Slashdot Mirror
Iran Moves To End "Facebook Revolution"
We've had a few readers send in updates on the chaotic post-election situation in Iran. Twitter is providing better coverage than CNN at the moment. There are both tech and humanitarian angles to the story, as the two samples below illustrate. First, Hugh Pickens writes with a report from The Times (UK) that "the Iranian government is mounting a campaign to disrupt independent media organizations and Web sites that air doubts about the validity of the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the nation's president. Reports from Tehran say that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter were taken down after Mr Ahmadinejad claimed victory. SMS text messaging, a preferred medium of communication for young Iranians, has also been disabled. 'The blocking of access to foreign news media has been stepped up, according to Reporters Without Borders. 'The Internet is now very slow, like the mobile phone network. YouTube and Facebook are hard to access and pro-reform sites... are completely inaccessible.'" And reader momen abdullah sends in one of the more disturbing Ask Slashdots you are likely to see. "People, we need your urgent help in Iran. We are under attack by the government. They stole the election. And now are arresting everybody. They also filtered every sensitive Web page. But our problem is that they also block the SMS network and are scrambling satellite TVs. Please, can you help us to set up some sort of network using our home wireless access points? Can anybody show us a link on how to install small TV/radio stations? Any suggestion for setting up a network? Please tell us what to do or we are going to die in the a nuclear war between Iran and US." Update: 06/14 18:32 GMT by KD : Jim Cowie contributes a blog post from Renesys taking a closer look at the state of Iranian Internet transit, as seen in the aggregated global routing tables, and concluding that the story may not be as clear-cut as has been reported.
This election would have had little impact on foreign policy, but the Iranian president does have a lot of leeway on domestic matters. Under Ahmadinejad, inflation and unemployment have skyrocketted. Rather than try to take action to fix it, he just lies about the figures (easy to do, when you control the media). That was really a key issue in the "election".
Of course, not having a Holocaust denier as president would probably help foreign relations a bit as well.
(Yes I know he never comes out and denies it. He just "questions" it. A lot.)
WTF is "after the age of HAM"?
Was completely and totally outlawed after the 79 revolution.
The original poster does not realize that they started licensing again, and mere decade ago went from a whopping 3 licensees to 15 licensees in the entire country. I have no more recent figures. Perhaps the slashdot understatement of the week to say they are not quite up to Japanese levels of licensing (licenses as a percentage of the general population)
http://www.qsl.net/oh2mcn/ep.htm
73 de n9nfb
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They did end tyranny by replacing the shah and they did establish a democracy when they voted for Mossadegh - only when that didn't work (i.e. the CIA undid all that and restored the shah) did they resort to more radical means.