> Satellite TV uses a file system called an MPEG transport stream that allows multiple audio, video, or data layers to be packaged into a single stream file.
Interesting read but that part really made me question my own sanity. It’s probably just lost in translation.
I wouldn't describe Transport Stream as a "file system" but most people probably aren't familiar with the term multiplexing. It's true if you record a TS (e.g. to a .ts file) you can later split out the different Program Streams which can hold pretty much anything.
that's how it works. point a free-to-air dish at the right place in the sky, demodulate the DVB-S2 signal, and it's often IP traffic moving through mpeg transport streams.
The difference between a file system and a container format is mostly a matter of perspective - indeed OSX literally uses "disk images" as their container format. Is .zip a filesystem? You probably wouldn't want to use it natively on a disk, but for a lot of purposes it's the same kind of thing.
File system is the wrong word.
What they should have used is file format.
It is not wrong that you can have a file (bits and bytes encoded in the shape described by a file format) on some remote point. If you have an index of those files where you can programmatically choose between multiple files that could even pass as a crude "file system". But I doubt this is what they meant to refer to.
It is likelier they wrongly assumed a file system is the system in which a file is organized, where in fact they meant file format.
I think they were going for a reasonable analogy, especially when a stream is saved to disk to have its contents extracted: each channel contained in the stream can then be thought of as a separate file, not unlike files in a zipped directory.
None of the people I know inside Iran actually use this Toosheh[1] thing. And I mean zero, nada, none. Not one. Most are unaware of its existence. This sounds something that sounded cool pre-Starlink era that received funds and favors from western governments and NGOs and did not result in anything useful (not surprising that they get international press too despite being a total failure.) Realistically, a download-only solution does not solve a problem. Persian video content that people watch are delivered via DVB Satellite TV video channels. With Internet, what people want is to communicate and therefore need realtime access and data upload capability to contact others and use web services, not download a new offline copy of Wikipedia everyday! In practice, Iranians inside Iran end up mostly using VPNs and tunnels of various sorts. Often some variant of shadowsocks with SNI spoofing, which stop working in a full blackout. What will be left during a full blackout is people who have government-sanctioned SIM cards with full Internet access (known as "white SIMs") to propagandize on social networks in favor of the reigme when everyone else is disconnected and, a tiny set of people who have acquired Starlink terminals.
The same set of people behind that project were supposedly given additional resources to smuggle Starlinks inside, and in the Persian community on Twitter, there's an ongoing meme mocking where those Starlinks actually went and given to whom, never to get an answer...
> in the Persian community on Twitter, there's an ongoing meme mocking where those Starlinks actually went and given to whom, never to get an answer
Of course not. From the article:
Because the technology is banned by the government, access remains limited and carries risk; Iranian authorities have recently arrested Starlink users and sellers.
I also wonder: if roles were reversed and (say for example) the US government was blocking parts of the internet to stop rampant CCP propaganda during a war with China - would "NetFreedom Pioneers" be advocating for ways for Americans to get around the block so they could continue to consume CCP propaganda because "muh freedom".
I expect not to be honest.
Not saying the cause is wrong necessarily but let's just call a spade a spade - this is aimed to help one side and one side only, "freedom" has nothing to do with it
It appears they do receive funds from US government so while I cannot directly answer your hypothetical question, I imagine they would lose at least some of their fundings. The author of the IEEE article is receiving compensation as Executive Director.
This is the framing used by the IR regime* in Iran and a moment's reflection makes it clear it is complete nonsense. Mass scale propaganda in Iran is delivered via satelite channels. Iran Inernational, BBC Persian, ..., are all accessible in Iran.
The blackout by IR regime is preventing Iranians from letting us, the rest of the world, learn what actually happened during the massacres earlier this year, get the actual facts about the number killed, the manner of regime crackdown, the nationalities of the (invited) paramlitaries from neighboring lands involved in mowing down unarmed civilians, testimonials from families regarding the treatment given to their loved ones, what they are put through to get the bodies of their dead loved ones, what condition they receive the bodies of their loved ones, and what pressures and evils they endure to bury their loved ones.
p.s. right now, with the almost two months of blackout, they only information sources we have are either regime flunkies and "professors" or obvious contra regime propaganda outlets like Iran International. And reasonable non-Iranians would likely have reservations about info delivered by an outfit like Iran International. Whereas if we could hear from civil society in IR occupied Iran, from prominent individuals, organizations, trade groups, universities, ...., then it would be completely impossible for the IR in Iran to mislead regarding the horrors they inflicted on Iranians.
* Preemptive note: They, the Shia of Khomeini, themselves refer to their system as "nezaam" which means precisely and exactly "regime".
>What will be left during a full blackout is people who have government-sanctioned SIM cards with full Internet access (known as "white SIMs") to propagandize on social networks in favor of the reigme when everyone else is disconnected and a tiny set of people who have Starlink.
One would think this is exactly the sort of circumstances under which store-and-forward/delay-tolerant routing would be useful. Years before Jack Dorsey thought of bitchat[0] I had the same idea, but never pursued it because I live in a western country but not in a "tech city", in other words, nobody around here is interested in being an early adopter of an app primarily of use only to preppers or people living under repressive authoritarian regimes.
Anyways, it's a great idea in theory, as the techno-anarchist preppers that LARP with off-the-shelf lilygo LoRa tranceivers will be happy to tell you. But in practice nobody who actually could benefit from these seems to adopt these things. Or at least I never hear about it, if they indeed do. Perhaps today's internet blackouts are too transient for a 2026 version of samizdat to develop?
Do the people you know inside Iran plan to just wait it out, or do they have some other solution ready for a total blackout?
To be clear while the annoying firewall has been a forever thing, and even grandmas know how to use VPNs day-to-day to access Instagram, a full, long-term blackout, has been a relatively new thing, so I don't think there's enough prep for that. Bitchat was certainly something that was spoken about after the January protests and before the war broke out. There was even a thief who cloned and renamed it something Persian without attribution and with shady security and the Bitchat guy got upset about it just a few weeks ago.
There are some government-sanctioned messengers that apparently keep working but some people would not use it as they are completely insecure and watched by big brother, of course. The biggest issue is getting data out of the country not internal comms (e.g. video evidence of massacre, for example, so that some poeple like in this very thread don't get the ammo to whitewash the regime, intentionally or accidentally.)
>The biggest issue is getting data out of the country not internal comms
No doubt. Unless there's somebody friendly just across the border in Azerbaijan or Basrah or something, I don't see how they'd do it. Maybe point a dish and establish a point to point link, but you'd need to pre-arrange that.
I think what you are suggesting is more practical today than before, since there are at least a few people who have some sort of access. The real catch is really the prep, or lack thereof. The anecdotes around me is they are hoping (perhaps wishfully) for a total regime collapse and internet freedom relatively soon.
So its just embeding some files in a satalite tv broadcast stream?
I dont think that helps that much. If you have satalite tv going in, you already have video coming in, are arbitrary files really that much more useful?
The thing people really want internet communication for is 2 way coms. Getting info on the situation on the ground out and allowing different groups inside Iran to coordinate. I fail to see how this helps with that.
Excepts the internet blackout has nothing to do with censorship at all. This is just Iran protecting itself from cyber attacks, if they had kept Internet running, they would have been completely pwned.
Come now, let's not be naïve. If protestors or dissenters are organizing over social media, or app-based Internet communications, shutting down the Internet is a great way to keep them in the dark and prevent the majority of them from either keeping up with local demonstrations or exfiltrating recordings of civil unrest.
It is true that shutting off your Internet prevents cyber-attacks, but imagine if it happened in the USA: it would effectively shut down much of our commerce and everyday living activities. In the West, Internet access is becoming more of an essential utility than the icing on the cake, or a recreational forum for malcontents and ne'er-do-wells. Or perhaps it's both at once.
Perhaps you are, instead, disingenuous, because the article you linked says nothing about the effects of an Internet blackout nor its motivations and now you're blathering about orchestration and arming, which likewise have nothing to do with an Internet blackout.
Receive-only DVB dishes are very common (although technically illegal and occassionally subject to house raids and removal). They often try to jam the signal from time to time by inducing noise on the broadcast frequency (locally referred to as parasite). They have been cracking down on Starlinks though (most likely from the supply chain, which is very likely to be a compromised regime asset). In any case, as I wrote in another comment, it does not solve a real problem and no one uses this. You can simply watch news/video content live (or DVR'd) on your TV.
What a shithole the world has become, and will become even worse... Yes, the world, not just parts of it. Everyone still lulled by notions of democracy, constitution and human rights today is asleep at the wheel.
The claim of 30,000 dead in the crackdown is dubious. It originates from a doctor turned fashion blogger turned independent journalist called Deepa Parent[1] and doesn't have any other evidence to support it. (The Dresden fire bombing required tons of munitions and the toll was 25,000).[2]
Now having said that, given the nature of the Iranian theocracy, they are quite capable of such acts. Remember that they have hanged homosexuals from cranes,[3] and executed rape victims.[4] But 30,000 in two days [5] is an extraordinary claim which requires more evidence, certainly more than circular references tracing back to just one source.
If you really want to get informed about the protests in January and the death toll start looking at Amnesty’s report and you’ll see the 30000 is not dubious. Cherry picking who reported on a piece of news doesn’t invalidate the content of it.
I could not find the 30000 figure in the link, while it does mention "thousands", what is contested here is the fact that 30000 is an order of magnitude larger number.
The fact that your account is only used to comment about Iran is also weird.
The protests were in over 200 cities with 5 million+ participants, WE KNOW they fired live rounds this is undeniable if you only had 200 deaths per city you would reach a death toll north of 40k already. Yes it's not verified yes there isnt a video of exactly 30000 identifiable bodies side by side. But the number really isnt as unachievable as people make it out to be.
From another article:
The 30,000 figure is also far beyond tallies being compiled by activists methodically assigning names to the dead. As of Saturday, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said it had confirmed 5,459 deaths and is investigating 17,031 more.
We also "know" Mossad had agents provocateurs there and was supplying weapons to dissidents. And since the war on Iran started it seems pretty obvious those "peaceful protests" were part of their regime change operation.
Was it? I can’t find that in the linked article. The source for the ~7,000 deaths linked near the only instance of “30,000” says it was over the first fifty days.
It’s unclear where the 30,000 comes from because the article doesn’t cite a source for that number. You’re drawing an unsubstantiated connection between two (or more?) articles so you can invoke and then discredit a specific reporter.
At this point I’m not sure what you are even talking about but you seem to have an agenda.
> The Dresden fire bombing required tons of munitions and the toll was 25,000
For clarity 3,900 tons over four raids and 1,500 planes.
I’m not sure how to translate that into modern munitions but I’m also uncertain why a strategic bombing death toll should tell us anything about Iranian protester deaths. Iran isn’t doing strategic bombing of their citizens, they’re using small arms across hundreds of locations.
The linked article cites a source [1] with detailed methodology for their actual claim of 7,000 deaths and mentions that other unmentioned sources claim it could go as high as 30,000. I don’t see any claim of that being in a single day.
Given the timeframe and widespread nature of these protests it doesn’t seem implausible.
A better comparison would be, say, the 1944 Oradour-sur-Glane massacre. 642 French civilians were killed in one afternoon by approximately 150 SS infrantrymen.
Or the Babi Yar massacre, where 33,771 Jews were murdered over the course of two days, by approximately 300 to 500 SS and German policemen.
Not everyone's up in their WW2 history: Just as a reminder: "In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the German city of Dresden."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden.
>NFP’s solution was to add redundancy, similar in principle to a data-storage technique called RAID (redundant array of independent disks). Instead of sending each piece of data once, we send extra information that allows missing or corrupted packets to be reconstructed.
A bit disappointing TBH if that is their solution. Seems like everything is trying to pigeon hole everyone into the proof of work scenario. If we have more power/energy then we will beat you in everything security, coding and censorship circumvention.
It's a sound solution. They are describing forward error correction with a variable code rate. Reducing the code rate increases the amount of redundancy, allowing the signal to be retrieved when the signal-to-noise ratio is lower. It's a standard part of communications theory and has a strong theoretical basis. A low enough code rate will overcome almost any level of jamming at the cost of reduced data rate, provided the receiver does not saturate.
> Satellite TV uses a file system called an MPEG transport stream that allows multiple audio, video, or data layers to be packaged into a single stream file.
Interesting read but that part really made me question my own sanity. It’s probably just lost in translation.
I wouldn't describe Transport Stream as a "file system" but most people probably aren't familiar with the term multiplexing. It's true if you record a TS (e.g. to a .ts file) you can later split out the different Program Streams which can hold pretty much anything.
that's how it works. point a free-to-air dish at the right place in the sky, demodulate the DVB-S2 signal, and it's often IP traffic moving through mpeg transport streams.
it’s the claim of it being a file system that’s throwing me. obviously nbd but maybe my mental models broken again.
The difference between a file system and a container format is mostly a matter of perspective - indeed OSX literally uses "disk images" as their container format. Is .zip a filesystem? You probably wouldn't want to use it natively on a disk, but for a lot of purposes it's the same kind of thing.
http://tom7.org/harder/
File system is the wrong word. What they should have used is file format.
It is not wrong that you can have a file (bits and bytes encoded in the shape described by a file format) on some remote point. If you have an index of those files where you can programmatically choose between multiple files that could even pass as a crude "file system". But I doubt this is what they meant to refer to.
It is likelier they wrongly assumed a file system is the system in which a file is organized, where in fact they meant file format.
I think they were going for a reasonable analogy, especially when a stream is saved to disk to have its contents extracted: each channel contained in the stream can then be thought of as a separate file, not unlike files in a zipped directory.
Maybe they meant "a file-based system" because they all run Plan 9.
None of the people I know inside Iran actually use this Toosheh[1] thing. And I mean zero, nada, none. Not one. Most are unaware of its existence. This sounds something that sounded cool pre-Starlink era that received funds and favors from western governments and NGOs and did not result in anything useful (not surprising that they get international press too despite being a total failure.) Realistically, a download-only solution does not solve a problem. Persian video content that people watch are delivered via DVB Satellite TV video channels. With Internet, what people want is to communicate and therefore need realtime access and data upload capability to contact others and use web services, not download a new offline copy of Wikipedia everyday! In practice, Iranians inside Iran end up mostly using VPNs and tunnels of various sorts. Often some variant of shadowsocks with SNI spoofing, which stop working in a full blackout. What will be left during a full blackout is people who have government-sanctioned SIM cards with full Internet access (known as "white SIMs") to propagandize on social networks in favor of the reigme when everyone else is disconnected and, a tiny set of people who have acquired Starlink terminals.
The same set of people behind that project were supposedly given additional resources to smuggle Starlinks inside, and in the Persian community on Twitter, there's an ongoing meme mocking where those Starlinks actually went and given to whom, never to get an answer...
[1]: TLDR: data archive within DVB-S video stream
> in the Persian community on Twitter, there's an ongoing meme mocking where those Starlinks actually went and given to whom, never to get an answer
Of course not. From the article:
Because the technology is banned by the government, access remains limited and carries risk; Iranian authorities have recently arrested Starlink users and sellers.
I also wonder: if roles were reversed and (say for example) the US government was blocking parts of the internet to stop rampant CCP propaganda during a war with China - would "NetFreedom Pioneers" be advocating for ways for Americans to get around the block so they could continue to consume CCP propaganda because "muh freedom".
I expect not to be honest.
Not saying the cause is wrong necessarily but let's just call a spade a spade - this is aimed to help one side and one side only, "freedom" has nothing to do with it
It appears they do receive funds from US government so while I cannot directly answer your hypothetical question, I imagine they would lose at least some of their fundings. The author of the IEEE article is receiving compensation as Executive Director.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/455...
That said, I'm sure CCP is spending more than enough to make sure Americans get its propaganda, so I wouldn't be too worried if I were in your shoes.
> consume ... propaganda
This is the framing used by the IR regime* in Iran and a moment's reflection makes it clear it is complete nonsense. Mass scale propaganda in Iran is delivered via satelite channels. Iran Inernational, BBC Persian, ..., are all accessible in Iran.
The blackout by IR regime is preventing Iranians from letting us, the rest of the world, learn what actually happened during the massacres earlier this year, get the actual facts about the number killed, the manner of regime crackdown, the nationalities of the (invited) paramlitaries from neighboring lands involved in mowing down unarmed civilians, testimonials from families regarding the treatment given to their loved ones, what they are put through to get the bodies of their dead loved ones, what condition they receive the bodies of their loved ones, and what pressures and evils they endure to bury their loved ones.
p.s. right now, with the almost two months of blackout, they only information sources we have are either regime flunkies and "professors" or obvious contra regime propaganda outlets like Iran International. And reasonable non-Iranians would likely have reservations about info delivered by an outfit like Iran International. Whereas if we could hear from civil society in IR occupied Iran, from prominent individuals, organizations, trade groups, universities, ...., then it would be completely impossible for the IR in Iran to mislead regarding the horrors they inflicted on Iranians.
* Preemptive note: They, the Shia of Khomeini, themselves refer to their system as "nezaam" which means precisely and exactly "regime".
"Freedom" as used by American politicians has always been a euphemism for "the interests of the American ruling class".
>What will be left during a full blackout is people who have government-sanctioned SIM cards with full Internet access (known as "white SIMs") to propagandize on social networks in favor of the reigme when everyone else is disconnected and a tiny set of people who have Starlink.
One would think this is exactly the sort of circumstances under which store-and-forward/delay-tolerant routing would be useful. Years before Jack Dorsey thought of bitchat[0] I had the same idea, but never pursued it because I live in a western country but not in a "tech city", in other words, nobody around here is interested in being an early adopter of an app primarily of use only to preppers or people living under repressive authoritarian regimes.
Anyways, it's a great idea in theory, as the techno-anarchist preppers that LARP with off-the-shelf lilygo LoRa tranceivers will be happy to tell you. But in practice nobody who actually could benefit from these seems to adopt these things. Or at least I never hear about it, if they indeed do. Perhaps today's internet blackouts are too transient for a 2026 version of samizdat to develop?
Do the people you know inside Iran plan to just wait it out, or do they have some other solution ready for a total blackout?
[0] https://bitchat.free/
To be clear while the annoying firewall has been a forever thing, and even grandmas know how to use VPNs day-to-day to access Instagram, a full, long-term blackout, has been a relatively new thing, so I don't think there's enough prep for that. Bitchat was certainly something that was spoken about after the January protests and before the war broke out. There was even a thief who cloned and renamed it something Persian without attribution and with shady security and the Bitchat guy got upset about it just a few weeks ago.
There are some government-sanctioned messengers that apparently keep working but some people would not use it as they are completely insecure and watched by big brother, of course. The biggest issue is getting data out of the country not internal comms (e.g. video evidence of massacre, for example, so that some poeple like in this very thread don't get the ammo to whitewash the regime, intentionally or accidentally.)
>The biggest issue is getting data out of the country not internal comms
No doubt. Unless there's somebody friendly just across the border in Azerbaijan or Basrah or something, I don't see how they'd do it. Maybe point a dish and establish a point to point link, but you'd need to pre-arrange that.
I think what you are suggesting is more practical today than before, since there are at least a few people who have some sort of access. The real catch is really the prep, or lack thereof. The anecdotes around me is they are hoping (perhaps wishfully) for a total regime collapse and internet freedom relatively soon.
> Or at least I never hear about it, if they indeed do
Too busy surviving to blog.
So its just embeding some files in a satalite tv broadcast stream?
I dont think that helps that much. If you have satalite tv going in, you already have video coming in, are arbitrary files really that much more useful?
The thing people really want internet communication for is 2 way coms. Getting info on the situation on the ground out and allowing different groups inside Iran to coordinate. I fail to see how this helps with that.
> So its just embeding some files in a satalite tv broadcast stream?
Which is neither new nor novel.
PlayCable was doing this to download console games over analog cable systems <checks notes> 46 years ago.
TeleText says hello.
> I dont think that helps that much.
Teletext [1] was extremely popular in Europe before the Internet was widely available for private households. Also piggybacked on TV.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
Excepts the internet blackout has nothing to do with censorship at all. This is just Iran protecting itself from cyber attacks, if they had kept Internet running, they would have been completely pwned.
Come now, let's not be naïve. If protestors or dissenters are organizing over social media, or app-based Internet communications, shutting down the Internet is a great way to keep them in the dark and prevent the majority of them from either keeping up with local demonstrations or exfiltrating recordings of civil unrest.
It is true that shutting off your Internet prevents cyber-attacks, but imagine if it happened in the USA: it would effectively shut down much of our commerce and everyday living activities. In the West, Internet access is becoming more of an essential utility than the icing on the cake, or a recreational forum for malcontents and ne'er-do-wells. Or perhaps it's both at once.
There is no naivety on my part, the USA has publicly admitted that it orchestrated and even armed the protests [1]
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/6/has-trump-confirmed-...
Perhaps you are, instead, disingenuous, because the article you linked says nothing about the effects of an Internet blackout nor its motivations and now you're blathering about orchestration and arming, which likewise have nothing to do with an Internet blackout.
Would satellite dishes still be allowed when push comes to shove and the Internet is completely locked down?
Receive-only DVB dishes are very common (although technically illegal and occassionally subject to house raids and removal). They often try to jam the signal from time to time by inducing noise on the broadcast frequency (locally referred to as parasite). They have been cracking down on Starlinks though (most likely from the supply chain, which is very likely to be a compromised regime asset). In any case, as I wrote in another comment, it does not solve a real problem and no one uses this. You can simply watch news/video content live (or DVR'd) on your TV.
What a shithole the world has become, and will become even worse... Yes, the world, not just parts of it. Everyone still lulled by notions of democracy, constitution and human rights today is asleep at the wheel.
The claim of 30,000 dead in the crackdown is dubious. It originates from a doctor turned fashion blogger turned independent journalist called Deepa Parent[1] and doesn't have any other evidence to support it. (The Dresden fire bombing required tons of munitions and the toll was 25,000).[2]
Now having said that, given the nature of the Iranian theocracy, they are quite capable of such acts. Remember that they have hanged homosexuals from cranes,[3] and executed rape victims.[4] But 30,000 in two days [5] is an extraordinary claim which requires more evidence, certainly more than circular references tracing back to just one source.
[1] https://thegrayzone.com/2026/02/01/guardian-iranian-death-to...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Asgari_and_Ayaz_Marhon...
[4] https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle/people/crime-against-...
[5] https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601255198
Edit: added [5]
If you really want to get informed about the protests in January and the death toll start looking at Amnesty’s report and you’ll see the 30000 is not dubious. Cherry picking who reported on a piece of news doesn’t invalidate the content of it.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2026/01/what-hap...
I could not find the 30000 figure in the link, while it does mention "thousands", what is contested here is the fact that 30000 is an order of magnitude larger number.
The fact that your account is only used to comment about Iran is also weird.
>> But 30,000 in a day
The number was given over two days, not one.
The protests were in over 200 cities with 5 million+ participants, WE KNOW they fired live rounds this is undeniable if you only had 200 deaths per city you would reach a death toll north of 40k already. Yes it's not verified yes there isnt a video of exactly 30000 identifiable bodies side by side. But the number really isnt as unachievable as people make it out to be.
From another article: The 30,000 figure is also far beyond tallies being compiled by activists methodically assigning names to the dead. As of Saturday, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said it had confirmed 5,459 deaths and is investigating 17,031 more.
https://www.aol.com/articles/iran-protest-death-toll-could-1...
The mass murdering of 5,400 people is nothing to scoff at, on any level, even over two days.
We also "know" Mossad had agents provocateurs there and was supplying weapons to dissidents. And since the war on Iran started it seems pretty obvious those "peaceful protests" were part of their regime change operation.
> The number was given over two days, not one.
Was it? I can’t find that in the linked article. The source for the ~7,000 deaths linked near the only instance of “30,000” says it was over the first fifty days.
It's not in this article but in others. I'm skeptical because the original source is that fashion blogger.
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601255198
It’s unclear where the 30,000 comes from because the article doesn’t cite a source for that number. You’re drawing an unsubstantiated connection between two (or more?) articles so you can invoke and then discredit a specific reporter.
At this point I’m not sure what you are even talking about but you seem to have an agenda.
You're right: two days.
> The Dresden fire bombing required tons of munitions and the toll was 25,000
For clarity 3,900 tons over four raids and 1,500 planes.
I’m not sure how to translate that into modern munitions but I’m also uncertain why a strategic bombing death toll should tell us anything about Iranian protester deaths. Iran isn’t doing strategic bombing of their citizens, they’re using small arms across hundreds of locations.
The linked article cites a source [1] with detailed methodology for their actual claim of 7,000 deaths and mentions that other unmentioned sources claim it could go as high as 30,000. I don’t see any claim of that being in a single day.
Given the timeframe and widespread nature of these protests it doesn’t seem implausible.
[1]: https://www.en-hrana.org/the-crimson-winter-a-50-day-record-...
A better comparison would be, say, the 1944 Oradour-sur-Glane massacre. 642 French civilians were killed in one afternoon by approximately 150 SS infrantrymen.
Or the Babi Yar massacre, where 33,771 Jews were murdered over the course of two days, by approximately 300 to 500 SS and German policemen.
Not everyone's up in their WW2 history: Just as a reminder: "In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the German city of Dresden." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden.
>NFP’s solution was to add redundancy, similar in principle to a data-storage technique called RAID (redundant array of independent disks). Instead of sending each piece of data once, we send extra information that allows missing or corrupted packets to be reconstructed.
A bit disappointing TBH if that is their solution. Seems like everything is trying to pigeon hole everyone into the proof of work scenario. If we have more power/energy then we will beat you in everything security, coding and censorship circumvention.
It's a sound solution. They are describing forward error correction with a variable code rate. Reducing the code rate increases the amount of redundancy, allowing the signal to be retrieved when the signal-to-noise ratio is lower. It's a standard part of communications theory and has a strong theoretical basis. A low enough code rate will overcome almost any level of jamming at the cost of reduced data rate, provided the receiver does not saturate.
I think they're just doing forward error correction (FEC). Not sure what that has to do with proof-of-work?
What other method do you propose to deal with data loss?