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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."
Clearly if I'm getting a frist psot on /. then they've gotten to us to!
Anyone hosting tor ports to assist? I considered, but I'm nervous about having some /b/onehead abuse my address.
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
How much will this really affect communication? If I recall, the last wave of protests mostly used Twitter, which doesn't exactly use a whole heap of bandwith? I could see this affecting Youtube, but it won't stop communication.
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.
How long do the authorities in Iran think they can keep this Internet slowdown going? Sooner or later, they'll have to let up, and when they do, there's going to be a flood of blog posts and website updates about the latest protests. Unless they cut off all Internet access forever, they can't stop it from happening, they can only delay it, and the longer they do, the worse it looks.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
From slow tweet to no tweet? Guess this might be the end of twitter as an organizing tool in Iran.
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.
Doesn't this just give the students more reason to protest, starting right now? I'd be even more pissed if the internet we shut down on top of the political turmoil.
How long before the Iranian government lays all new fiber to a central military facility and then disable the now-current fiber links? The idea being total central control to turn off the internet connection entirely or by segments from one physical location.
Hey, if they have the money to build another 20 nuclear reprocessing sites, they damn well have the funds to pull something off like this!
Life is not for the lazy.
Bah,
Last death throws of a failing regime. I feel horrible for the Iranian people right now, but thank god they don't seem to be taking this lying down.
It's like the 1960's over there, a huge boom of 'youth' and a repressive establishment to fight. Here's hoping the result of this revolution is a bit more friendly then the last, but more importantly that it treats it's people better.
If they were all using IRC/Jabber and regular POP3/SMTP email (with encryption/one-time pads) or something more decentralised and robust altogether the effects of 'slowing down the internet' would hardly be felt, since these protocols use so little bandwidth anyway. In this case anyway relying on 'De Cloud' ie. a couple of supermassive foreign social networking sites does not seem like the best course of action
I would have been first but I'm posting from Iran.
Maybe everyone was just blogging and tweeting about how awesome the protests were going to be, and it clogged up the tubes.
If so, that would explain everything.
The same thing happens when China "cracks down." The media whines and opines for a while, but at the end of the day the rest of the world is powerless to stop these boneheads from abusing their own people. I feel for those affected, but at some point the people inside the Matrix need to do more to help themselves. Having the people outside complain really doesn't do a whole lot to make it better.
So if I'm a thug government, I know I can pretty much do what I want, especially if I have something the world wants (cheap labor/oil/etc).
In Australia you need permission from the Government to stage a protest. How is this any different?
It's only a matter of time now...
At least they can have protests. In the United States, you would be put in a "free speech zone" and have your picture taken by the FBI. Or in the case of the GOP convention last year, they just lock you up for violating a "fire code" and hold you 72 hours without charge and let you go after the convention is over.
hobbyist dilettant3 That *BSD 0wned. [tux.org]? Are you could sink your
I'm not in any way defending the absurd "free speech zones", but I also don't think you can really say Iranians are free to protest.
At least here in the U.S. they don't gun you down in the street, as they did in Iran after the election.
Civil disobedience is STILL disobedience!!
Sorry to disappoint you, but the "revolutionaries" are mostly urban youth (a lot of students there, obviously, which is why you often see those). However, that's not what the majority of Iran's population is - that comes from the countryside, rural agrarian folk, and they're rather happy about mullahs and Ahmadinejad. So at worst this won't be a revolution, this will be a civil war, and if the "more democracy" side wins, it will do so against the will of the majority (can you count the bodies it takes, already?).
I very much wish for a democratic Iran, but at this point it looks as unlikely as ever.
They're doing it wrong.
they should encourage p2p software use, increase the bandwidth, then everyone will stay home watching lost or house.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If your analogy holds true we should see some real changes in say 30 years.
As I watch the situation I look for only one barometer of popular dissent:
when I hear about a police and/or military mutiny. That's when things
are cooking.
537
After the Kremlin exited Eastern Europe, the peoples of each nation in Eastern Europe rapidly established a genuine democracy and a free market. Except for Romania (where its people killed their dictator), there was no violence.
In Iran (and many other failed states), no external force is imposing the current brutal government on the Iranians. The folks running the government are Iranian. The president is Iranian. The secret police are Iranian. The thugs who will torture and kill democracy advocates are Iranian.
If the democracy advocates attempt to establish a genuine democracy in Iran, violence will occur. Why? A large percentage of the population supports the brutal government and will kill the democracy advocates.
Let us not merely condemn the Iranian government. We must condemn Iranian culture. Its product is the authoritarian state.
We should not intervene in the current crisis in Iran. 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. Right now, the overwhelming majority clearly oppose the creation of a liberal Western democracy. The Iranians love a brutal Islamic theocracy.
The Iranians created this horrible society. It is none of our business unless they attempt to develop nuclear weapons. We in the West are morally justified in destroying the nuclear-weapons facilities.
Note that, 40 years ago, Vietnam suffered a worse fate (than the Iranians) at the hands of the Americans. They doused large areas of Vietnam with agent orange, poisoning both the land and the people. Yet, the Vietnamese do not channel their energies into seeking revenge (by, e. g., building a nuclear bomb) against the West. Rather, the Vietnamese are diligently modernizing their society. They will reach 1st-world status long before the Iranians.
Cultures are different. Vietnamese culture and Iranian culture are different. The Iranians bear 100% of the blame for the existence of a tyrannical government in Iran. We should condemn Iranian culture and its people.
"At least here in the U.S. they don't gun you down in the street, as they did in Iran after the election." Where were you in the 60's and 70's? Write off Kent State as a one off mistake but then what about the civil rights movement? Hurts when you fall off that high horse doesn't it?
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
Especially those who are expert in Parkour? So that the net is not needed.
so why they get news
I remember my university did the same, l'Universite Laval in Quebec when we organized some protests. For instance a monopoly they wanted to grant to, and did, to Sodeco for all the restaurants on the campus. ...
But it is quite conservative. Maybe conservatives in Iran don't do better than conservatives in Canada... Could it be ?
Oh, let me remember, wasn'it Bush administration that prevented GIs to watch some medias during Golf War II ?
Finally, may be we got a censorship problem with conservative governments everywhere, from China to USA, via Iran, Tunisia, Marocco, Canada.
That waht we should fight against, and not think that censorship is the exclusivity of a government (foreign), a regime (communists !), a people (russians, no, arabs), a culture (african, arabic), and a religion (Islam !).
These are precious stereotypes to prevent us from defending our liberties (not freedom) and criticizing our own governments and their policies.
So yes, we should protest, and not only against Iran, but where ever freedom of speech is threatened.
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
Does this rural majority actually exist (a quick web search says Iran is 60% urban and rising fast), or is it the same kind of thing as Palin's "real Americans"?
In other words, is "rural Iran is the majority and supports the government" a propaganda thing being endlessly repeated by the Iranian government to try to convince dissenters that they're in the minority and resistance is hopeless? Given the way they rigged the last election, how do we know they didn't BOTH reduce opposition votes in the cities AND inflate government support in the rural areas? AFAIK, every failing government's PR mouthpieces claim majority support, right up about until the fall.
but don't take my word for it: allow an actual iranian to complain about ill-informed american armchair analysts who spout stupidity based on crap assumptions like yourself:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opinion/19shane.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They aren't fighting Islam, which is the root source of all their problems
Do you *really* believe that? Just how much do you really know about Islam anyway?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Oh, I have such a difficult time telling the difference between those two.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
please explain these miraculous invisible mechanisms
see in china, or iran, there are actual laws about everything being approved and monitored, there are actual large and well-staffed/ well-funded offices for doing exactly that, and severe punishments are doled out if the government doesn't like what it sees online or in print, and the strict party line has been brutally enforced on hundreds of occasions in the last couple of years
so please tell us how this is EXACTLY how it works in the usa. see as a simple sheeple horribly under the foot of american propaganda, i cry out for your "insightful" enlightenment on this matter
k thx
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not the Ayatollah
Not the Guardian Council.
Not Ahmadinejad
The Jews leasing the pipe to Iran decided that the surge of traffic last time could have brought them a few more little pennies and in anticipation to this current surge sent extortion letters to Iranian ISPs demanding lots more money. Like Jews do, always with the money. Iranians do not want to know that cockroach Jews control the Internet as well as all banks and businesses so the ISPs just told the Jews to fuckoff and the story was never released by the media. At least you can depend on Iranians not to be Jew puppets unlike fat American pigs.
NUKE ISRAEL AND LET THERE FINALLY BE A HOLOCAUST FOR REAL!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator Time to fire up the production line, and carpet bomb Iran with the things....then stand well back.
"It is morally wrong to initiate the aggressive use of force.." Of course, defensive force is fair game...
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?
Bah,
Last death throws of a failing regime. I feel horrible for the Iranian people right now, but thank god they don't seem to be taking this lying down.
It's like the 1960's over there, a huge boom of 'youth' and a repressive establishment to fight. Here's hoping the result of this revolution is a bit more friendly then the last, but more importantly that it treats it's people better.
Bleh. South Korea tried protests in the 1980 for democratization, and the military ended up killing several hundred demonstrators while troops were brutally restablishing control over Kwangju. South Korea has only had democracy since the 1987--and that's only if you believe Noh Tae-Woo, the previous dictator's buddy, was elected in a fair election. Otherwise, ROK has only had democracy since the mid-90s... and that covers the entire period from the end of World War II to present. :(
The Iranian government has already tried movie marathons. Perhaps people were tired of LOTR and they could try playing "V For Vendetta" ;)
I wonder if it is Iran slowing the Internet... ...Or maybe the U.S. or Israel or some other country with an agenda of war against them?
IMHO, it would be a mistake to equate what is happening right now in Iran right now with the 1960s of the west; the culture of the middle east in general and Iran in particular is very different. As others have said, the ayatollahs are quite popular with the poorly educated and rural majority of the Iranian population who are religious, suspicious of the west, and to whom information is very carefully metered and controlled by the state. Combine this with the repressive and violent nature of the Iranian regime and perhaps you will begin to see that nothing much is likely to change in Iran any time soon. In fact, it is my own belief that things will become much worse. An armed showdown between Iran and the west is practically inevitable now. The real turning point will come when Iran effectively withdraws from nuclear non-proliferation (I say effectively because once it becomes patently obvious to everyone that inspections are useless, it will be the same as if they formally withdrew from the treaty). Once that happens, it will only be a matter of time before Israel, and perhaps the United States, are forced to strike before Iran completes "the bomb".
Maybe it's not a smart move after all to cut internet. Free WoW would have done a better job.
Has anyone considered how cooperatively amazing the Iranians are? They are a large community working together for what they want. As an american, I am disappointed in how pathetic and lazy we are in fighting for our rights even if we are better off than Iranians in Iran.
This time around, the revolution WILL be televised (but apparently, just not in web-streamed 1080p).
I am just wondering if these oppressive regimes wouldn't have such a hard time subjugating their populace if the West wasn't supplying them with the means to exert their power.
Is the Iranian government technically able to censor/throttle the Interwebs? No. Most likely some US or European publicly owned company is supplying the technical capability to do this.
Does anybody know who this is as I for one would like to know and boycott their products.
Allah U Akhbar !!
We already have millions our brothers in Europe and America, awaiting the chance to slit your throats !
Allah U Akhbar !!
but how is that equivalent to the kind of control china and iran exerts, which is what i was responding to as an assertion by the grandfather poster
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
you describe
i however would like to know how that is equivalent to the brutal tactics china and iran use to control information in their countries, which is what the grandfather poster asserted
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
with the scenario you describe
what i take issue with is equivocating manufacturing consent with the brutal tactics used in china and iran to maintain control over their media, which is what the granfather poster was asserting
surely you do not assert that the process is you describe is the same as the tactics used in iran and china?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It won't be long; the religious despots pretty much all have colostomy bags by now, the youth have almost completely rejected their vision of how political Islam should look, and the middle aged religious moderates can see which way the wind is blowing and are making more and more reformist noises.
A society maintains continuity by the old passing on enough of their values to the young before they die. This process has clearly failed in Iran. The post-election protests showed conclusively to everyone in and outside Iran that the government only governs by force, not by even tacit consent. Theres more dark times ahead, but ultimately all the Iranian reformers need for victory now is patience.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"Answer: No they didn't. US did a coup in Iran 40-50 years ago and overthrow their national democratic government and returned the dictator "Shah" to power. people were forced to act more aggressive to put the Shah away. An aggressive act of revolution caused more aggressive opinions."
Wrong. There were maybe a handful of Americans within Iran during the revolution. The Iranians did all that to each other.
"Then a war was exposed to Iran by Iraq (Saddam) which killed almost 1million Iranians. The war was supported by most Arab countries + Europeans + USA. Arabs paid Iraq by oil and cash (around 200 billion) and Europeans and US gave them weapons etc (including chemicals for illegal chemical warfare). 50,000 Iranians are effected by chemicals provided by Europeans to Saddam."
Did you opposed the overthrow of Saddam? Which presidents did all this? Did you know that the US changes presidents from time to time?
"The same Saddam used those weapons against same Arab countries a few years later."
Well, he won't be gassing any Kurds or Iranians for a while.
"About your comment on Nukes I should say, USA is the only country which has both built and used nukes."
So? It's naive to assume that the USSR wouldn't have used them if they had won that race. Our use of them did two important things: ended WW2 (which Japan, Germany and Italy started, no the US) without a land invasion of Japan AND showed the world the horror of nuclear weapons. Which in turn prevented their further USE. Imagine the cold war without that knowledge.
"US has started around 50 wars in recent history. Iran has never started any war in last150 years or more."
Wrong. The US hasn't started ANY wars in living memory. Not one. We've joined two after being attacked. But we didn't start either of those and we tried to stay out of them. Since then we learned that isolationism and cruel indifference don't work.
"You want to condemn the 7000 years old culture of Iran"
The culture that exists there is not based on the culture that existed before. Once Islam took root there it became another culture. If Islam took root in the US in the way it did in Iran, it would be a radically different culture.
Furthermore the sins and virtues of the ancestor are not the descendant's to bear. i don't care if 1000 years ago some Iranian did $somethingMiraculous or $somethingAwful. All parties involved are dead. i could no more credit an Iranian born 20 years ago with the Cyrus Cylinder than i could a German born 20 years ago for Mein Kampf. It doesn't matter in the slightest.
The person you replied to wasn't condemning 7000 years of culture. Just the culture since 1935 or so.
Don't worry, i'll tell the girl at the campus bookstore how multiculti you are. She'll be impressed.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Wrong. There were maybe a handful of Americans within Iran during the revolution. The Iranians did all that to each other.
Did what to each other during the revolution? Khomeini was not known by 95% of the people in Iran 2 years before revolution until he went to France and western media started to cover him and bring his voice to Iranian. When the airports during the revolution were closed it was France government which allowed Khomeini to embark the airplane and forced Shah's regime to allow it to land in Tehran airport. In my opinion, shah was replaced by Khomeini because it was believed islam can counter communism better than Shah. The same strategy was used in Afghanistan. Taliban was trained by the US to counter communists in Afghanistan.
Did you opposed the overthrow of Saddam? Which presidents did all this? Did you know that the US changes presidents from time to time?
No I didn't. I know the president changes but I also know it does not remove the wrong doings of previous presidents.
Wrong. The US hasn't started ANY wars in living memory. Not one. We've joined two after being attacked. But we didn't start either of those and we tried to stay out of them. Since then we learned that isolationism and cruel indifference don't work.
World believes you!
Don't worry, i'll tell the girl at the campus bookstore how multiculti you are. She'll be impressed.
Girls in the Campus already know. Both those in my lectures and outside. You do not need to bother yourself. And you are not as funny as you think.
Err.. young people from internet predators.
Iran has many young, bright, well-educated people who resent the government's interference in their lives. Now they have been given a strong incentive to find ways to route around this government censorship. I can only hope that they will share the methods they devise with the rest of the world; we all need help routing around censorship. (Yes, the same argument applies to the great firewall of China.) What we really have here is an arms race, and I expect the greatest strides in promoting freedom to come from the citizens of the most oppressive regimes, since they have the greatest incentive to do so.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Remember kids: /. is just like Digg. If you disagree with someone mod them as a troll to bury their comment. It's not censorship when YOU do it!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Bullshit... these people are subjugated mainly because foreign governments view their slave labor as more valuable than their freedoms. The treaty establishing a communist, completely un-free state (China) as "Most Favored Nation" by the "bastion of freedom" (USA) was the wrong move. Instead we should have included fair trade protections in our treaties to encourage these nations to stop their slave labor practices, because it undermines the standard of living across the globe when we simply say "free trade" (ie, race to the bottom for wages and standard of living).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
It's a Biblical reference, one of the Jesus parables.
I didn't initially mention that in order to avoid the religious angle. (FWIW, I intended it as more of a general literature reference than a religious reference)
Matthew 7 (NIV)
[3] "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?]
[4] How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?
[5] You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
So Iraq shot first?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.