Iranians Are Using Starlink to Counter Internet Censorship - Iran News Update
irannewsupdate.com
The increasing adoption of Starlink in Iran highlights the population’s resilience against oppressive controls and their pursuit of digital autonomy.

I’m reading here:

As Starlink’s user base grows, the Iranian government is likely to intensify efforts to restrict satellite internet access.

How could they do so?

  • talEnglish
    5·
    5 days ago

    You can make radio receivers pretty hard to find. I think that shortwave radios are an even better example, where they’ve been used by intelligence agencies for effective unidirectional communications:

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

    A numbers station is a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries.

    But yeah, agree with you that if you want to want to have a transmitter, then you’re out of luck. Can’t hide that.

    considers

    You might be able to run just the downlink over Starlink, if it had a purely-unidirectional mode (which it probably doesn’t today). Most consumer bandwidth use is asymmetric. Hiding the downlink is hard, but the uplink might be easier.

    It would have unusual-from-a-traffic-analysis, unidirectional, non-sustained traffic, but because the bandwidth usage is less, easier to hide in other traffic using steganography. Certainly have different traffic properties, at any rate, than a traditional VPN.

    Another issue is that the receiver has to be visible from the sky. There are substances which are not radio-transparent but are visible light transparent. I’m sure that someone has done this.

    kagis

    Ah. Someone doing exactly this.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/14blm4x/how_hide_starlink_dish_from_skyview_without/

    how hide starlink dish from skyview without signal loss ?

    i live in iran and government censored internet

    how can i hide its dish or make it hard to trace by government?

    which material is not blocking starlink signal so i can cover the dish and hide it visually ?

    Fiberglass, styrofoam aka polystyrene foam, various other polymeric foams used in packaging and insulation, not too thick polymeric (such as polyethylene) sheets. But these materials often have a bunch of additives that change RF transparency. You may have to try a few choices.

    Also, if the government really wants to find these, I suppose that they could probably go after them with something like high-resolution radar imaging from aircraft.