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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.'"
They can never stop the signal. Even if the signal is going at 128kbps
Silly Iranians, high-speed Internet is for Westerners!
But seriously, are they going to ban cars and television, too? We use those a lot in here in the west.
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
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.)
oh no! you western infidels have slashdotted my blog running on a 128kbps connection!
Eat a Chicken, You know you want to.
They should probably be more worried about their roads than their pipes.
End transmission.
Of course, the intelligent citizens will know that they can just split the downloads amongst themselves, essentially bandwidth-pooling. Maybe we need to educate the government.
Palm trees and 8
I'm sure it's possible to combine several 128K lines to get one single hi-speed line.
Suppose you and 5 or 6 of your neighbours had 128K each. How would you go about it?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Note to self: Avoid Iran Counterstrike servers due to bad pings.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
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.
They will son become world experts in data compression, home construction of undetectable spread spectrum links, ad hoc very long range wireless data connections, and anonymous groupware! Thanks Iran!
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
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
The country is effectively a theocracy. The country does conduct votes and such, but it ultimately doesn't matter as the Ayatollah have the final say on everything. It is a highly oppressive in many ways. For example in the 2004 election the hardliners won a major victory. You might think this was the people's wish, but in fact the simple matter was the Council of Guardians disqualified most reformist candidates, including many incumbents. As for information access, well I'll quote Freedom House:
"Freedom of expression is limited. The government directly controls all television and radio broadcasting. Satellite dishes are illegal, though widely tolerated, and the authorities have had some success in jamming broadcasts by dissident overseas satellite stations. The Ministry of Culture must approve publication of all books and inspects foreign books prior to domestic distribution. The Press Court has extensive procedural and jurisdictional power in prosecuting journalists, editors, and publishers for such vaguely worded offenses as "insulting Islam" and "damaging the foundations of the Islamic Republic." The authorities frequently issue ad hoc gag orders banning media coverage of specific topics and events. The government systematically censors internet content by forcing internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to a growing list of "immoral sites and political sites that insult the country's political and religious leaders.""
Somebody'd better go and liberate them, quick!
----
Not to be confused with Col.
... not only are they trying to develop nuclear weapons and "wipe Israel off the map," but they're capping bandwidth at 128kbps!
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.
What do you think about fundamentalist naturalists and secularists? They can be quite fanatical, you know.
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.
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."
First, they came for the newspapers, and I did nothing
because the Farsi Side comic was just re-prints now.
Next, they came for the books, and I looked the other way
because the Death to America Book of the Month Club
was only recommending books to burn anyway.
Then, they came for the Satellite Dishes, and I said nothing
because I still had a year left on my Infidelphia Cable contract.
Finally, they came for my Internet Service, and no one was left
to hear my ululation!
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
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
Hi all.
...), half by mullahs. Now this problem. I don't know what the hell will happen next time.
First every US based company (virtually %90 of software companies) reject to work with us. Few weeks ago I just lost a $4000 consulting contract just because I'm Iranian (I'm a java programmer and $4000 is a big money here). Commonly I pretend I'm Turkish or other country just to use very basic things in internet like paypal or activating a web hosting. we say half of the web sites are blocked by USA (iee, sun download section,
Regarding music and movie it's not a big problem as most of contents are either from satellite or cd or dvd. Sometimes I think western music groups will be surprised when they know how many fans they have in Islamic Iran and specially in Tehran (my favorites are dire straits and Shania twain among others). Here most of the people have dishes and I think it's between 70%-80%.
Maybe you think we are happy with creating nuclear bomb and this government But I can say must of us are sick of these things. We just want to live a little better like any body else and have some kind of freedom, unlike what this government pretend, we have no kind of problem with outer world.
In Iran young people call the "ali khameneii" (supreme leader) as "ali Galile" because like galile he look at stars (for creating Islamic rules).
The biggest use of internet in Iran is for chatting with yahoo. Girls looking for boys and boys looking for girls (talking in public can result in prison or forced marriage if government arrests). So this will not affect the biggest use of internet in Iran. If you take a look at asia rooms in yahoo messenger and if you know farsi you will see almost every body is Iranian. Other things like orkut are already blocked. You may wonder but this fool (president) already forced coffeenets (small shops which let you connect to internet in the shop) in specified days don't let boys use internet and the same for girls meaning avoid both boys and girls be at the coffeenet at the same time. Some people wish USA drop a bomb and kill this government and if we die, it's not a big problem.
It's funny but this kind of governments fear from virtually every thing. Like high speed internet, dishes, and even yahoo messenger.
Also we are not Arab we are persian, some people hate arabs for what they have done to our country (including me).
Some times I think life is a little tough with us but maybe it's our predecessors fault.
I'm curious to know what a 'fundamentalist secularist' looks like.
completely opposed to religion in any way, shape, or form. one of the basic idea is that belief in any form of religion is a sign of mental illness requiring treatment.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Oh my god! I *can not* believe how such stupid rumors get started and even published in the media!!! Yes the ICT ministry has asked ADSL internet service providers to stop giving high speed (higher than 128kbps) to their users. However, being the totalitarian regime that they are, this one had nothing to do with censorship! The ICT ministry announced that this is a *temporary* limitation which will be removed *within 4 months* and that it has to do with the gradual implementation of the new structure for ISP companies (which are going to be divided into several different categories based on their type of activity and the amount of bandwidth that they are allowed to provide). And forget this post, didn't any of you think how stupid it sounds to *censor* the internet by just reducing the speed to 128kbps which is actually quite a fast connection for a home user in this part of the world (because of high price of internet bandwidth). It just doesn't make sense. source: http://www.iribnews.ir/MainContent.aspx?news_num=6 5777
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.'"
Luckily, the PDF "How to Make a Nuke Out of Normal Household Items" is only 96k.
I don't consider myself pro-Israel, but honestly, check your facts*. There have been Jews in the Middle East pretty much continuously since there were Jews, admittedly in small numbers, but they never entirely went away. Western history as typically taught tends to follow the story of European Jewry, not unreasonably, since most Jews today are of course of European ancestry. But that doesn't mean Palestinian, Lebanese, Iranian and African Jews ceased to exist.
*On this subject, particularly, I don't know if it's even possible to find factual information that is entirely free of political agenda, but this page seems to be fairly free of BS. Can't vouch for the rest of the website, just that particular page.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.