Slashdot Mirror
Rapid Internet Growth In Iran
securitas writes "The BBC's Abbas Azimi reports on the rapid growth of the Internet and Internet cafes in Iran, apparently with the tacit approval of the government. Seven million Iranians have Internet access, or 10% of the population - double the rate two years ago. Access costs 60 cents/hour. The article describes how the Internet is used for everything from VoIP phone calls to chat and Web logs. Even Iran's vice-president has a daily blog on a popular site with 'musings about politics and life.' All of this despite the ban on many sites, which is easily circumvented by Iran's webmasters and geeks. An interesting point is that most of the PCs used in Iran are assembled from smuggled parts and run pirated versions of all the latest software (due to foreign embargo?). It sounds like a great opportunity for open source software."
Just compare this undeniable explosion of freedom to communicate in the "Axis of Evil" to the ever-increasingly repressing law arsenal in Europe: for instance, no sooner than last week, in France, the "LEN" (Law on Digital Economy) makes the provider responsible for the legality of the contents of whatever its customer are communicating over the internet, including web, mail, and so on, and must give information, mails and web logs to the police without the need of a subpoena.
Time to move to free countries...
I know a few programmers with ties to Iran. Some of their computer scientists do things with Assembly that few of their peers in the West can match. Given that most of their population is 25 or younger, and that they are having to become so efficient with so few resources, I think that when Iran opens up to the outside world we could see the next India opening up inside of five years.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
This has nothing to do with anything, but it just occured to me that internet cafes are an absolutely natural target for Knoppix. Everything you need goes on the CD, the instant someone signs off everything they've done to the filesystem's cleared, you don't even need a hard drive...
Someone could probably do pretty well for themselves if they made a customized version of Knoppix with software tailored to what an internet cafe needs, the interface made windows-user-friendly and with some big "WEB" "EMAIL" buttons on the desktop, Evolution set up with a quick "connect to your specific email" wizard, and some sort of hooks to some sort of central use tracking/billing system. They could print up a bunch of cds of this and sell it as a no-setup-required "internet cafe in a box" system...
I dunno, it's an idea.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I've never been to kazakhstan or kyrgyzstan but i have been to estonia a couple of times and it's got a very well developed economy, 100% nationwide cellphone coverage and a fairly well developed internet infrastructure (though it was slow in 99).
It's pretty inconcievable to think of microsoft not covering estonian - even though there are only ~4 million speakers (maybe less, i cant really remember). It's also very close to finnish and uses a western character set, so relatively easy to work with.
US companies aren't permitted to do business with iran and so it'd be a fairly gray area if they chose to develop an iran-localized windows.
That said, iran does seem to be the most internet developed "axis-of-evil", they even have an ipv6 prescence.
Iran is not arabic!! This is the kind of ignorance that pisses Iranians off (and probably arabs too).
Rubbish! Have you travelled in the Arab world? I have. There are few places were you meet more heartfelt friendliness, openness and generosity than in the Arab world. If there is hate, it is only among a small number of people, and when you meet people face-to-face, and you return their respect, it's gone. It is about mutual respect.
This has some merit, but it is not a real source of hatred. But if you are prepared to sit down and hear what an Arab has to say about their heritage and what the Arab world has given to the west, you'd be respected. You'll also notice that many Arabs and Iranians too are prepared and very interested in taking the best of what the West has to offer. They have no hatred against the west, to the contrary, they would like to incorporate in their culture what they feel is good, and democracy is certainly one of the things they'll be working with.
But Arabs and Iranians have a lot to be proud of, and what they don't want is westerners coming in and tell them what to do. They appreciate help when they ask for it, but they mostly want to do things their own way, based on what they think are the best from their own culture and western culture.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid