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Iran Slows Internet Access Before Student Protests
RiffRafff writes "Iran is at it again, pre-emptively slowing or cutting Internet access before anticipated student protests." From the article: "Seeking to deny the protesters a chance to reassert their voice, authorities slowed Internet connections to a crawl in the capital, Tehran. For some periods on Sunday, Web access was completely shut down — a tactic that was also used before last month's demonstration. The government has not publicly acknowledged it is behind the outages, but Iran's Internet service providers say the problem is not on their end and is not a technical glitch."
I hope the protest succeeds for many reasons, one of which is to show that regime change can be beneficial and effective without overt American influence. The Iranians are tough people with long memories, and they will be as resistant to American meddling as they are to the Ayatollah.
They're one of the few countries without McDonald's' and I'd like to see them stay that way.
Well, that really doesn't leave much. I give the Iranian government credit though, this is a much more subtle way of handling things and potentially more effective than more blatant crackdowns. However, I don't think this will matter much for certain types of channels. A lot of the channels used in previous protests to communicate (such as Twitter and text messages) have extremely low bandwiths. So slowing down the internet shouldn't do much. And large scale cutting will lose the more subtle element. Of course, this sort of repeated behavior should make it clear to anyone in doubt that the current Iranian government really isn't popular with the people. If they were genuinely popular, they'd have little need to try to control communication like this. The government probably remembers that the last time there was an extremely unpopular government was the Shah's regime and that was brought down by what started as student protests.
Has anyone ever got into trouble for running a tor node? Also, not everyone lives in the US, with the level of 'freedom' over there it seems like you guys should be the ones using the tor nodes, not running them
The problem is that it doesn't matter how it looks.
People using html in email should be shot.
And how do you think this is going to help in the slightest? If all Internet traffic in and out of Iran is being slowed down, running through a proxy outside of Iran won't help because traffic to and from it will be affected just as much as everything else.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Yeah, if they're willing to gun down citizens in the street for protesting a bogus election, then I don't see how anyone could think they'd care at all about how they look for restricting bandwidth on the internet.
"I feel for those affected, but at some point the people inside the Matrix need to do more to help themselves."
They are too comfortable for violent revolt, or they would violently revolt.
They aren't fighting Islam, which is the root source of all their problems, they are merely wanting their piece of the Iranian pie.
I'll be impressed when they have the balls to fight like the Jihadists they face, and wear IEDs into Republican Guard facilities.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
he was an exile, an expatriot. he gathered financial support and philosophical encouragement from ideas outside china. he spent a lot of time in hawaii, finding inspiration in things like lincoln's gettysburg address. then he went home to china, and helped overthrow the backwards qing dynasty. he is revered by both the mainland communists and the nationalists on taiwan as the father of modern china
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen
my point?
national borders are artificial constructs, and the seeds of revolution often come from outside a country, not from within it. ideology is ideology ideology: if it works in one country, it can work in another. its not like you go over the border of china or iran and suddenly you are in a magical land where human nature is fundamentally different. no: human beings are human beings. an idea that inspires someone in rio de janiero can just as easily inspire someone in hamburg. you give far too much power to something as flimsy as a tribal, arbitrary dividing line
my point is: there is very much we can do to help an angry and energized rich iranian expat community to give birth to the iranian sun yat-sen
its not just people outside the country whining and complaining. that's not all they are doing, you can be sure of that. and the iranian government knows this: they jail relatives of iranian expats they perceive as being active in fighting the illegitimate iranian military dictatorship (the ayatollah is only a pawn now):
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/05/2044243
the iranian government certainly recognizes what you do not: its not the cia, or mi-6 that is there most potent foreign enemy. it is the iranian diaspora: raising funds, keeping alive hope, influencing opinion at home
the iranian regime has heard of sun yat-sen, and they are on guard against the iranian one
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And those of us with memories don't need a reminder.
Remember when we sent weapons to Iraq and trained their army to fight Iran? I mean, remember when we allowed them to gas the Kurds and Saddam Hussein was a secular Islamic leader stemming the tide against the Iranian Revolution and their Russian backers?
Wait, I forgot. Iraq is Evil and Saddam Hussein is Evil. They let Kuwaiti babies die in the floor in the hospital! Well, that turned out to by a lie by a diplomat's daughter. But anyway, we never did anything like that to Iraqi babies, I mean, besides starve them with an embargo for 10 years.
Remember when we invaded Iraq because they helped al Qaeda with plotting 9/11? I mean, remember when we invaded Iraq because they had WMD? I mean, remember when we invaded Iraq to liberate it's people?
Wait, what's the story again?
Or a Semi-Auto rifle banned because it look mean...
Money is the root of all evil?
Freedom of speech? You can hardly show tits on TV.
Even politically you impose self-censorship, at the least. What were doing your news outlets when the ones in the rest of world were casting serious doubts at, say, "Iraq has WMDs"?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Wow, living in the US, I don't see a parallel there at all.
Learn about Photography Basics.
People judge Islam by current practice, not ancient times.
Ancient times, it bears repeating, are over, past, kaput, done, no longer applicable.
There are zero Muslim countries where one has the freedoms we expect in the secular West. Not even Turkey, praise be to Kemal Ataturk for trying, qualifies.
I've seen the best Islam can do with an unlimited budget while deployed there (before GWoT) on a friendly basis. KSA, Turkey (limited budget but more Euro influence) Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi are all places no freedom-loving person would go unless deployed or making fat contractor money. The locals are friendly (bring social skills and a smile), but Islam sucks. Imagine the US taken over by Evangelical Christians of the Fred Phelps variety. If you are like them they like you. If not...
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The log "in your own eye" is pretty big. Witness the near constant half-accusations in the media about Iran at the moment. The repeated "some people think the elections were rigged" claim even when the US's own research suggests Ahmadinejad won the election because he really is very popular in Iran. A sudden rush of "look at the Iranian totalitarianism" stories. The constant exaggeration and air-brushing of the protests in the media. Mousavi supporters setting fire to cars? Nothing. Police arresting people? All over the news. Ahmadinejad does something questionable? Everywhere. Any questionable behaviour by Mousavi? Never reported. Ahmadinejad blames outside forces for formenting unrest - mockery. Mentioning that the US Congress has allocated millions to supporting opposition groups within the country and that two years ago the CIA were given approval by Bush to carry out destabalisation operations in Iran (both matters of public record) - most people don't know that.
You can only have an effective democracy if the populace is informed. That's true of Iran, and it's also true of the USA. If you want to know why we're suddenly seeing news stories about Iran everywhere and outraged people appearing online everywhere, the reason is simple and very scary. The USA thinks it might get dragged into a war with Iran by Israel and wants to get pre-emptive approval by its populace. Whether or not people think the USA should go to war or not, they should at least grant or withold their approval based on the actual situation. Not "someone was censored but no, we're not giving specifics" sort of stories.
I'm going to try and outline why I think the US is doing a media war on Iran. Apologies for length, but I could write triple this quite easily.
It's news all of a sudden mostly because there's a crisis with Iran at the moment. Iran may or may not be working towards nuclear weapons. We don't know for certain. They're working toward nuclear power which they have every right to and, in fact, if they have sense, really need to develop for a number of good reasons. But there are suspicions that they are also trying to gain nuclear weapons capability. Which given the threats to them from other powers, also makes good sense for them, but they deny that they are doing this. A lot of the intelligence comes from the Israeli intelligence communities who seem pretty confident that their is a nuclear weapons program and that, although nuclear capability isn't imminent, is on the roadmap (I've heard figures like ten years passed around, but also a couple of lower estimates). Anyway, say what you like about the Israeli's ethics, they have a Hellishly effective black ops^H^H^H^H^H intelligence community. If anyone knows what the Iranian government is up to other than the Iranians themselves, it's the Israelies.
Now we don't know that they're developing nuclear weapons. But Israel is serious enough about this that they're talking about military action. Now this bit is personal opinion, but I don't think a nuclear-capable Iran would attack Israel. Why would they? It would only invite similar retribution in kind. Plus Iran hasn't initiated a war of aggression in forever. Plus they have nothing to gain in material terms. Not even in political capital as even the Palestinians don't want to see Israel suffer nuclear strikes (they just want their own state and bit less bombing, please). If Israel went to war, the Palestinians would suffer more than anyone. But what a nuclear capable Iran would mean would be that the Palestinians suddenly had a big brother that couldn't be threatened and it would change the regional power balance quite heavily. It looks like Israel wont countenance that possibility, hence the talk of pre-emptive strikes.
Now sorry for having been so long-winded in all this, and that much of it has been about Israel, but it really is the elephant in the room. The nice thing here however, is that the USA is in some ways, finally back in the roll of the good guy (which is exactly what the r
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.