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

Censorship is the last resort of a failing regime

[The_Fire_Horse]

As has happened many times before, What starts as a simple censorship of a website ALWAYS turns into more nastier things while the 'people in charge' are trying to control the masses.

How stupid are these governments - really. Do they honestly believe that the problems of their country can be solved by stopping someone having a GMail account, or preventing them looking up camel porn on google?

Iran is in a desperate attempt to return to old school biblical times (great if you are not a woman - "Iran has tough censorship on internet access .... as well as womens rights") and are now clutching at straws - it can only result in resentment from the citizens.

Re:You can't "slap a Jap" anymore

[MyLongNickName]

Wow. I have seen a couple instances where you take fact A add it to fact B and come up with false conclusion C. This is another one.

Fact A: The US has a history of stereotyping other cultures
Fact B: The US executive administration wants to go to war with Iran.
False Conclusion C: We are not allowed to paint Iran as bigoted, sexist or totalitarian.

The fact that the US has problems does not correlate to Iran being pure as the wind-driven snow. In fact with all of our problems, I'd much rather live here we have the opportunity to fix our problems.

Re:You can't "slap a Jap" anymore

[faloi]

In the obvious run up to the war with Iran, it seems like the media is all too happy to paint them with the bigot, sexist, and totalitarian brushes. We are doing this with China. We did this with Iraq. Now, with Iran in our sights, they also get the black tar treatment.

Oddly enough, I find it hard to be sympathetic toward a country that hosts a Holocaust Denial seminar. Maybe I really am part of the problem.