Iran Cracks Down on Internet Sites

Dan Brickley writes "It appears that Iranian ISPs have been ordered to block a large number of popular Web sites, including weblogging, community, chat and email services. Web (particularly weblog) use has been increasing rapidly in Iran, with 64000+ weblogs published by Iranians via various sites. As of today, if the news is correct, the majority of these may be inaccessible to their authors, as will the email (eg. Yahoo) services they use to communicate with friends, colleagues and family worldwide. See stop.censoring.us and hoder.com for more details. The newly expanded blocks include PersianBlog, Blogger and the Google-hosted Orkut 'social networking' site, where Iranians come third after Brazil and USA, representing 7% of all users. How can we get our Iranian friends back in the Web?"