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Iran Developing 'Halal' Domestic Intranet
An anonymous reader writes "The WSJ reports that Iran is beginning a crackdown on Internet use by its citizens, creating new blocks against foreign content and stepping up surveillance of browsing habits. Internet cafes in Iran have 15 days to set up security cameras and start collecting information on customers, and people are finding it increasingly difficult to use social networking sites. The new restrictions are likely being implemented now to head off dissent and protests about the upcoming parliamentary elections. According to the article, 'The network slowdown likely heralds the arrival of an initiative Iran has been readying—a "halal" domestic intranet that it has said will insulate its citizens from Western ideology and un-Islamic culture, and eventually replace the Internet. This week's slowdown came amid tests of the Iranian intranet, according to domestic media reports that cited a spokesman for a union of computer-systems firms. He said the intranet is set to go live within a few weeks.'"
creating new blocks against foreign content and stepping up surveillance of browsing habits
Sounds familiar for some reason.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Why is Iran doing this to itself? It's so needlessly self destructive. Just stop it. Behave yourself, the sanctions will come off, and we can all get along. Aggressive posturing, locking your people off from the world, and developing variants of nuclear technology best able to produce weapons grade material... what is the point of all this? Best case you'll get a bomb and then what? Hundreds of years of MAD as the rest of the world contains you? That sounds like loads of fun. If you just stopped all this we could normalize relations to everyone's benefit.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
and has begun implementing it. The corporations will be pleased!
The good news is that soon, we may have some left over IPv4 again.
This gives a strong signal that your ideology doesn't stand up to whatever else is out there. Alright, so it's strongly worded against "the west", for which read American Freedom And Liberty And Democracy (And Republicanism) And Commercialised Happiness For All[tm], which is strongly evangelised by the world's highest tech army, navy, and air force. Before you bristle: Yes, there is a strong case to be made that it is in fact an ideology with religious fervour backing it to match. The lot of you aren't nearly as Christian as you think, you're American[tm] first. Bristle on.
The point, however, is that ultimately such a strong signal of negativism will be self-defeating. They're defining themselves as something they are not, instead of as something they are. The more they have to denounce most of the world to keep to their way, the more of their people will stray from that way and find other ways to life fulfullment. And it leaves lots of attack angles for competing ideologies. Nevermind the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, that's just the pry-bar. The more you clam up, the more others will poke at you.
in terms of popularity halal will rank above gopher but below telnet
I doubt Iranians want any of this. But the three power blocks have to posture and jockey for position, and this is what happens.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The expression is "for all intents and purposes", and your statement is incorrect, the internet would still function if the USA went boom.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
And I mean clerics of every stripe and color. Once you've empowered people with the weight of "the word of gawd", allowing them to govern based on that authority is a recipe for suffering and injustice. It has always been so, and it always will be. The world will be a far, far better place when we can tell all the believers to STFU about what everyone else must do and to focus more on walking their own spiritual path.
Yeah, okay, that was a cheap shot. But I couldn't resist. And while the U.S. is certainly no Iran when it comes to repression, it is good to keep in mind that there is a slippery slope that's all too easy to slide down into once you get going. Right now the government/coporatocracy in the U.S. doesn't face any real threats, so it's easy to be generous with freedoms. But what would happen if something like the Occupy movement really started to gain ground and actually started shutting down cities and firebombing corporate HQ's? Would the powers-that-be hesitate to start using some of that power we've given them to start suppressing internet access here? It's already happened here at least once, on a smaller scale.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"Religion" in this context is just a means of control; you can't do that because God says so, you must do this because God says so and you can't question God's word so get off Facebook. I'm willing to bet that the Mullahs won't restrict themselves to this "halal" Irannet, no, they'll need to be able to check on all that corrupting, un-islamic content to make sure it's still out there and all corrupty - you know, for the good of the people.
Religion is a tool, it can be used for good or evil, help people or harm them, but in general when people in power get hold of it they move firmly into the "harm" category.
They should call it "Crackdown on Internet Piracy" and they would become best buddys with some congressmen.
The current political elite is loosing it's grip. So it is only natural that they start fighting. Same here, same there.
This can only work towards continuing the psychopathic elite control over people and causing problems that otherwise would not exists.
It is by the people of the planet talking with each other that the power of the psychopathic elite lose their power over the people, as the people find there are no ghost in the closet or monsters under the bed in reference to people around the world.
Such censorship and control need to be deteriorated in every way possible..... As a matter of peace.
When you see "US", "China", "IRAN" etc., in the news in terms of insinuating all they people of that country...... you are being lied to. i.e. US is going to war... does not mean the people, but rather the few who think they are a country called the United States and lied their way into a position of commanding war.
The mass majority of the people of this planet are to busy living their daily lives to have time for war. Its only the few who play their game at the expense of the rest of us. And they need to be ended.
I thought it was "all intensive porpoises". Though I don't understand what dolphins have to do with the US internet.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
... the same, oups wait, no they never had an open Internet.
Iran is on the Internet since approx: 95/96 (ok at that time they had about 19200b/s to connect them to the university of vienna...
KSA started to authorise Internet only around 2001 and only after they had installed a "country firewall"....
But all this shows that Internet is a tool, not a "solution"... Internet does NOT "route around sensorship", people do using the tools at hand, and it is not easy because the means of sensorship are many...
Making in country hosting very expensive and throttling international internet access are the most comment means...
Manipulating the search engine, either because you own it, or through various "preservation" laws another...
Make laws about what you are allowed to say is an all time favorite..
The Jim Crow laws have been repelled, including the laws forbidding to critisize them, but equivalent laws about drug policies, Intellectual properties policies, etc... abound in all the world...
With the effect that even with an "open internet" the info might "be there", but no local person therefore no "locally connected" person can point to it... (thing thai monarchy for an example concerning another "ally")
Only civic movements can change things, and even then "your mileanage might vary", (see the result of the "arab spring", now the new arab winter...)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX46Qv_b7F4
If I'm not mistaken...and I think this came from the PBS/Frontline eppy about it...wasn't the Mubarak regime's decision to cut the internet the last straw in their revolution? That is...when the cut the internet...things really blew up. Pissed the ppl off big time.
In Iran, they build a halal closed internet. Here in the US they let the entrenched media conglomerates control the flow of information by abusing civil law to maintain a de facto cartel.
Iran has a state enforced religious code, in the US they privatize the enforcement to self serving corrupt economic interests that want to maintain the status quo by eliminating competition. Without meaningful competition there is no functioning capitalism.
The difference in only in the execution, not the result. The US version is more sophisticated, and the Iranian version is more crude. That's about it.
Why is Snark Required?
Yeah, it is not like there could be any secular reason why people might try to set up a national firewall...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_firewall_of_china
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOPA
Palm trees and 8
If you ever saw Big Cable going in and out of our FCC offices, you'd know something fishy was going on.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Actually, he borrowed the strategy from the CIA's playbook:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
Palm trees and 8
. OK, which Satanic US corporation has the contract to deliver this technology and support it?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Iran is pursuing the same approach as China. Rather than block social media sites, leverage their citizen's desire for them by replacing them with similar state-approved (sic - controlled) duplicates. Nothing new. I would be more interested in what Western technologies are making this possible, a more interesting discussion for Slashdot.
A big government program without Pork? Good luck with that...
But what would happen if something like the Occupy movement really started to gain ground and actually started shutting down cities and firebombing corporate HQ's?
Why would they have to shut down cities or firebomb corporate HQ's?
The treatment of "Occupiers" in public parks (or pseudo, "it's a park on private property that is required to be available to the public 24/7 by terms of agreement with the city" bullshit) was a good indication of how it goes down.
Step 2 has been SOPA.
Last time we had a movement like OWS, they were the Hoovervilles and the Bonus Army, and just like today, the Republican response (courtesy of Herbert Hoover) was to send in troops to beat them up.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
You didn't think they would just LET it happen, did you? This kind of change will require more than a few pounds of flesh.
...is that there has been this "Myth" that nothing can stop the internet. We've all heard the saying: the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.
Well I've always had a theory that it would only remain so until the powers that be sat around and figured out how to get the genie back in the bottle. There were those who claimed it could never happen, but I remember looking that the vast majority of the backbone of the internet is controlled by only a handful of companies.
I think a lot of countries have been waiting to see if countries like China and Iran can implement restrictions on the internet and frankly they've done so quite successfully. Has it been 100% successful. No. But it doesn't have to be. It just has to bee good enough to keep those that don't know technology trapped into a small little corner.
It's the fact countries like China and Iran have had enough success at it that we're now seeing it happen in the US, only we're calling it SOPA. Which is what I was predicting to friends and co-workers about 10 years ago that by 2020 the "internet" would become fractured and restricted most likely by law.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The USA follows a set pattern. They make the leader of that country look like a crazy warmonger, they say the country is going to attack us, they make it look like we've no choice but to pre-emptively attack them. They did this in Iraq too, if you care to check. The only reason the war hasn't started yet is because the USA was busy with other wars and doesn't have the resources/people ready to go yet.
We've been waiting more than 60 years for North Koreans to get a clue and a backbone, yet you think Iranians will wake up after half that time under the most cynically intolerant religious bootheel in living memory? It took being ground into dust by the world's two mightiest powers, with very outsize help from a third power that was no piker, to snap the people of the Third Reich and the militarized Japanese Empire out of their acquiescence to evil. And their respective religious fervor wasn't even driven by surrender of humanity to a supernatural deity in either case.
Hmmm. You know, if China quietly told the US it intended to invade Iran, somehow got permission from Russia, Germany, France, and Britain to do it, and could somehow convince the Pentagon that it could pull it off without getting Israel nuked in the process... it would be politically awkward (to put it mildly), but almost an epic win for the US.
On one hand, it would put China in direct control of much of the world's oil. On the other hand, China would buy most of Iran's oil output *anyway*.
It would nicely allow the US to outsource a nasty, bloody war, and would let CHINA's army get beaten up for once instead of ours. Americans could look at horrible things done by the PLA in Iran, say "Tsk.", and celebrate the return of $2/gallon unleaded. With China firmly in control of Iran's oil, global markets would be flooded by it (or at least, flooded by cheaper oil from elsewhere no longer being purchased by China).
The big wildcard is Israel. It wouldn't take much for Iran to destroy it, and for obvious political reasons, Israeli troops can't be allowed to go anywhere *near* Iran regardless of what happens there. I suspect that if China could convince Israel that it can be its reliable protector & get tacit (if grudging) support from Russia & European leaders, approval by the US would almost be a formality.
I would of modded you're comment up if had the points. It brung a knew incite to the this cushion.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
and just like today, the Republican response (courtesy of Herbert Hoover) was to send in troops to beat them up.
Republican? Try Political response. Republican, Democrat, it doesn't matter and hasn't mattered a damn for years now.
While I agree with a large part of your statement, don't put this on any one particular group - aside from rhetoric, there is no fundamental difference between the two parties.
Obama is a moderate Republican and Romney is a moderate Republican - regardless of with which parties they affiliate themselves.