What are the odds someone makes iranstagram.com lol
Edit: i've just read the article. disheartening series of events. my country philippines has flaws but damn i can still say i'm lucky in a lot of ways.
I think it's not so much about them talking to each other, it's about shutting them off from the outside.
> The last time the Islamic Repubic cut off the Internet in Iran, they brutally massacred 1500 people, just 3 years ago. I beg you please save my people (crying while typing)
Can people in Iran SSH out to other countries? If so the folks familiar with SSH could use something like sshchat or devzat [1] see demo info, not my project This does not persist chat, but that may be a net positive in a surveillance state.
Does anything like Briar/Bridgefy exist for Linux? Something that relays messages/packets through a pure P2P meshnet using any connection available (ethernet, wifi, bluetooth), without any intermediate, special purpose routing hardware?
| As a former WhatsApp engineer, I don't think WhatsApp even has any mechanism to do such a thing. It's probably an unintended artifact of its infrastructure that the Iranian government has exploited, and knowing the WhatsApp team, they are probably already working on a fix.
Possibly. Sanctions law is a hot mess of sometimes contradictory exceptions. In this case, the exceptions regarding "informational materials" may apply.
(As much as I dislike Meta —) applying foreign laws to foreign users isn't "dealing" with the Iranian government. "Dealing" in the legal sense generally requires a two-way exchange. If Iran unidirectionally imposes a regulation, that's not a deal; Meta has made no decision to enter into it.
(Reference/entry point for legal aspects about this: contracts are also invalid if they're purely unidirectional. If I remember correctly there's a LegalEagle YT video about this, but you can probably dig this up elsewhere too.)
Google pulling out of China instead of catering to censorship was a principled move, but fairly obviously did not lead to more freedom of speech in China. It helped kickstart a domestic, government-obedient tech industry.
I don't know what the right move here is. Nobody who thinks there's an obvious right answer is worth listening to.
I would rather American companies not get so comfortable with blatant censorship. While we do still have some degree of censorship (and a whole lot pf privacy violation), it’s still generally seen as a taboo and not as a moral or necessary thing.
Once the social standards change however, the goalpost moves and it becomes harder to maintain the same freedoms we had before.
Should American companies pull out of Germany instead of banning Nazi propaganda? The UK instead of removing court-ordered offensive speech?
I mean, maybe, but since the US has the least-restricted speech of basically any nation, you are de-facto asking for a nationally partitioned internet. That's a big change.
The problem is: if you want to ban Nazi propaganda you have to develop tools to do it. Once you have tools in place you can use it to ban anything you do not like, not just Nazi propaganda.
Precisely. This is what it means for a company to get 'comfortable' with something. It means that given enough demand they have developed the tools necessary to do that aforementioned thing and those tools now can become accessible to any jurisdiction, even those who didn't ask for it.
You also have to develop tools to block spam, child porn, and (in practice on almost all social networks) legal porn that there is nevertheless considerable censorious pressure on.
Or just copyrighted material. Try posting the new Disney movie or streaming the latest UFC fight for free and see what happens. The tools for censorship are there, they just don't count if it's to protect a corporation's assets, for some reason.
I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws.
Meta will not violate American law. As citizens, our most effective tool is our government of the people.
The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms, and not our representatives and laws... it's insane, to the say the least. I'd prefer to elect the people to protect my freedoms, not hope a for-profit advertising company will do so automatically.
It’s also viable to fight for neither capital or state dominance. You have a lot of confidence in the rule of law applying to power and liberal society
You've given platitudes with an overall misunderstanding of both the parent comment as well as a the functioning of the real world.
> I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws.
I would also like a world where problems don't exist, but that doesn't change the real world. It's a naive take. The world is complicated.
> Meta will not violate American law.
This is both demonstrably false and borderline meaningless.
False because they have and will, unless you're suggesting Meta/Facebook has NEVER broken a law. It's just a question of whether they got charged/sued for it.
It's meaningless because laws can be highly interpretable, unenforceable, impractical... and the playing field is constantly changing, so there's always a new opportunity for new types of violations.
That isn't to say laws are meaningless, obviously they are extremely necessary and must be enforced, but the public response to those ambiguous situations is what would help determine the next set of laws/norms.
> The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms...
Parent comment doesn't suggest this. "Corporate culture" has little to do with it. American culture is what would change, has changed, and is changing. When the tooling is developed to carry out efficient, sweeping censorship, it will be used. With more use, we become more comfortable with it and even see it as a necessary evil. Currently there is public outrage when a tech company censors information. How long will this remain interesting enough to draw our attention? TSA in airports after 9/11 is a good example of this.
What an absurd, condescending and pointless reply.
Example:
>> I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws.
>I would also like a world where problems don't exist, but that doesn't change the real world. It's a naive take. The world is complicated.
What in the hell kind of reply is this? How dare you. (On the day that the EU fined Google 4 billion Euros, largest in history, demonstrating laws and governments of people, no less). Your nonsensically dismissive reply is immature and entirely unfit for this community. Take this tripe back to reddit.
Culture in general changes. A company is not an island. Employees move around, tech moves around. Society at large gets comfortable with censorship when its use spreads.
We're all looking for ways to censor spammers or belligerents from internet forums. It could easily start there and spread to other areas.
This includes not wanting to support or do business with people who look the other way as people get slaughtered. I'm not in Iran, I'm dealing solely with things that enter my ken and therefore become subject to my judgement.
I can't go to a museum, admire the bravery of, say, Sophie Scholl, and then go "ah yes, but at the end of the day it's not really anyone's business", and you cannot both have the dignity of a person who accepts the responsibility they have just by virtue of being human and shut yourself off.
At the end of the day, it's just a rationalization for kicking away the ladder. You don't care what happens to them as long as it doesn't happen to you or people you love. That is what it is, and all it is.
People really do think their nations culture should be imposed everywhere.
In reality it doesn't work.
See Americas bitter defeat in Afghanistan. Which is now more Islamic and antiwestern than it's ever been
It's a massive regression from 2002 - 2021, but this is not true. The Taliban has moderated somewhat from 2000 (somewhat), and frankly would be very happy to make tactical deals with the west to help counter ISIS.
FWIW, Google said they pulled out of China for principled reasons but they did it practically for self-preservation.
Google got hacked by inside actors planted in their physical offices by the Chinese government. It's one of the very few times that Gmail's security was compromised. At the time, Google did not have the security countermeasures in place to protect against such an attack so they responded by severing the physical ties so such an attack could not be repeated. Once the BeyondCorp initiative had completed and they had the technology necessary to firewall pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights from other pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights, they reopened business in China because the risk model had changed.
That's the tool they used to get in, then they went sideways from the corporate network and eventually into Gmail. I was on the team that cleaned it up...
Those are two very bold claims: that Google pulled out of China for purely ideological reasons, and that the Chinese tech industry would have otherwise failed if they had stayed. We are dealing with hypotheticals here, so it's not like we can back up our propositions with actual evidence. But both ideas just seem deeply unlikely based on what we know of both Google and Chinese tech.
not sure why this is downvoted. Chinese companies can definitely make their own search engine. And in fact search engines are not so big in china anyway; everything is an app, and questions are answered on Zhihu. Google's time in China was up anyway and they knew it. It was good PR for them to leave with a bang. Does anyone really thing the CCP would allow Google to collect data on every Chinese person as they do in the US? And without data collection ads become much less profitable (see: facebook). This would also set a precedent of barring Google from data collection which would spread elsewhere. Now its just seen as a domestic Chinese thing only.
This highlights the problem of communications metadata still being available to an outside observer or manipulator. A messaging network where source and destination identifiers can't be linked to real-world identifying information, such as phone numbers, would have been resistant to such censorship.
If they can't target some particular group then they just shut down the whole thing. This more highlights the problem of systems with a single point of control.
Multiple providers who federate would still not be enough. With some effort one could block every XMPP server, Jami (or Tor) node out there. You would need something like Briar which does mesh networking via Bluetooth.
With "some effort" you can block anything. Encryption is better than open, federated and encrypted is better than centralized and encrypted, federation over a mesh network is better than just federation.
Iran seems to think Whatsapp & Instagram are destabilizing such that turning them off can help quell domestic unrest.
A couple of takeaways. First, holy shit. Communications software is powerful enough to put fear in the hearts of political rulers! Second, insofar as sanctions are designed as punitive measures against a government who's actions our government doesn't support, it makes no sense to restrict their access to goods and services their government finds disruptive. In fact, we'd probably want to give them extra.
The internet is the digital equivalent of Guthenberg's press in Europe: on one hand, it ended the cultural primacy of the Catholic Church; on the other hand, it opened the door to hundreds of years of violence over who could reclaim that primacy.
Eventually we will find a new equilibrium, but right now we're in choppy waters.
Communication networks are the first thing to disable or compromise in any conflict. Whether it's banning African slaves from having Talking Drums or cracking the Enigma during WWII, it's always a feature.
Interesting contrast to Arab Spring. I wonder if blockage has to do with Iran govt or US Intel agencies. My assumption is that the latter is more influential. If Iran is inducing the blockage, the spies agree for some reason.
I’ve seen many tweets from people in Germany, USA, Turkey etc. that they can’t access their WhatsApp account. Seems to be both Iranian government and Meta.
(I've moved your comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937709 to the merged thread because it's a good comment and I don't want it to get stuck where no one will see it.)
I’m in Turkey currently and my father works in Moscow as an expat, yesterday we were not able to do video calls on Whatsapp and assumed it’s the Russians blocking it because the error message that Whatsapp gave was something like the operator of the person you call doesn’t support video calls. Tried Wi-Fi and mobile internet, the result was the same.
I don't see mention of a CDN in the link or the conversation around it, the closest being "artifact of its infrastructure". Was it the correct link?
I'm not seeing how a CDN exploit would result in Instagram replying with "your post has been removed". That said I'm only inferring how Meta uses its CDNs (e.g storing static user posted video/image assets)
I'm an Iranian living in Italy and have an Italian phone/WhatsApp number. Couldn't call anyone or receive WhatsApp calls to/from Iranian and non-Iranian numbers yesterday afternoon when the internet blocking started in Iran. It was like all numbers somehow in touch with Iranian contacts were blocked from completing calls. As soon as either side of the call would answer, the call would end with a message like you are connected via a network that has blocked WhatsApp or something similar.
How is it possible for two non-Iranians (in a geographic/telecom sense, not ethnic sense) to lose the connection on WhatsApp due to Iranian government? Surely the blocklist isn't implemented inside Facebook, it must be based on cellphone carrier.
Normally the government (in this case Iran) contacts the service provider (in this case FB/Whatsapp)and lets them know that unless they self-block their service, the government will do blocking at the network level and might issue fines.
Normally, that makes the service provider implement blocks on their end, because then at least they can present the user with a sensible error message, and other services that the government isn't trying to block are not impacted (eg. services hosted on the same servers - for example Whatsapp voice calls might be banned, but text chat not banned).
Sure, but if Meta/Facebook/Whatsapp would react to such an order from _Iran_ they'd be in very big trouble _very_ quickly. That's violating US sanctions level stuff.
Ignoring the Iranian government might make them loose some users. Trying to ignore the US government will make some people go to prison. If that's what happens.. someone made a _very_ bad decision
> The app provider should detect the network outage and provide a good UI,
Can the blocking be adequately distinguished from packet loss? If not it seems like it would be embarrassing for the app to declare Government blockage when it's not really the case.
To my knowledge, Iranian government doesn't have power to dictate FB's actions outside Iran. So FB could block by the IPs, but blocking everywhere by the nationality makes no sense (at least by the standards of a normal person).
Github once managed to ban accounts of Iranians, even students in the US. Afaik shortly after that GH went to the US government and convinced them that sanctioning every Iranian even outside Iran was technically and politically dubious, which resulted in the sanctions being relaxed in some way.
There is zero chance that FB/Meta is complicit in this. The occam's razor answer is that the Iranian government has figured out an attack, and a bunch of FB employees are frantically trying to mitigate it instead of reading HN.
I doubt Iran needs to go to the extent of hacking Meta to block a few random users in Italy? They've achieved their main aim of quelling protests by simply blocking at the network level. I'm skeptical about the original bug report.
I have friends here in the US who use WhatsApp and they are originally from Iran. I wonder, if it's been many years since they lived in Iran if they're still considered "Iranian" for the purposes of this blockage?
I noticed this issue last night while trying to call WhatsApp numbers in India from the UK (no Iranian numbers involved). I got the same error message: "Couldn't place call because your device is connected to a Wi-Fi network that prevents WhatsApp calls. Connect to a different network or turn Wi-Fi off." I wonder if that was collateral damage from the Iranian block.
I'm sure repressive governments will make it illegal to use phones that can connect to Starlink. Satellite phones are banned in India, for example. You will be arrested for a lot longer for owning a satellite phone than if you owned a gun illegally.
New iPhones. It's very common to buy secondhand in these markets. The satellite-able ones will need some time to "trickle down" but it's going to happen - especially if it offers this feature.
You do realize that these topics arw differwnt? Also a nice stab at supressed women standing up for their rights in very repressive country, doing so takes a lot of courage. Don't diminish that.
I didn't diminish a thing. If anything, it was a stab at the dumb religion the damned government is basing it on. I lived through communism in Europe and was present during the local revolution, I know very well how much courage is required, I was staring inside the gun of a Russian tank there. And no I don't think these topics are too different - everybody knows unfree people need secure communication first and foremost, it's only your take that the iPhone is merely a fashion accessory, but in practice it's also the most secure phone on the market and now it's getting sattelite comms too.
Tmobile is actually the one that will be partnering with Starlink. Apple is partnering with GlobalStar which actually really sucks (currently) and will have pretty much the worst satellite network for at least a few years. If they really got their shit together and started launching satellites ASAP they could probably improve a lot in a year or two.
Also GlobalStar only covers the continental US and a little farther......
Depending on how strict they are you might be able to smuggle in a Garmin inReach and connect to Iridium now (or an actual Iridium or Inmarsat satellite phone or modem)
Just a reminder that Signal supports both censorship circumvention and independently hosted proxies (e.g. Search Twitter, etc. for proxy links using the #IRanASignalProxy hashtag.)
Iran has blocked Telegram in 2017 and 2018. Presumably they could be doing that as well soon which is why I was highlighting some Signal features to help.
It's blocked but it's still working with MTProxies. VPNs aren't working in Iran (a friend told me) and he's surprised Telegram is the only app that's working fine.
Unfortunately, they won’t be. China has been exporting some really amazing surveillance tools to Iran, NK, Russia that make revolutions basically impossible now.
When was the last successful overthrow of a despot in a middle income country? Euromaiden 2014?
It's not clear that he was "democratically elected"--there were many allegations of election fraud and voter intimidation. Moreover, he wasn't "overthrown", parliament voted to remove him (because he ordered the police to shoot protesters en masse). The courts also convicted him of treason, and he was even disavowed by his own party.
Allegations? I thought one had to provide evidence in order to invalidate election results. It's funny how allegations are enough when it's useful to one's own side, but hard evidence is needed for the rest.
> "Yesterday's vote was an impressive display of democratic elections," said João Soares, the president of the OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly and Special Coordinator for OSCE short- term observers.
It seems election were pretty democratic unless you can provide some evidence to the contrary.
Also, parliament voted his removal without reaching the needed majority, according to Ukraine's own constitution, so the removal itself was unconstitutional.
If that had been a democratically elected regime, Ukraine wouldn't be making the stand it is today vs Russia. Ukraine would have immediately folded under popular domestic pressure to give in to / join up with Russia.
The elections have been internationally recognized as democratic. Please refer to the quote from the head of the OSCE observers mission I just posted in the parent thread.
That's the only thing that counts, not your assumption on how Ukraine would behave, especially 12 years after said elections.
Slight OT: When I was in Monaco recently the Monaco Telecom network prevented me making or receiving WhatsApp calls. I could message, but no calling. Presumably therefore it is something that the network provider can interfere with effectively.
Could it be that WhatsApp has a mechanism for ISP and telcos to block calls to prevent unnecessary competition? Like Apple has one to prevent using Apple's VPN?
It's not hard nor does it require WhatsApp's cooperation. It's fairly easy to figure out something is an (even encrypted) video call (for example by the consistency of throughput of "wanting to upload") and certainly pretty easy to use a simple algorithm to deduce what that traffic looks like.
Hiding video traffic with other traffic is hard since it's easy to assume "long persistent video-like upload with consistent throughput over something like srtp" is video and get a few false positives and no false negatives.
260 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 78.2 ms ] threadinteresting that it works
might as well make it a national holiday for the purge
Edit: i've just read the article. disheartening series of events. my country philippines has flaws but damn i can still say i'm lucky in a lot of ways.
Maybe you live in Iran and just happen to REALLY like cooking Chinese food? And so do ALL your friends :-D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WokFi
> The last time the Islamic Repubic cut off the Internet in Iran, they brutally massacred 1500 people, just 3 years ago. I beg you please save my people (crying while typing)
-- https://twitter.com/AsingleNight/status/1572930406709530624
> We are covered in blood, don't forget us, they want to suffocate us. Please be our voice.
-- https://twitter.com/dokhtr81/status/1572907289774006272
It's heartbreaking, and I for one do not intend to let it go. Enough is enough.
https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1572273975639642114
Bridgefy was never able to find my Android device and vice-versa.
The title is corrected now.
| As a former WhatsApp engineer, I don't think WhatsApp even has any mechanism to do such a thing. It's probably an unintended artifact of its infrastructure that the Iranian government has exploited, and knowing the WhatsApp team, they are probably already working on a fix.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/did-twitter-violate-us-sanctions...
(Reference/entry point for legal aspects about this: contracts are also invalid if they're purely unidirectional. If I remember correctly there's a LegalEagle YT video about this, but you can probably dig this up elsewhere too.)
the social network's censorship is unbelievable.
I don't know what the right move here is. Nobody who thinks there's an obvious right answer is worth listening to.
But if the answer is trite snark that summarizes evil vs obvious good, they haven't done that work, and I won't listen, no.
I would rather American companies not get so comfortable with blatant censorship. While we do still have some degree of censorship (and a whole lot pf privacy violation), it’s still generally seen as a taboo and not as a moral or necessary thing.
Once the social standards change however, the goalpost moves and it becomes harder to maintain the same freedoms we had before.
I mean, maybe, but since the US has the least-restricted speech of basically any nation, you are de-facto asking for a nationally partitioned internet. That's a big change.
That would be a little ironic since it was the US who pushed for such laws in post-war Germany in the first place.
Meta will not violate American law. As citizens, our most effective tool is our government of the people.
The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms, and not our representatives and laws... it's insane, to the say the least. I'd prefer to elect the people to protect my freedoms, not hope a for-profit advertising company will do so automatically.
> I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws.
I would also like a world where problems don't exist, but that doesn't change the real world. It's a naive take. The world is complicated.
> Meta will not violate American law.
This is both demonstrably false and borderline meaningless.
False because they have and will, unless you're suggesting Meta/Facebook has NEVER broken a law. It's just a question of whether they got charged/sued for it.
It's meaningless because laws can be highly interpretable, unenforceable, impractical... and the playing field is constantly changing, so there's always a new opportunity for new types of violations.
That isn't to say laws are meaningless, obviously they are extremely necessary and must be enforced, but the public response to those ambiguous situations is what would help determine the next set of laws/norms.
> The idea that we rely on culture or corporate benevolence to maintain our freedoms...
Parent comment doesn't suggest this. "Corporate culture" has little to do with it. American culture is what would change, has changed, and is changing. When the tooling is developed to carry out efficient, sweeping censorship, it will be used. With more use, we become more comfortable with it and even see it as a necessary evil. Currently there is public outrage when a tech company censors information. How long will this remain interesting enough to draw our attention? TSA in airports after 9/11 is a good example of this.
Example:
>> I would rather the American people elect a government that will protect their rights through laws.
>I would also like a world where problems don't exist, but that doesn't change the real world. It's a naive take. The world is complicated.
What in the hell kind of reply is this? How dare you. (On the day that the EU fined Google 4 billion Euros, largest in history, demonstrating laws and governments of people, no less). Your nonsensically dismissive reply is immature and entirely unfit for this community. Take this tripe back to reddit.
Shame on you for how you behaved here.
All I will say is that in being offended by a rather benign comment, you have yourself committed what you accuse me of.
We're all looking for ways to censor spammers or belligerents from internet forums. It could easily start there and spread to other areas.
We had a breakdown in our consensus mechanism — because the government partnered with corporations to censor rather than allow public debate.
The nation is still bitterly divided.
Or would you like to have Iran or Pakistan or whatever intervening in the domestic issues of the West?
I can't go to a museum, admire the bravery of, say, Sophie Scholl, and then go "ah yes, but at the end of the day it's not really anyone's business", and you cannot both have the dignity of a person who accepts the responsibility they have just by virtue of being human and shut yourself off.
At the end of the day, it's just a rationalization for kicking away the ladder. You don't care what happens to them as long as it doesn't happen to you or people you love. That is what it is, and all it is.
It's a massive regression from 2002 - 2021, but this is not true. The Taliban has moderated somewhat from 2000 (somewhat), and frankly would be very happy to make tactical deals with the west to help counter ISIS.
Google got hacked by inside actors planted in their physical offices by the Chinese government. It's one of the very few times that Gmail's security was compromised. At the time, Google did not have the security countermeasures in place to protect against such an attack so they responded by severing the physical ties so such an attack could not be repeated. Once the BeyondCorp initiative had completed and they had the technology necessary to firewall pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights from other pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights, they reopened business in China because the risk model had changed.
This just isn't true? It was an IE 0-day.
How long do you think US companies could operate in the US if they weren't government-obedient? Or any company in any country for that matter.
It is and always has been the intersection of realpolitik and greed.
https://twitter.com/KianSharifi/status/1572885353551339521?t...
GitHub has: https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...
A couple of takeaways. First, holy shit. Communications software is powerful enough to put fear in the hearts of political rulers! Second, insofar as sanctions are designed as punitive measures against a government who's actions our government doesn't support, it makes no sense to restrict their access to goods and services their government finds disruptive. In fact, we'd probably want to give them extra.
Well, yes, is this a surprise? Did you miss the "Arab Spring?" Or the Rohingya massacres?
It's a double-edged sword. It can give you a revolution whether you need it or not or whether it's justified or not.
Eventually we will find a new equilibrium, but right now we're in choppy waters.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Of course it is. No government wants people to get falseful information from unapproved sources.
Yes. Encryption software can also defeat courts, judges, governments, militaries.
Edit: can be a compromised CDN. See https://twitter.com/roozbehp/status/1572841090910388225?s=46...
Edit 2: Videos are being removed too https://twitter.com/youranonstory/status/1572747450368290816...
Edit 3: from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/protests-internet-disruption-ir/
Voice calls and text worked just fine.
I don't see mention of a CDN in the link or the conversation around it, the closest being "artifact of its infrastructure". Was it the correct link?
I'm not seeing how a CDN exploit would result in Instagram replying with "your post has been removed". That said I'm only inferring how Meta uses its CDNs (e.g storing static user posted video/image assets)
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937782 links to claims that the Iranian government hacked WhatsApp or one of its networking providers.
Normally, that makes the service provider implement blocks on their end, because then at least they can present the user with a sensible error message, and other services that the government isn't trying to block are not impacted (eg. services hosted on the same servers - for example Whatsapp voice calls might be banned, but text chat not banned).
Ignoring the Iranian government might make them loose some users. Trying to ignore the US government will make some people go to prison. If that's what happens.. someone made a _very_ bad decision
The government is blocking at network level anyway.
The app provider should detect the network outage and provide a good UI, not proactively block users who aren't using the affected network at all.
Can the blocking be adequately distinguished from packet loss? If not it seems like it would be embarrassing for the app to declare Government blockage when it's not really the case.
How could any network-level block by Iran prevent a user in the UK from calling a user in India?
I mean, we are discussing hair here, so it is a (bitter) laugh to imagine that they are going to let citizens have access to an unfettered network ...
From the same site: Iran smartphone imports (sept 2021 - sept 2022)
1 Samsung 48% 2 Xiaomi 28% 3 Nokia 12% 4 Apple 6%
Also GlobalStar only covers the continental US and a little farther......
Depending on how strict they are you might be able to smuggle in a Garmin inReach and connect to Iridium now (or an actual Iridium or Inmarsat satellite phone or modem)
Yeah, authoritarian governments will just allow that to happen, let alone the cost of such a device is out of reach for most of these people.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360056052052-Pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_in_Iran
When was the last successful overthrow of a despot in a middle income country? Euromaiden 2014?
> "Yesterday's vote was an impressive display of democratic elections," said João Soares, the president of the OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly and Special Coordinator for OSCE short- term observers.
It seems election were pretty democratic unless you can provide some evidence to the contrary.
Also, parliament voted his removal without reaching the needed majority, according to Ukraine's own constitution, so the removal itself was unconstitutional.
That's the only thing that counts, not your assumption on how Ukraine would behave, especially 12 years after said elections.
https://www.cloudwards.net/whatsapp-ban-in-dubai/
Hiding video traffic with other traffic is hard since it's easy to assume "long persistent video-like upload with consistent throughput over something like srtp" is video and get a few false positives and no false negatives.