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Iran Caps Net Access to Keep West Out
davidwr writes "The Guardian reports that Iran has banned high-speed internet access to attempt to curb the west's influence. In addition to seizing satellite dishes and filtering more websites than any country save China, Iran is now capping Internet speeds to 128kbps in order to keep out Western influences." From the article: "The latest step has drawn condemnation from MPs, internet service companies and academics, who say it will hamper Iran's progress. 'Every country in the world is moving towards modernization and a major element of this is high-speed internet access,' said Ramazan-ali Sedeghzadeh, chairman of the parliamentary telecommunications committee. 'The country needs it for development and access to contemporary science.'"
Yes, cripple your country! Better to maintain strict control over a nation in poverty than be in charge of a prosperous one!
(Interestingly, the same comparison can be made for overprotective parents, who would prefer keeping their children...well, children, rather than prepare them to become adults.)
Now their researchers will have a harder time finding instructions to build a nuclear-bomb!
Iran is run by a bunch of wackos... I can live with that. But what really scares me is what happens when the RIAA hears of this - they will go for this shit in an instant.
It isnt that difficult of a concept. Iran does nothing for us, China is a major trade partner.
That is why, it is pretty simple.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Actually the administration is merely pandering to the evangelicals. They aren't actually getting much of what they want. This group in office has their own agenda. They just convince the religious to support it.
The evangelicals actually believe they're getting a lot of support. They have too much faith in the words of their leaders.
Developers: We can use your help.
How can you possibly compare a nation that limits online bandwidth in order to limit citizens' freedom to a nation which makes internet gambling illegal in order to protect citizens from themselves? We all know that everyone has an inalienable human right to wank off to free mpegs from the internet, but there is no basic human right to lose money by gambling online, now is there?
It's a problem with religious fundementalists of all types, who fundemntally wish people to remain ignorant and uneducated. In America you see fundementalist attacks on education and freedom. Completely illogical thinking like "gay marriage" violates the rights of religious fanatics. A belief that one's particular religious icon should be installed in court houses. Whatever. America needs to worry about the threat of hard-core religious freaks. And note, the type of religion is irrelevant. All fundementalists are budding terrorists whether christian or muslim.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Short answer: Instead of quickly downloading western culture, the average Iranian will now be mildly inconvenienced by a cap on bandwidth speeds.
Long answer: What makes this restriction really useful to the Iranian government is that it will help curb attempts to get around their filtering. Countries which censor (such as China) have had flourishing peer-to-peer anonymous darknets spring up as a result of technologies such as Tor and Freenet (link to wp article, as the site appears to be down currently). By capping the bandwidth at 128kbps, it's much more difficult to have faster supernodes on such networks, and fewer Iranians will be willing to dedicate bandwidth to running a p2p web server. Between a combination of web censorship, and an added (though not insurmountable) barrier to darknets, this will help Iran rather effectively cut off its citizens from what the government doesn't want them to see.
The other main consequence is to servers; besides the comical bad ping for Iran counter-strike server which a commenter mentioned earlier, this will affect anyone trying to spread subversive material over their connection; on the other hand, this will cripple anyone trying to serve anything over their connection. I wouldn't be surprised if Iran soon gives exemptions to various research and commercial groups to help stem the latter conquences.
How exactly will capping connection speeds at 128k per second stop someone from uploading 1k worth of text to 'put the information out' about a gathering? It's not like you need flashy banners and embedded movies... if someone wants to attend your protest rally (and you're serious about organizing one), waiting a few seconds instead of half of a second isn't really going to get in the way.
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
- China hasn't threatenned to "wipe Israel off the map."
- China doesn't refer to the US as the "Great Satan."
- China doesn't support Hizbullah, a terrorist group which killed 241 Americans in a bombing in Beirut.
- China didn't ship thousands upon thousands of rockets to terrorist group Hizbullah.
- China didn't storm the US embassy and hold 66 diplomats and US citizens hostage for over a year.
- China didn't use terrorists to bomb the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires.
- China doesn't try to actively sabotage the peace process in the Middle East.
Oh.... but Iran did.China has nuclear weapons, but not many people are worried that China would provide a terrorist group with a nuclear weapon. There is great uncertainty over what Iran would do with nuclear weapons and nuclear technology.
China is far from perfect, but the general direction they are moving is towards a more open society and a market economy.
Perhaps if they just banned oil exports, they could then stop that inflow of filthy, moral corrupting American money.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
What country has a larger per-capita incarceration rate?
In the US, drug dealers end up incarcerated. In the others, I'm willing to bet drug trafficking has a much steeper penalty.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
Looking at their total GDP isn't a good measure of poverty, because it doesn't say anything about the distribution of the resulting wealth that's being created. In the case of Iran, I have a feeling it's mostly concentrated in a small number of individuals.
That said, based on some articles that I've read, life there for the average person isn't too bad in the physical sense; it's not poverty-stricken in the same way that parts of Africa or even South-east Asia are. The government uses oil revenues to heavily subsidize some consumer goods in order to keep the people happy (the price of gas there is ridiculous, I want to say around $0.30 a gallon), but there's very little investment in anything that's going to help them once the oil runs out, like education or scientific research (no, building a bomb-factory nuclear reactor that would have been obsolete in 1975 doesn't count) or communications infrastructure.
The government's plan seems to be "hold on to as much as we can, for as long as we can, by any means necessary."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Actually the administration is merely pandering to the evangelicals. They aren't actually getting much of what they want. This group in office has their own agenda. They just convince the religious to support it.
Sounds like someone else watched 60 Minutes over the weekend and listened to David Kuo lamenting the Bush administrations manipulation of the Christian Right, getting the backing they need for a few tokens and runs at legislation which would be unconstitutional anyway (some of the Faith-Based initiatives.)
The Iranian government represents mostly the conservative rural people, not the more cosmopolitan city dwellers, same way most despotic regimes seize power (get the peasants behind you) and then maintain it through fear and intimidation.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Clearly the Iranian theocrats are even less technologically informed than Alaskan senators. I would think that information passed using highly-compressible, low bandwidth text would be much more of a subversive threat than bloated "Punch the monkey" flash ads and YouTube videos of sleepy kittens.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
President Bush Jr. said on national television that he believes that God works through him. The bulk of our political figures regularly cite God as their motivation for their actions. The republican party, which is currently in control of our government, has been hijacked by the religious fundamentalists. If you don't think that this adds up to the US being a religiously-controlled nation, then I don't think you're thinking hard enough.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"