With internet being practically shut down by the “government” except for a very few individuals connected to the regime, my family in Iran has no means to get the alerts about the areas that are getting or gonna get bombed or have been bombed and maybe able to the non existent shelters.

Surprised the US hasn’t set up some kind of DTC-via-loitering drone technology to allow stock, unmodified cell phones to bypass the internet restrictions.

With air superiority they could do it indefinitely. It could be backhauled via Starlink, each one acts as a Stingray-style cell tower and you launch a couple of them over every major city. Would be slow for tens of thousands or millions of users, but quite technically possible. The same technology would also be practical for disaster relief anywhere else in the world.

Someone should dig up the corpse of project Loon to deploy networking balloons over warzonez. Would be perfect for psyops/intel gathering.

Internet access in Iran was already spotty after the massacres in January [0]

[0] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/internet-shut...

[flagged]

Flagged. Can we please not boost obvious astroturfing campaigns? [1]

"According to The Wall Street Journal, "[some] journalists at Iran International have complained that management is pushing a pro-Saudi, anti-Islamic Republic line". WSJ quoted a former correspondent at the TV station commenting that "a systematic and very persistent push" was made during her time there. Azadeh Moaveni of New York University has charged the channel is an arm of Saudi Arabia: "I would not describe Iran International as pro-reform, or organically Iranian in any manner". Historian Lior Sternfeld [he] stated, "Just as Al-Jazeera promotes Qatari interests, so does this channel promote Saudi interests regarding Iran", while noting a softening in Mohammed bin Salman's attitude towards Iran from around 2021. By 2026, in the estimation of the international relations scholar Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Iran International was possibly being backed by Israel." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukblewis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_International#Editorial_i...