Iran Slows Internet Access Before Student Protests 289
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."
Re:Hub and spoke control (Score:5, Informative)
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.
What makes you think they don't route everything through a central location already?
Here's an analysis of the outage immediately following the presidential election [renesys.com]. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Re:Proxification? (Score:2, Informative)
Yep - we're free to face jail time for taking a 4 minute video with a copyrighted movie in the background, for instance. Taste that freedom!
Re:In Australia (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Everybody needs a little revolution now & a (Score:4, Informative)
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.
you'e a pessimist, and you are ignorant (Score:5, Informative)
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 [nytimes.com]
Re:How long can they make it last? (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. He represents exactly the opposite. The very rich and powerful Revolutionary Guards, evident of his extremely corrupt cabinet ministers some of which are so rich that the parliament had to spend days deliberating how to give them a confidence vote and not raise questions about the way they got that obscenely rich in the first place.
If you actually followed the events instead of dreaming them up, you would have noticed there was groups of people from different all classes protesting. The poor are especially pissed of at Ahmadinejad because he promised to fight corruption, reduce inflation and get them jobs. He then became a symbol of corruption, doubled the inflation which hits the poor most and broke unemployment records.
Re:the american government controls its media? (Score:3, Informative)
You don't need laws when the biggest media are eating whatever they are fed by your administration.
Where were their doubts about the justification for invading Iraq, voiced at the time freely in other countries?
Hey, it's beneficial I guess when media conglomerates are one of the biggest campaign contributors...on both "sides".
Re:Proxification? (Score:2, Informative)
You act as if the US stole freedom from someone. No. We're not perfect, we've got a hell of a lot to criticize, but give it a rest with the anti-American crap.
Removing a democratically elected leader in favour of a crazed despot so that you can keep getting cheap oil [wikipedia.org] is stealing freedom from someone. The UK were just as much to blame for Iran, so it's not like it's just a US thing, but it was a seriously bad thing to do and still hasn't been put right. Your points have some merit, but the anti-American (and anti-UK) stuff is not un-justified simply because some other countries were/are badly run before/after the attempts to interfere with their governments. What would things have been like if we had left well alone?
From people I've spoken to, the anti-American feeling in Britain comes from a mixture of:
1. The US does do the things mentioned by the GP far more than any other country does. Killing civilians is always wrong and the reasons are rarely good enough to counterbalance the harm, so it winds people up to see it happening.
2. Americans often take the line that it's not such a big deal for other people/countries to be devastated like this, as if it doesn't matter or it was needed because they're not very civillised anyway (like you hint at above). To be fair, I think all people feel this way about their own country's military action, but seeing as the US does so much more military action these days, it just shows more. Still not nice to hear though.
3. The 'freedom' thing. Most people's definition of freedom involves being able to choose their own political leaders and to not get bombed, so it's clear to an impartial (non-American) observer that the Freedom often spoken about means 'freedom for us to live as Americans' and not 'Freedom for everyone to live as they choose without interference', which is what it should mean. It kind of adds insult to injury when people claim that e.g. Iraq was about Freedom, when it was clearly about Oil.
If US foreign policy shifts towards helping other countries for the sake of it rather than for strategic benefits, then I think the anti-American feeling will start to fade.
Re:It's called manufacturing consent (Score:1, Informative)
We're at war with Iran, we've always been at war with Iran. We've never been at war with Iraq.
Erm... What? Am I missing something here?
Read 1984.