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Man Attacked In Ohio For Providing Iran Proxies
David Hume writes "electronicmaji is reporting on the Daily Kos that the individual known as ProtesterHelp (also to be found on twitter) was attacked in Ohio for providing network security for Twitterers in Iran, setting up private networks to provide secure proxies, calling for media networks to remove the Iranians Twitterers' information from their broadcast, and providing counter-intelligence services (including Basiji and Army Locations) within the Twitter community. ProtesterHelp was allegedly attacked by a group of men while walking to class in Ohio. The men, who appeared to ProtesterHelp to be either Iranian or Lebanese, drove up beside him and threw rocks at him while shouting, 'Mousavi Fraud.' ProtesterHelp further reported that his personal information has been leaked, and is currently being spread both online and inside of Iran amongst the government." Relatedly, Wired is also reporting that Google and Facebook have rushed out support for Persian. This move has allowed many pro-democracy groups to connect and translate their message to a broader audience.
For all the hatred spewed at the direction of the USA, I've got to say there's quite an effort underway by normal citizens to help. There are people from all over the world trying to help, but I'd say a good number of them are from the USA.
I've been lurking around the IRC channels for a few days. Folks have been working on setting up proxies, and doing what they can to help. I question whether anything is actually being accomplished, but my hat is off to anyone who is at least trying to help facilitate communication. Personally, since I'm not a developer, I haven't found too much I can do. There are more than enough proxies out there at this point...
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
The single click and least trouble free solution to help right now seems as this one:
http://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en
If you don't know about it, Tor is a distributed proxy system which helps people in oppressive areas.
If you have questions about legitimacy of helping such a system, US DOD itself designed it and suggests their own personnel to use it when abroad.
If you think like a Iran nerd, Tor would be the only solution to implement really fast to gather and send information now. It could be life saving since those countries are really at limit of spying the internet right now.
They say just spare 20 KB (not MB) a second upspeed is enough. It is even lower than torrent traffic and shouldn't effect regular internet usage in any way even if you have multiple computers on NAT etc. (install to single in that case)