Iran Blocks, Unblocks Access to Google

morpheus83 writes "Iran has blocked access to the Google search engine and its Gmail email service as part of a clampdown on material deemed to be offensive. Hamid Shahriari, the secretary of Iran's National Council of Information did not explain why the sites were being blocked. Google, Gmail and several other foreign sites appeared to be inaccessible to Iranian users from Monday morning. Iran has tough censorship on cultural products and internet access, banning thousands of websites and blogs containing sexual and politically critical material as well as women's rights and social networking sites." That didn't take long. Iran has now unblocked Google claiming the censorship was an error.

Comments

That's the least of the problems with Iran today

[dusanv]

Censorship of Google is the least problem there today unfortunately.

Re:Unblocked

[deftcoder]

How do you 'accidentally' block a site nationwide? Does Iran only have 1 ISP or something?

Re:Censorship is the last resort of a failing regi

[JustNiz]

Th US has to stop trying to be the world police. Why should Iran just expect the US to jump in? They should grow some balls and try standing up for themselves.

Armed Citizens In the Modern World

[WED Fan]

They should grow some balls and try standing up for themselves.

Yeah, that works. So, we'll see some guy with his grocery bags standing in front of a Russian or Chinese supplied tank, stopping the entire Iranian Army from running down protesters that "grew some balls".

Have we seen this before?

In an age where the government has much more firepower than the armed citizenry, its difficult for citizens to rise up like they did in 1776.

Back then, with the exception of a Navy, the people in the American Colonies were a lot more closely matched with the British. What they lacked, they were able to get through guerilla action. Hell, back then, even privately owned vessels were armed.

Modern tyrannies are better armed than the citizenry, even where the citizens are permitted to own firearms. Back then, a handfull of armed farmers could take over an artillary battary, and use it. Now, farmers might be able to knock a plane out of the sky. Or disable a tank, but, the average farmer, tribesman, stockbroker, pimp, is going to be hard pressed to come out on top when a division of tanks comes at him while jets providing support for the ground troops create a no-mans land where neighborhoods stood.

Yeah, your idea worked for the students in China.