Iran’s supreme leader has vowed that authorities will not back down in the face of a rapidly growing protest movement,
setting the stage for an intensified violent crackdown on the second day of a nationwide internet shutdown.
Protests have raged in cities and towns across the country in recent days,
posing a threat to the authority of the regime, which has been significantly weakened since the last large protest movement in the country in 2022.
Another round of demonstrations was called for Friday night.
In his first speech since demonstrations started on 28 December, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described protesters as
“vandals” and “saboteurs”
and accused them of working on behalf of foreign agendas
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/09/iran-supreme-leader-harsher-crackdown-protest-movement-swells?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/115867867113553037
A dream new "weapon" I'd like to see for Peoples like those of #Iran: weatherproofed and camouflaged solar-and-battery-powered mesh networking hardware on #UAV platforms with multi-band radios, retractable solar arrays, proximity sensors (to deactivate radios and fly away if approached), and explosive self-destruct triggered by physical tampering (to prevent intrusion through physical access).
Onboard software would provide #surveillance- and #censorship-resistant mesh networking and tunnel to the Internet over #Tor, as well as automatic response to proximity by deactivating radios, folding the #solar array, taking off, flying by a randomized path to a random new hard-to-reach and low-visibility location out of line-of-sight of anywhere within line-of-sight of the previous location, landing, re-deploying the solar array, and reactivating the radios.
I'd love to see a world where hackers with crowdfunding could build swarms of these and disperse them en masse from high-altitude low-radar airship carrier #drones over areas where Internet access denial is part of a regime's oppression strategy. I could see us building a few at the local hackerspace, but it would need to be a major international effort to produce enough.