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Five Technologies Iran Is Using To Censor the Net
alphadogg sends in a Network World piece on the unexpectedly effective technologies Iran is now employing to thwart their citizens' access to the Net. "While the government's initial efforts to censor the Internet were blunt and often ineffective, it has started employing more sophisticated tools to thwart dissidents' attempts to communicate with each other and the outside world. Iranian dissidents are not alone in their struggle, however, as several sympathetic hacker groups have been working to keep them online. One such group is NedaNet, whose mission is to 'help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize.' NedaNet project coordinator Morgan Sennhauser, who has just written a paper detailing the Iranian government's latest efforts to thwart hackers (PDF), says that the government's actions have been surprisingly robust and have challenged hackers in ways that the Chinese government's efforts at censorship have not."
Iran and China are not the same thing. Iran's government is much more repressive. It's not a technology issue. It's a repression issue. The "quote" acts like China and Iran are apples to apples and if China could do it too, they would. Just because China is repressive doesn't mean all repression is equal, and that they and Iran are two equals on a scale of *free -to- enslaved* . It's like when people try to compare to US to Iran because you can cherry pick incidents from each country and draw parallels. It's not a fair comparison and ignores the greater number of differences.
In contrast to your point however, Iran and China both need and encourage the intellectual elite. They see them as a means to an end, in regards to defeating their enemies. Just that the level of control they place over them is vastly different. China is much closer to joining the west in opening up. I'm not saying they are there yet, and that there are not issues in China. But compared to Iran? It's not even close.
All it would take was a condemnation from Khamenei to overthrow the military dictatorship. Khamenei has the influcence to overthorw any government he choses.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Well, yes, of course. Any régime based on religion will NEED to have people to be poor and unemployed so they’d be receptive to the religious bullshit.