Iran is slowly coming back online, but by "online," I mean they've moved from whitelisting some websites to blacklisting everything. I had no idea what these terms meant, but living in Iran forces you to know about technical network and connection stuff. Basically, instead of banning everything except for a few shitty malware apps posing as "social media platforms", they have now moved to filter out and ban the same usual things as before (like Telegram, Instagram, YouTube, everything). So what does that mean? It means more IPs will be available to bypass the ban, and VPNs will be more affordable. So more people can access the internet, STILL ILLEGALLY and THROUGH A PAYWALL.
It's currently close to 4 AM now that I'm posting this, and I've been crying non-stop since midnight because my friends came back online one by one through an unstable connection and said: "Hi, I'm alive." I had prepared myself for the funeral of so many of my friends. Some haven't come back online yet, and we've formed small "search and rescue" groups to find their contacts or families to check if they're okay.
What remains a fact amidst all of this is that nobody in the world ever gave a single fuck about us. I was one of the lucky ones to connect during the complete shutdown via some newly invented way we were too scared to even publish on GitHub for fear of getting arrested. In the time I was connected, I felt immense guilt for having access to the internet, and I begged you all on my socials to be the voice of the people who were about to get executed.
Not even once did I see someone talk about the internet blackout in Iran, and it enrages me.
We've been massacred, mass executed, and then silenced by getting our only way of communicating with the world shut off and the world treats it as some background noise, some irrelevant news that isn't even worth spending time hearing about.
So I'm asking you again, please, be the voice for the people in Iran. We are barely surviving.
