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Iran Cuts Internet Access and Threatens Telegram Following Mass Protests (bbc.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader cold fjord writes: As seething discontent has boiled over in Iran leading to mass protests, protesters have taken to the streets and social media to register their discontent... The government has been closing schools and shutting down transportation.
Now, as mass protests in Iran go into their third day there are reports that internet access is being cut in cities with protests occurring. Social media has been a tool for documenting the protests and brutal crackdowns against them. Iran previously cut off internet access during the Green Movement protests following the 2009 elections. At the same time the Iranian government is cutting internet access they have called on Telegram, reportedly used by more than 40 million Iranians, to close the channels used by protesters. Telegram is now closing channels used by the protesters while Telegram itself may be shut down in Iran.
Now, as mass protests in Iran go into their third day there are reports that internet access is being cut in cities with protests occurring. Social media has been a tool for documenting the protests and brutal crackdowns against them. Iran previously cut off internet access during the Green Movement protests following the 2009 elections. At the same time the Iranian government is cutting internet access they have called on Telegram, reportedly used by more than 40 million Iranians, to close the channels used by protesters. Telegram is now closing channels used by the protesters while Telegram itself may be shut down in Iran.
Thank FCC, you caused this!!
... Brexit and learn, America!
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Threatens telegram? Something like this:
Stop rioting stop if you don't there'll be bother stop
END OF MESSAGE 53 LETTERS 17 CENTS
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Oooohhhh that Trump! I can't eat, I can't sleep! All I think about is Trump and I get so angry I just go outside and scream and scream!!!
It actually happens
Nothing like virtue signalling by screaming at a robot.
He's just like a monkey that's proud he jerked off in public and then threw a turd.
Iran was once a democracy until they elected the "wrong" leader and America and Britain fixed it by putting in the Shah. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As long as the rank and file soldiers and police don't feel that the internal turmoil in Iran won't be exploited by outside forces they likely will tolerate peaceful protests. There is a good chance the Iranian leadership won't order any kind of crack down for fear the police won't obey them. If the rest of the worlds leaders can resist opening their mouths there is a good chance Iran can be another success story like Tunisia.
I just saw this video on what's going on in Iran:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbXWFKttVs8
One thing I took away was this, it takes just one generation for freedom to die. If a totalitarian government can stay in power long enough for everyone that remembers what freedom looks and feels like then freedom can die. At that point people people don't know any better and expect nothing else. That's what North Korea has become. In North Korea they've had the Kim family in charge long enough that anyone that remembers the time before is dead, or at least weak and senile enough to be safely ignored.
The people in Iran had freedom roughly 40 years ago. If freedom is not restored soon then the people that remember what freedom felt like will be gone and Iran will continue in this darkness they've created for a very long time. This is Iran's last chance. If this current public outcry does not restore a democracy then expect Iran to become a nation like North Korea, shut off from the rest of the world and left to live in their own shit.
It's not like things are going well in North Korea right now. They just had an officer run the border with his own troops shooting at him. When he was recovered from the DMZ by South Korean forces he was found with evidence of severe starvation, in a nation where the military eats first. That's what Iran can look forward to if this revolt is put down, they can expect 50 years of starvation and misery.
I expect that if Iran falls then we can expect North Korea to fall not long after.
You're right!
Ban buildings right now!
#DeleteFacebook
Mesh networks implemented properly are much harder to shut down.
Makes it rather easy for governments (or anyone) to shut down a group. Log in and start saying a lot of violent garbage. Channel banned. Problem solved.
This news must come as a shock to CNN viewers because they've been running 24-7 coverage of that damn white truck that blocks CNN's view of Trump playing golf. Oh wait, this won't shock CNN viewers because CNN still isn't covering it at all.
If that were true... wouldn't the MSM be pushing it a bit more? Instead we have CNN on what? Day 2 or 3 of talking about a white truck.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
While the corrupted Iranian regime cutting access to the Net for fear that the protest will spread, the Western MSM is cooperating with the Iranian regime by doing everything they can to SUPPRESS THE NEWS !
Do we need 'mass media' when it is part of a censorship cartel?
...and terrorists, as used in Ukraine, Libya, and Syria. Prominent politicians including Howard Dean have lobbied for MEK, which was on the State Department's list of terror groups until people started asking why people like Dean weren't being prosecuted, when the government sent someone to prison for carrying a Hezbollah TV channel. Iran has been on the "regime change" list since they kicked out the Shah. Obama spent years threatening to attack Iran for a nuclear weapons program he knew they didn't have, and Trump hasn't been any better.
So, take these protests with a BIG grain of salt.
I don't care who you are* that's funny.
*I really don't care who you are.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
An even stronger reaction than in the U.S.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Nor in the US.
Americans have the right to bear arms, but not the right to use them. © 2017 CaptainDork
Look at the video footage of riots there. Protesters are using stone-age weapons. They aren't using #2A.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Now if only us Americans can not stick our heads in like we did in the 50s (deposing their democratically elected leader not less) then maybe, just maybe they'll have a chance to modernize and secularize.
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Whoah. WTF? I hate the trumptards as much as the next person, but you're just throwing fuel on the fire here. Login so we can ban you?
However, props for actually being honest and not just using socks to censor users. You guys need to be more honest about the censorship, and I guess this is a step toward that.
The AIPAC in USA is behind this.
Oh shut the fuck up. The idea that everything revolves around the US is stupidfuckingbullshit.
Rouhani (the moderate president) published how many tax rials go to unaccountable religious programs (e.g. directly into the pockets of the mullahs). This is the first time those budget carve-outs have been made public. Rouhani did it to provoke a reaction against the mullahs. It seems to be working. For now. He may have underestimated the strength of backlash and could be washed out on the same tide as them.
The sad thing is that if these protestors succeed, chances are the power vacuum will be filled be even worse assholes. That's what happened with most of the arab spring. And that's because tearing shit down is easy. Building up new institutions from the wreckage is really fucking hard and lots of powerful people would be happy to see Iran permanently hobbled. Not the least of which is Abu Ivanka al-Amreeki, incompetent as he is, incompetent malevolence second only to competent malevolence.
Also, we should remember Neda Agha-Soltan and pray that no one else suffers her fate.
For those that want the sound effect.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Yeah, because it's happened so often and stuff.
Oh, wait. That was the doomsdayers. Day be trippin', yeah.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Your coherence is pretty low. But I think you are making a smugly ignorant rebuttal. Not unlike the alcoholic who says driving drunk is perfectly safe because he's never crashed his car, yet.
To which I reply that there are more than a couple (public) stories of Armageddon avoided by the slimmest of margins. And that was when highly competent and informed people were running things, not idiot hot-heads like today.
For example:
Soviet officer who averted cold war nuclear disaster
Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a secret command centre outside Moscow on 26 September 1983 when a radar screen showed that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched by the US towards the Soviet Union.
Red Army protocol would have been to order a retaliatory strike, but Petrov – then a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel – ignored the warning, relying on a “gut instinct” that told him it was a false alert.
World War Three, by Mistake
President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asleep in Washington, D.C., when the phone rang. His military aide, General William Odom, was calling to inform him that two hundred and twenty missiles launched from Soviet submarines were heading toward the United States. Brzezinski told Odom to get confirmation of the attack. A retaliatory strike would have to be ordered quickly; Washington might be destroyed within minutes. Odom called back and offered a correction: twenty-two hundred Soviet missiles had been launched.
Brzezinski decided not to wake up his wife, preferring that she die in her sleep. As he prepared to call Carter and recommend an American counterattack, the phone rang for a third time. Odom apologized—it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications device at NORAD headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents.
A similar false alarm had occurred the previous year, when someone mistakenly inserted a training tape, featuring a highly realistic simulation of an all-out Soviet attack, into one of NORAD’s computers. During the Cold War, false alarms were also triggered by the moon rising over Norway, the launch of a weather rocket from Norway, a solar storm, sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds, and a faulty A.T. & T. telephone switch in Black Forest, Colorado.
Maybe if America and its allies (mostly the UK) hadn't gotten involved in Iranian politics in the first place by ousting Mohammad Mosaddegh then we wouldn't have the current mess in the country.
Yah, so, whats your point?
Mosaddegh was removed in a coup. Not mass protests across cities and towns so small nobody outside of Iran has even heard of them.
These are the protests of the Iranian people, by the Iranian people, and for the Iranian people. Foreign intervention could probably help the regime crush them, but no foreign intervention could motivate this many people to risk their lives. Especially not intervention from a country that has officially declared that they will refuse anyone seeking asylum if the protests are crushed.
The real question you should be asking is, why did it take the US media(and most of the western media) so long to do any stories on this in the first place. My guess? There's another journolist type organization deciding what "type" of media to present again. This stuff was all over Japanese media well latish 3ish days ago now, it was in the A section of the Mainichi Times print publication, right next to the article on Japan looking at full revoking article 9, or partially rewriting article 9 of their constitution to allow proactive military defense with the increasing of China in the Sea of Japan and N.Korea. It however isn't in the english online daily or the JP online daily, though the article 9 story is, but it was published early(10am) on the 30th.
Om, nomnomnom...
Their own gold and cash we had stolen from them after they dared rebel against the CIA-installed dictator.
Never happened. When even Mossad will tell you Iran had no nuclear weapons program, why do you American Exceptionalists even bother pretending otherwise?
Well, with the internet shut off, they had to send the angry missive SOMEHOW! ;P
So Telegram has begun shutting chats at the behest of government bodies.
Well. That didn't take long.
So much for Telegram being the hard-ass impossible to influence "we never take bribes or listen to threats" messenger.
Fork, anyone?
This wanker threatens to ban people for saying shit on the internet? awesome place we got here.
From what I gather Iran was never much into religion until US backed regime of Mohammad Pahlavi killed off all secular politicians, because "secular" + "non aligned with US" means "communist" to US overlords. And religious people are easier to control.
You realize that's a troll account, right?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
As for what has been transpiring in Iran, that's not their priority
'specially after O "invested" $150 billion in the Mullah's regime, something a normal Iranian govt might give us for free.
The real question you should be asking is, why did it take the US media(and most of the western media) so long to do any stories on this in the first place.
I'd definitely suggest asking themselves why they're following those news-outlets, if they are not covering various stories.
(Also, I've been following "western media", it's in there)
People like the mullahs found the Telegram app to be an ideal tool for the terrorists they promote to exchange encrypted messages. Apparently now it has come back to bite them.
Correction it's in there now. Two days later, in a country that lives and breathes news and money, and the stock market doesn't goto sleep between boxing day and the 31's unless it's a weekend.
Om, nomnomnom...
I'd make a distinction between "western media" and "US media".
I live in Brussels (Capitol of EU), and heard about the protests earlier.
On the one hand the mainstream will catch on quick enough: They know a news bandwagon when they see it and since Trump has joined the Iran hawks and they're going all out again to stir up conflict, so expect a lot of news from evil Iran and demonic Hezbollah. But on the other hand there is a lot of powerful opposition who think war with Iran is a bad idea and that often means the media will be conflicted as well.
Fun detail. Iranians are the main enemies of "ragheads", aka arabs. They're persians.
Not that you'd know.
Just how little control "shareholders" have when grand scale geopolitics are at stake was demonstrated very well in Germany in 2014, when it was dragged kicking and screaming into sanctions against Russia that hurt shareholders severely.
When things are about grand geopolitical designs, shareholders are told to suck it up and shut the fuck up.
TL;DR
Volume does not add value.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
So you're optimistic about the actual length of WW III.
Shareholders aren't.
But dancing on the rim is very possible.
For Reference, see Afghanistan.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I'd make a distinction between "western media" and "US media".
I live in Brussels (Capitol of EU), and heard about the protests earlier.
I wouldn't. Nearly all of the big "byline" companies are based out of the US, even AFP has it's primary newsroom in the US.
Om, nomnomnom...
For a better reference, see length of Japan staying in the war after nuclear bombs were dropped.
P.S. Yes, I can argue the case that bombs were just the official reason, and actual reason was USSR breaking neutrality and making successful landings from the West too. Does not adjust the analogy to analogy point.
Many of those secular politicians were in fact actual Communists.
Come on now. Those Big IT corps that support and enable the Iranian internet black-out are probably all big supporters of net neutrality.
They would never help a dictatorship limit access to the internet? It would go against their sacred principles of open and unfettered access to the Internet.
Oh, Nevermind. It is just all about the money for those guys too.
See, if you disagree with me you are just like this guy! Who wants to be that guy? Not even that guy, which is why he posted AC.
Thanks for shoring up my position so well! I'd add you to my Christmas Card list but, you know, AC. Happy new year friend!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Japan was not an economic powerhouse back then and "globalization" was not a thing.
Also, America is the only country to ever use thermonuclear weapons.
Because there was no comparable retaliation, analogies fail.
Today's border-less corporations will sell and transport weapons to any and all sides, but they will not allow annihilation of the customer base.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Yeah. Their own gold and cash.
You can take it out of the hundreds of billions you owe them for overthrowing their democracy, backing Iraq when it invaded Iran, shooting down one of their passenger jets murdering all crew and passengers, and the decades you spent supporting a torture-loving dictator.
Dipshit.
What part of "even Mossad admits Iran has no nuclear weapons program" did you have a hard time understanding?
That's exactly what "they don't have a nuclear weapons program" means, dipshit.
You aren't winning any points.
Is /. a game, and I'm looking to level up?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Westerners sure love Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Japan was a massive economic and military powerhouse before the WW2. Globaliation started being a thing in 1800s. You should stop spewing opinionated falsehoods.
P.S. You really should read history, especially on your last claim. Weapons export to customers in other countries and wars not being controllable by said exporters was a thing for literally millenia. I could cite examples going all the way back to fall of Constantinople and beyond.
Too late with that thought. German relationship with US is already in the gutter due to political machinations of the elite that thought Clinton was a sure bet in last presidential elections.
Current administration views Germany as an openly hostile state in terms of economic cooperation. To US, economic cooperation traditionally is purview of national security first, and economy second. Reason for this is obvious when you look at portion of the total GDP that comes from domestic vs foreign trade and then compare to other countries. US built the current trade order, but it never invested itself in it to an extent even remotely similar that its allies did.
As for the rest of your broad and rather ignorant generalisations, I'll let you have them. If you even remotely think that US/European allies didn't for example play the Israel situation as "good cop/bad cop" scenario to avoid Second World getting the "primary sponsor of other side" spot, I have land on the moon to sell you.
Until we intervened. There are pictures of Iranian girls in short skirts from the 50s. Hell, the war in the middle east was basically caused by the west dividing up the country the way we saw fit ignoring Geo-political boundaries...
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