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A comment on As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp. Parent comment

Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by londons_explore on Thursday September 22, 2022 @08:46AM (#32938081)
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).

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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by lupire on Thursday September 22, 2022 @08:59AM (#32938207)
It is illegal in USA for Meta to pay fines to Iran government.

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.

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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by wyldfire on Thursday September 22, 2022 @09:53AM (#32938764)
> 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.

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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by ffk on Thursday September 22, 2022 @10:53AM (#32939644)
It’s probably validated by a human before the message is deployed.
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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by hnaccount_rng on Thursday September 22, 2022 @08:57AM (#32938196)
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

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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by stickfigure on Thursday September 22, 2022 @10:11AM (#32938998)
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.
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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by nindalf on Thursday September 22, 2022 @10:25AM (#32939201)
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.
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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by toyg on Thursday September 22, 2022 @11:08AM (#32939921)
There are tons of Iranians abroad, figuring out a way to cut them off from the local population is definitely a worthy goal for the regime.
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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by panarky on Thursday September 22, 2022 @12:45PM (#32941421)
> blocking at the network level

How could any network-level block by Iran prevent a user in the UK from calling a user in India?

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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by aasasd on Thursday September 22, 2022 @10:00AM (#32938838)
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).
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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by weard_beard on Thursday September 22, 2022 @02:29PM (#32942786)
I can only send email 500 miles and my nationality seems to impact my cell service
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Re:As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, What... by aasasd on Thursday September 22, 2022 @06:58PM (#32945712)
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.
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