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.
Ok, how does that change the propaganda aspect? Suddenly we have people who absolutely n33dz teh Hax0r Sk!llz posting on slashdot?
Hurry, post some docs for an ad-hoc wireless mesh network before teh death star blows these people up!!
Seriously, in times of turmoil the last thing anyone should be doing is adding new skills - that is how you get busted on trumped up charges and executed as an enemy of the revolution.
If the overwhelming majority of Iranians (like the overwhelming majority of Poles) truly support democracy, human rights, and peace with Israel, then a liberal Western democracy will arise -- without any violence.
The purpose of all governments, is to fool or force the majority into helping the leaders, to the detriment of the majority. No different here or there or anywhere, ever. Sometimes the government does something that unintentionally makes something nice happens to the majority, but thats just a pleasant side effect or accident. We've been lucky that way. Them, not so much.
That fact of life does not seem to fit in with your worldview. Therefore your worldview is suspect.
We in the West are morally justified in destroying the nuclear-weapons facilities.
Don't keep me on the edge of my seat... why? You're confusing rationalization with morality. Some subset of the radical neocon west would love more war in the middle east, after all we clearly don't have enough war in the middle east, and war is good, so more war is more good, being moral is good, unsurprisingly by our own definition we are good, therefore war is good, QED. But that logic somehow seems faulty.
I don't argue that there are strong national interests in blowing up their buildings and killing their people, I'm just intellectually honest enough to declare it as a lesser of two evils, and militarily convenient to do it sooner rather than later, not using some tarted up "moral justification" that merely doublespeaks what "morally justified" actually means.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Sorry to be so straight but your argument is bullshit and you look racist and pretty ignorant.
Iran had a dictatorship, supported by the United States, who killed everybody against the Sha, the US-fellow friend.
After the Islamists and Communists got sick of fucking US fucking their country (as most world does), they killed the Sha.
In this Kaos time, the Islamists took the control.
It's nothing about "their culture" it's about how the United States keeps on failing into making this world a safer place.
It's not only about culture, just read some history book before saying so stupid things.
Spain became a Socialist Republic in a democratic election, we had female vote, abort, and loads of other social benefits.After 3 years of war against Spanish, Italian and German fascists, we lost. We had 2 million volunteer soldiers, but we lost, because we had no external help at all against the fascists. UK and France said "oh, this is an internal affair, we can't do anything", that is translated into: we are so fucking terrified by the nazis that none of us is valiant enough to help you, guys.
We had 36 years of dictatorship without "external powers" after the Spanish Civil War finished, how did the fascists stand for so long?
Easy, jailing and killing people and not having External Pressure against it.
5% of population died in that war, 10% of population escaped from the country and another 5% was jailed for up to 20 years (most died in jail), just for being part of a union or simply for not going to the church.
Please, don't be so simplistic, the only dumb state I see around in the western world is the US, the only "democracy" where a president can stole an election (remember year 2000) and people just keeps on eating burgers.
At least Iranians strike on streets.
Who is more culturally democratic, then?
Learn a bit from the Iranians and try to help them, don't just say "the people has the government they deserve", or I'll keep on talking about Bushes.
This is a fight between two fundamentalist religious regimes (Iran and Israel). Why take sides? I abhor both regimes, while rejoicing in the rich culture of *all* peoples in those oppressed states.