable it is in presence of communists, terrorists, degenerates who have rejected the democratic values and thus stopped being humans, etc.

Dystopias and the dystopian outlook actually helps any kind of high profile swindler a lot. People treat them as the portrayal of “how the world really works”, and expect it to be normal when someone does it, or just hints at such option to scare the public, while they were intended to portray how stupid people can be if they cease to think. Please choose some higher standards.

[znano]

I have to do more research on NIN, it's hard to know what they're exactly doing.