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Iranian Government Cuts Off Internet Access Again
AlbionTourgee writes "It is reported that Gmail and Yahoo mail at least have been blocked in Iran, along with many English-language sites. While news of demonstrations seems to be getting out of the country, the government appears to be trying to prevent people within Iran from communicating and from learning what's happening. It remains to be seen whether TOR and Freenets can be effective to combat this sort of effort to block communications, and whether the general circulation of information about the protests around the world will help."
Then blaming Iran. Part of the ramp up to get the US to do their dirty work.
Expect Americans to die by the gross, in Afghanistan, thereafter.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Not Iran.
"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin
They have internet in Iran?!
Their religion tells them to oppress and be oppressed...
All they have to do is block the known Tor entry points or set up their own hacked TOR routers.
There really isn't any technical reason why Iran couldn't stop covert communications over the Internet they could even go to a white list system if they really needed to.
The only thing preventing is their own population. I just don't think they would tolerate becoming prisoners in the their own nation.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
well.. It seems tor is showing is usefullness for us, these that love freedom.
maybe could be a good idea to start building a system better than tor, for.. you know, if theres something like a race arms, and tor is blocked / detected. :-I
-Woof woof woof!
They are the Government of that country, whether or not we happen to agree with their policies. If they want to ban automobiles and have everyone ride around on horses, it is their perogative. We can get our undies in a bunch as much as we want, and hem and haw and harrumph about the situation. They are a sovereign nation and may make their own laws as they please. If you don't like it, revolt. Oh that's right, you don't live there but would like to impose your views and laws on them.
Unfortunately, given the current socio-economic state that the US and it's allies are in, Iranian leaders -- very possibly not being the caricatures many americans would assume them to be -- may be making a large bluff in this and other moves it has made. The US can ill-afford a continued string of wars in smaller powers that do not offer a consumer incentive; i.e. any war that doesn't have us retooling our auto companies to make tanks, telling our people that if they ride alone they ride with the ayatollah. If we're to go to war, it needs to be a manufacturer's war, not a war of attrition fought by a people that have sufficient stores of it's most important tactical resource (people) to not care about when it "wins".
Iranian leaders, if they have any semblance of intelligence, knows that we cannot call their bluff unless a larger ally steps in and makes the war "interesting". For now, despite the horrible situation in Iran, the best thing that we can do is encourate the Iranian people, and let them know that their voices are being heard, that they have the power to revolt and change their own destinies. Most of all, that if they take the initiative, we will respect any free government they impliment in the aftermath.
But we cannot help them with guns. We cannot help them with bullets. We cannot help them with manpower. Any fight we make on their behalf, is fighting their cause. Every bullet we fire at an oppressive Iranian government, we fire at Democracy. If we have learned anything from Iraq-ganistan, it is that a policy of policing the world leads to later generations of peoples turned from ally to staunch enemy with the memory of american guns killing their people outweighing the memory of american guns killing their enemies.
May God and Allah see eye to eye in this conflict.
-1, Disagree is not a valid option. Troll, Flamebait and Offtopic are not a substitute.
That's ok Google will just leak the contents of everyone's email to everyone else in Iran!
What's that you say? Gmail is blocked?
Missed it by that much....
The only people who do care, are gullible, interventionist Americans.
I'm fed up with the Middle East. The region is this planet's equivalent of a high school oval. It's the traditional venue that pretty much everyone goes to when they want to have a fight. There is conflict of some sort happening there constantly, on a literally second by second basis.
These endless conflicts also are not ours. The rest of the world very rarely has any real stake in them, for the most part. Oil is about the only legitimate interest anyone else has there. Semitic monotheism, and who owns a particular mosque or church or whatever, is utterly meaningless as a legitimate incentive for war.
If the Iranian government wants to completely exterminate its' constituency, let it. If the Arabs and Jews want to mutually remove each other from human memory, let them.
At least if that were to happen, the rest of us might finally get some peace and quiet.
Another Al Qaida plot to mass murder civilians on the 9/11 anniversary foiled in NY. You filthy Muslim apes need to get the fuck out of this country and wallow in your 3rd world oppressive shitholes, killing each other and gouging out clitorises in the name of purity like you've always done...
Fuck Allah. Fuck that murdering pedophile phony "prophet" Mohammed. I shit on his rotten image!
It's the routine planned Monday outage.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Why is this tagged nukem? Lots of Iranians are extremely hot, like princess Princess Jasmine from Aladdin - they are largely Persian. We have one at our lab and she says about 70% of Iranians hate their government but are being oppressed (people disappearing in the middle of the night kind of thing). They need liberating more than Iraq did (though that's not too hard) and they probably would WELCOME a liberation instead of blowing up! In fact that's what they're scared of most - not being liberated by America but being blown up by America because their government is an asshole.
Apparently their "Gmail" app was duplicating the function of "Persian" script, and the government hasn't blocked it! They're just "researching" it
Deliver. S0me of arroganc3 was Usenet is roughly They started to
i) Stage color-coded 'revolution' ...
ii) Raise rumor of election fraud - (and ignore fraud-riddled elections in Afghanistan)
iii) Raise rumor of internet censorship
iv)
v) Profit - but for whom?
I thought they only used twitter in Iran.
It could be the Iranian equivalent of the MPAA/RIAA is just forcing the Iranian ISPs to kick file sharers offline.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
move along
Sorry, no. Moral relativism is complete bullshit. Some things are morally wrong ABSOLUTELY. One of them is supressing your populace's ability to communicate. I'm sick and tired of people justifying morally corrupt behavior just because it's state-sanctioned. Sorry, forcing women they have to wear a head-dress is absolutely not acceptable. Denying them basic human rights is absolutely not acceptable. Persecution of homosexuality is absolutely not acceptable. EVEN IF ALL THESE THINGS ARE STATE SANCTIONED. I'll take that one step further and say that it is even absolutely morally unacceptable for a radical state to possess nuclear weaponry, even more absolutely morally unacceptable for such a regime to have such unabashed hatred based on another people's religion.
The difference between a state and a mob is that one controls the military and one does not. Simply being a group does not magically grant anyone moral superiority or the ability to redefine basic human rights. Saying that its ok for ANYONE to do that is fucking retarded, and something that is continued by apologists. Your moral 'relativism' is the reason why atrocities like this are allowed to perpetrate.
Only old people use Twitter in Iran
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
It could be that the USA's cyber-warfare department is doing its best to disrupt Iranian networks. Or it could be that government shills are "reporting" fake news so as to create antagonism towards Iran in order to reduce the number of protests that the USA government would face during its future war against Iran.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
how is it related to Michael Jackson?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
tell me again, how is this different than the bill to allow the president of the united states to "shut down the Internet" in case of emergency? or is this simply a case of different intentions?
Iran? The fundamentalist run Islamic republic has banned Yahoo and Google?
Try this, a NATO member, EU member designate, secular (still!) neighbor of Europe and having actual part in Europe country, Turkey has banned Myspace in addition to Youtube today. Yes, Myspace, that "personal blog" or more like "music demo" site.
Keep watching Iran and China though...
why these countries have leaders that vehemently insist they have the best hackers and the best computer cultured cyberpunks in the known world, however actively block collaboration tools and sites that are used by practically all of them.
im not sure the censorship is a huge deal, or not as huge as im being led to believe..i think its a self correcting problem. have internet, or restrict it, you will reap the consequences either way. If your iranian computer wizards hate your censorship enough, they will leave. If you censor your internet enough, you'll find your relevance and influence on the network as a whole to be rather paltry. Censored internet is a countries most apparent resignation to continue living in the stone age, pounding the drum to dictatorial policy that will never be considered compatible with the information age.
Good people go to bed earlier.
And if Iran was the USA, you'd have a point.
What part of "inalienable rights" is so hard to understand?
It is very interesting that we would choose to talk about the American ideal of "inalienable rights" in reference to our dealings with Iran -- just look into the CIA's involvement in Iran. Overthrowing a popular leader for greedy economic interests? Check. Installing a brutal, tyrannical dictator in his place? Check. I mean, the CIA trained SAVAK, the secret police force responsible for repressing political dissent! The United States government saying ANYTHING about Iran silencing dissent is hypocrisy of the worst kind.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Maybe I'm an optimist, but uh...pretty sure we've been here before and censorship didn't really cut it for Iran's government. The Neda video, Twitter, Facebook, Tor usage, cell phones. There's just too many ways for information to flow from Iran (or Burma or wherever) for any censorship to really be effective. The best ideas would be cutting off ALL access, or white-lists, both of which create serious issues for Iran in terms of being connected to the world.
A communications disruption can mean only one thing: Invasion!
...just joined the Axis of No Internet Access. Other members include my parents and that homeless guy down the street.
Tor is not working. Attempting to use it probably is drawing the wrong kind of attention.
Technicalities aren't going to get us around these #{@#[@^@# islamic idiots. Only violence will.
It is very short sighted to think they could "mutually remove each other from human memory" without taking a few of us with them.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Just be glad that is all we are cutting off...
-Imadinnerjacket OUT!
We all know about the injustice in Iran and many many other parts of the world, but we really want to make a case like in Iraq and then go to a War?
Please more tech news, thanks!! and peace!!
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
Sure, I agree that all that stuff is bad. But all this crap about "moral relativsm" just confuses the issue. Practically no one in the western world thinks it's OK to stone people for being gay, or for the government to cut off people's means of communication, or to force women into submission, or any of that. What people disagree about is what to do about this. I, for one, do not believe that because the government in country X is misbehaving, that the US is automatically required to go to war with country X to fix this situation. We need to balance the needs of people in other countries for freedom, with our capability to do something about it. Realistically speaking, the government of Iran is not going to change their ways because we ask them to, or because we impose sanctions on them, or any other action we take short of outright toppling their government. And our experience with the aftermath of that sort of thing has never been very good - the population of Iran would certainly not be thanking us. And it would be ruinously expensive in terms of money expended and lives lost.
It's all very well to get on your high horse about misbehavior of other governments. But 1) we don't have any realistic capability to do anything about it, and 2) before we worry about the mote in Iran's eye, shouldn't we attend to the beam in our own? The US government hasn't exactly been a paragon of virtue over the past few years, either.
And if Iran was the USA, you'd have a point.
The GP is suggesting that free communication in the birth-right of every human being, irrespective of spiritual belief. Are you really suggesting that this point has no bearing on the people of Iran? That, for some reason, totalitarianism is acceptable if painted in terms of cultural norms?
Jingoism is jingoism, no matter where you're from and what your culture is. Same goes for censorship. They are separate issues. Jingoism in the USA has cost the USA a lot of moral credibility around the world. But that does not negate the fact that censorship is bad thing. You can't impugn the moral veracity of aspects of the constitution simply because USA politics involves extremists and jingoist voices.
The notions of good and bad are culturally constructed, however, a cross-cultural analysis reveals a tremendous amount of overlap. Censorship is bad - period, whether the USA is Iran, Iran is the USA, the USA is the USA or Iran is Iran.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
you know israel and the US will do anything to take over iran, if the idiots inside keep protesting, it'll be another welcome into their country and then yay, israel will own that one too.. everything is propaganda anyway, so they cut off access to gmail and yahoo, i'd surely like to know their reason but i wouldn't trust a source out of twitter in iran, the israeli controlled media in america will do or say anything to take iran, their consistent complaints about nukes and what not, israel doesn't even have the right to have nukes -- they haven't even signed the nuclear non proliferation act, IRAN has.. iaea has been going in and out of iran if i recall and has found nothing. i think the iranian government should shove it up america and israel's ass by scrapping the nuke project and doing what most sane americans would want is taking advantage of the sun and doing solar... that way it'd take a conspiracy by israel and the US to go to war with them.. kind of like 9/11. no good will and could ever come from war. the mid east is happy enough we took that dictator out of the white house. i was listening to i think the senate minority leader and he was calling russia and iran's regime evil or something! wow! no weapons system will stop anyone from an all out war. second of all, bush's regime was evil, took out a million people oversea's "for the death of 3500 americans." spent hundreds of billions and they say 45k people per year are going to die from lack of insurance, WEE AMERICA! go attack the mid-east while your own people die from being sick, gotta love sarah palin and her dumb-as-shit followers. jesus this is such a rant and run on sentence post! weeeeeeeeeeeee, now i'm an 'anti-semite' because that's all people can say when someone is critical of israel! now, go and be a great patriot and ask for war with iran.. because it's the patriot thing to do!
That'll be us once this cyber"security" act passes.
How very, very ... Christian of you. Now take 3 guesses why it doesn't work in Iran.
Of course while Christian ideology is all in favor of personal decision making (certainly since Saint Thomas of Acquinas), AND the associated responsability, guilt and freely offered reparations and forgiveness, there are few other ideologies that have similar basises. "Recent Judaism" is similar (meaning what Jews practice these days, as opposed to the descriptions in the torah), as is the far eastern confucianism. On the "non-religious" front only capitalism is an ideology that permits individual freedoms.
Note that the obvious needs to be added these days. For everyone to have maximum freedom, freedom must be curtailed. To take one obvious example : theft must be prevented using superior force. There can be no "unnatural" rights, rights that aren't natural. There is, for example, no right to spend more than you have. And, more controversially : there can never be a right for a gay couple to have children.
Individualized decision making, responsability and forgiveness is most definitely not a property the "law-based" religions exhibit. Neither toraic judaism (google "beth din"), islam (google sharia), buddhism (just read some history or google dalai lama controversy) or ... are in favor of that. Given a random religion it's a VERY good bet it's against individuality. It's just that one of the very, very few different religions is so very very large, and people forget that there are others. To remind people : there are people who are not Christians. That means that they have DIFFERENT definitions of things like "fair", "good" (e.g. stoning women is good in orthodox judaism and islam "under certain conditions" as everybody knows and noone wants to admit)
Neither are most "non-religious" ideologies pro-freedom, starting with the obvious : "living gods" (ie a person = god) ideologies (like buddhism), dictatorships, and socialism in all it's forms, ... in general ALL forms of centralized control are anti-freedom for obvious reasons.
And yes, taken to it's logical extreme that means that e.g. the AGW accords are anti-freedom.
Gee the country that is regularly described as the least islamic country with a muslim majority allows an exception to islam ? In fact you will find that in Morocco, like in Turkey, large parts of islam are effectively outlawed.
So I dare say your "counterexamples" do not reflect, at all, on islam.
It is merely another idiotic defense of moral relativism. Taking your "remark" into account paralyzes any moral actor, preventing any action for change due to "uncertainty".
Or to put it another way. Hitler didn't decide to kill Jews until, at the earliest 1941 (long after the start of WWII). Does that mean he was innocent on 31/6/1941, and any and all action against nazi germany was immoral ? Until at least that date they merely let people die to save on national health care costs ...
I hope the police does NOT think the same way if it ever sees someone attempting to kill you. After all, they're not sure until you're dead, and even then it could have been an accident.
Some of the solutions proposed seem overly complicated, microwave links, CIA dropping wi-fi equpment behind the lines, wtf? A primitive HAM trancivier and morse code should be enough to get information out of the country.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
No, I don't believe that. I also don't believe I'm a police officer with the legal right and duty to do something about it. Similarly, I don't believe the US has the responsibility to police all the world's bad states.
Ob. Princess Bride quote goes here. You know the drill.
You might want to look at/listen to this video, it's called silent volcano, and yes it is more for "occidental" viewer, but it is interesting.
As in "may you live interesting lives..."
While Freenet could be used in this situation, there are a few problems that make it not very useful for Iran. First, it can be difficult to get up and running efficiently, especially so if you're trying to set up a darknet. This difficulty means that even if you could do this, you probably don't know anyone else who can and would, so you have no one else to connect to. For example, here in the US I don't know anyone, in person, who runs Freenet. You could hop on opennet if you are willing to take that risk (much more detectable), and that's probably the only option.
The useful applications for Freenet are just that: applications that run separately on top of Freenet, and these have to be configured, and set up. The spam-free forum system, FMS, is particularly tricky, is only available through Freenet (the author is anonymous), has no official documentation, and would have to be modified to work on a disjoint darknet. There's some sparse documentation on opennet, but you have to be able to get to it.
Even though any arbitrary data could be inserted into Freenet, all the documentation, Freenet itself, and all the plug-ins and apps are written in English. A non-English speaker would probably have a lot of trouble getting started. There are> lots of German and French speakers on Freenet, but I suspect they all speak English as well.
Those bombs driven up to military checkpoints, police checkpoints, civilian political and governmental offices, markets, and schools kill far more of the citizens than anything else. That goes for the military checkpoints and structures as well.
You know this.
Yet you pretend you don't.
That makes you scum.
You're the enemy, the same enemy as always. Don't think you can fool everybody all the time. Don't think you will avoid the consequences (you've already said enough to merit being on all the lists).
No true Muslim should believe that Allah will abuse Jews or Christians via Muhammad (PBH) via Quran.
I had a friend that came from Syria, he said they did the same there, controlled everything (but for money , not for crowd control) ...so I devised a
He could not even chat with his wife on msn, because they monitored the ports that msn used for that.
small chat program myself that could link to any port, even port 80, and this allowed the flow of traffic unhindered.
He still uses it today, there could have also been many more things he could have used, ssh tunnels, vpn, and many more, but the
small chat program i gave him was perfect for his needs. Most countries that have such limitations are only hurting themselves in the end, the population will figure out a way to bypass it, especially the kids...and they will end up hating their own country because of it.
Monitoring for a specific activity is one thing, blocking altogether is another.
If that's really news to you, try reading sites that have multiple sources instead of Fox.
Try http://www.informationclearinghouse.info for example.
This was meant as a joke, why is it a Troll?