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Censorship The Internet

Iran Cracks Down on Internet Sites 866

Posted by michael from the no-blog-for-you dept.
Dan Brickley writes "It appears that Iranian ISPs have been ordered to block a large number of popular Web sites, including weblogging, community, chat and email services. Web (particularly weblog) use has been increasing rapidly in Iran, with 64000+ weblogs published by Iranians via various sites. As of today, if the news is correct, the majority of these may be inaccessible to their authors, as will the email (eg. Yahoo) services they use to communicate with friends, colleagues and family worldwide. See stop.censoring.us and hoder.com for more details. The newly expanded blocks include PersianBlog, Blogger and the Google-hosted Orkut 'social networking' site, where Iranians come third after Brazil and USA, representing 7% of all users. How can we get our Iranian friends back in the Web?"
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Iran Cracks Down on Internet Sites More

Iran Cracks Down on Internet Sites

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  • Well (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:02PM (#11294013)
    We could invade and liberate them. We're right next door. Then the Iranians could write about how happy they are on their blogs.

    • Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)

      by Schemat1c ( 464768 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:57PM (#11294316) Homepage
      We could invade and liberate them. We're right next door. Then the Iranians could write about how happy they are on their blogs.

      Take a look at our current troop deployment. If this was a game of Risk it would be inevitable. Of course we should hurry up before Iran gets another card.

    • Not a great idea. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cente ( 785332 )
      I dunno if Bush would go for it. After all, I'm not sure if there's oil to conquest in Iran (like the only reason there was a "war" -read, slaughter- in Iraq)? We gotta find an excuse for the monkey to cash in on it, first.

      I think a country needs to "liberate" itself. The US had numerous bloody wars to get to the point to where its at. If enough people are against a topic in a country, they need to overthrow the powers that be themselves, that's all there is to it. Same thing goes to the whole "woman being

      • Re:Not a great idea. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by stupidfoo ( 836212 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @11:48PM (#11294584)
        woman being battered" in a few of the middle eastern countries. Sure, I think its wrong, like anyone. But that's *my* belief, not necessarily theirs.

        This whole worship of cultural relativism makes me sick. How can it be anything but unacceptable that people are beaten and horribly discriminated against just because they happen to be a female? My god people. The intellectual dishonesty is just amazing.
        Oh, and woman aren't just "battered".

        Iranians and international community expressed outrage at reported execution of the 16-year-old Ateqeh Rajabi on vague charges of un-Islamic behaviour. [iran-press-service.com]
        However, informed sources revealed that Ms. Ateqeh was sentenced to death by the judge, a cleric, because during the "trial", she expressed outrage at the misogyny and injustice in the Islamic Republic and its Islam-based judicial system.

        "The lower court judge was so incensed by her protestations that he personally put the noose around her neck after his decision had been upheld by the Supreme Court", the sources reported.

        Plenty of pictures. They string her up using a standard construction crane and leave her their hanging for everyone to see.

        Friday 27 August 2004 in the Germany-based internet newspaper Iran Emrooz, Dr. Hoseyn Baqer Zadeh, an Iranian human rights activist observed that the laws of the Islamic Republic are the "most inhuman, segregationist, insulting and discriminatory" against women.

        • Re:Not a great idea. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by aussie_a ( 778472 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @04:21AM (#11295652) Journal
          This whole worship of cultural relativism makes me sick. How can it be anything but unacceptable that people are beaten and horribly discriminated against just because they happen to be a female?

          How can it be anything but unacceptable that people are denied equal rights just because they happen to be homosexual?

          How can it be anything but unacceptable that people are sent to jail drugs where they are raped (and a lot of people's response is "eh, whattaya gunna do about it?") just for using drugs?

          If you agree with my examples then great, but many many many people who do agree with your statement but wouldn't agree with mine.

          For those that believe that Iran (or any other country) should be invaded because of how women are treated, just think about America being invaded because of how you treat homosexuals and druggies.

          • Re:Not a great idea. (Score:3, Informative)

            by kaiidth ( 104315 )
            The thing is, it is unacceptable that people are denied equal rights just because they happen to be homosexual, and it is unacceptable that prison rape occurs, and it is unacceptable that drug addiction is so unreasonably dealt with.

            All of these things are unacceptable, most particularly the first case since drug-taking is after all relatively speaking a choice, whereas outside fundamentalist theorising neither homosexuality nor being born female are 'a choice'. And yes if a country started stringing peopl

      • Not a good comparison (Score:5, Insightful)

        by The Tyro ( 247333 ) * on Saturday January 08, 2005 @12:59AM (#11295004)
        using domestic violence as an example... you're a few decades out of date.

        It USED TO BE in the US that the woman had to press charges against the man in order for the police to make an arrest. I know this not only from a law enforcement background, but from personal experience.

        One of my next-door neighbors growing up was a terrible alcoholic and wife-beater (he was also a physician. What a disgrace to the profession... but I digress). I can't remember how many times we called the police, because we could hear him beating her (things breaking, screaming, thuds, etc). The guy used to beat the living tar out of his wife... bruises, black eyes, cuts... I've seen better-looking barfight victims. She, however, would never press charges, and the guy got off every. single. time. We could have "minded our own business," but we felt an obligation to do something. I was but a lad, so I couldn't understand the dynamics involved... Needless to say, all their kids, save one, are now in prison.

        It took decades, but a sea change eventually took place. These days, Domestic Violence is a crime not only against the individual, but against the state. This allows the police to make an arrest whether the victim wants it or not.

        Sometimes the situation is bad enough, or the people co-dependent enough, that they literally need help to get out of their situation. I'm well aware of how that sounds... so spare me the vituperation for being patronizing. That said, I don't think the Iranian people would resent being free... and any way we could assist them in that effort is arguably the right thing to do.

        Of course, it goes without saying that we'd probably be ahead to first exhaust less-violent means of assistance.

      • Re:Not a great idea. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Razzak ( 253908 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @04:18AM (#11295645)
        I think a country needs to "liberate" itself. The US had numerous bloody wars to get to the point to where its at. If enough people are against a topic in a country, they need to overthrow the powers that be themselves, that's all there is to it.

        That would be great. Tell me. You're a poor peasant in a country that 80% poor and 20% rich. You and your 15 friends get together and build some rudimentary weapons (swords, etc). Now those four rich guys come by and they have two HUGE FRIGGIN TANKS.

        Explain to me exactly what you'd do.

        This ain't the 18th century. It is no longer difficult to retain power in a country with little popular support. The thought that every country should fix itself or it doesn't really want/deserve change is naive and heartless. Wow, and I'm the republican.

  • For closed societies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:03PM (#11294026)
    Complete control of information is required to stay in power. Lets hope that the people can get around this.

  • Proxy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spac3manspiff ( 839454 ) <spac3manspiff@gmail.com> on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:04PM (#11294031) Journal
    They can use a proxy to surf the web.

    just my .01 cent

    • They can use a proxy to surf the web.

      Whatever happened to those distributed annonymous webproxy projects that were started several years ago? I seem to remember one done by the hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow (the makers of Back Oriface) but I never really saw anything materalize.

      The problem with normal proxy services (anonymizer.com, etc) is that they can easily be blocked by government black lists on DNS and IP addresses.

      • Re:Distributed Annonymous WebProxy (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bahamat ( 187909 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @05:16AM (#11295762) Homepage
        I'm the sr. sysadmin for Anonymizer and we have a contract with VOA to provide free proxy service to Iran.

        It's based off of PrivateSurfing (which you can try out for free at the Anonymizer [anonymizer.com] homepage, sorry you can't surf /. with it...Rob hates me). Added features for the Iran proxy is full time SSL, URL encryption, Farsi language support, and we switch the proxy website about once a month (every time the Iranian government blocks us). We perform checks on the service from within Iran to see if our site is actually blocked (yes, it works), and we maintain a database of all known e-mail addresses that we can detect as being located in Iran. Every time we switch the proxy site we send an e-mail informing them of the new free proxy location so the citizens of Iran can find it. The sites are also broadcast via radio and TV into Iran by the VOA. To be honest, we're usually about a day behind the blocks, due mostly to time zone differences.

        The systems that run the Iran proxies are dedicated and used quite heavily. Much more than any of the servers that we have for everything else. The loadav is pretty high, and we're working on upgrading them in the next few months to increase capacity.

        Most of our customers are under NDA so I don't mention where I work much, but the VOA [anonymizer.com] is one of our very few public contracts due to it's anti-censorship nature.
    • All they need to do is block the main proxy list. After that, any attempt to use p2p proxy... they'll just block the port completely and only allow minimal use of the internet. Port 80, and nothing else. If that doesn't work, they're just going to turn off the internet. If they care enough to censor, I'm sure they don't have a problem completelty disconnectiong.

  • So blogs are offline... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:07PM (#11294049) Journal
    Go take a look at blogger some time. Seriously. There are a zillion blogs on there now, it updates so fast that you could post your own blog and not make it to the "Latest Updates" page and catch your post before more than 500 new items scrolled it off the screen.

    If everyone has a voice, no one really has a voice. Any single voice will be drowned out by many thousands of "Gee, this is my blog, I thought it would be a good idea to start one because my cat is so cute. I'll post pictures of my cat and I love Jesus."

    The main thing is that the Iranians have access to medical information, educational information, and worldwide news outlets. None of those are being squashed, even by the fundamental, right-wing Muslim leadership. They know that having good quality information is key to improving the quality of life in their country.

    Dissent is the only thing prohibited, but I doubt there is any country in which real dissent is permitted.
    • Dissent is the only thing prohibited, but I doubt there is any country in which real dissent is permitted.

      But how many countries prohibit dissent so openly and forcefully. The free flow of political ideas, even many of the horrible ideas that flow much too commonly here in the US must be protected. Obviously something was being posted on these blogs that was uniting Iranians who shared dissent or the government wouldn't be blocking access to the blogs.

  • Orkut (Score:3, Informative)

    by evel aka matt ( 123728 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:07PM (#11294050)
    I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of Orkut users don't miss their "Iranian friends" as much as you might thing. There's been a lot of bitching about them and the Brazillians from the English-speaking Orkut users. Can't say whether the complaints have any merit or not, but I've heard them in more than one place.

    • Re:Orkut (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fbform ( 723771 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:34PM (#11294202)
      Yeouch! Language wars on Orkut are quite the worst type of flamewar. It usually doesn't affect the communities I'm part of (mostly college-based), but many general interest communities aren't able to speak a common tongue even if they advocate one in the community rules. The trouble is usually when there's a serious discussion in language X, and someone gatecrashes with a message in language Y. All messages after that are in language Y, and nobody is able to read the whole discussion and make sense of it.

      On a different note, it had been several weeks since I checked my Orkut account. I logged in today (this story on Slashdot reminded me) and found I could not do anything without the server returning internal error messages. If this keeps up, it may soon die of its own accord, language and Netcraft be damned.
  • Some kind of open distributed web proxy might do the trick. Not unlike a spammer's botnet, but run voluntarily. Use something like Coral [nyu.edu] or random proxy servers for GET requests, and random proxy servers for POST and PUT requests.

    "The Internet [well.com] reacts to censorship [rikk.com] as damage and routes [linas.org] around it." - John Gilmore [brainyencyclopedia.com] (frequently misattributed to Howard Rheingold [uoregon.edu])

    • Whatever happened to Freenet? I'm not sure if it's an "open ditributed proxy" but wasn't the whole point of it to solve this kind of problem?

    • Re:A distributed, random web proxy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by spikedvodka ( 188722 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:12PM (#11294077)
      Some kind of open distributed web proxy might do the trick.

      Sounds good, how about tor http://tor.freehaven.net/ [freehaven.net]
      if a single (or even multiple) tor proxies get blocked, it will just go through a different one.

      it works nicely for me

      hrmmm... I wonder if it would get through the "great firewall of China" just as easily

    • Re:A distributed, random web proxy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cavebear42 ( 734821 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:16PM (#11294105)
      Technical problems require technical solutions.
      Political problems requre political solutions.

      Don't use law to stop file sharing in america.
      Don't use proxys to stop legal action in Iran.

      THe problem is a political one and we need a political answer. The people of Iran need to make it heard that they want blogs and such. Only they can secure their own freedoms. The best thing that we as a free people can do is offer assistance in helping their government learn that free speach is good.

      We could invade Iran (again) or we could train Iranians to hack but the reality of the issue is that beyond this, all we will do is put a band aid on a huge wound.
  • Easy... (help) depose the current regime.

    How ? Now that's the not-so-easy part. I fear the Bush administration might speed that along, but.. *eyes Iraq* ..the change should come within primarily.
    • Umm.. by helping people in another country overthrow their government arn't you participating in what these days is called 'aiding a terrorist organisation?' The problem with every country around the world passing laws against 'terrorism' and 'aiding terrorism' is that the world 'terrorist' has no universal meaning. Most times it is defined simply as "any organisation that is opposed to the current government."

  • Censorship (Score:5, Interesting)

    by omeomi ( 675045 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:15PM (#11294097) Homepage
    How can we tell them not to censor the web when we censor just about everything here at home. I mean, yes, the web is pretty well uncensored in the US, but TV isn't, and neither is radio. In fact, there's no free non-censored medium in America. You have to pay for Internet, Cable, Satellite TV, or Satellite Radio in order to have the right to free speech in a country who's first amendment to the constitution guarantees that right. How can we expect Iran to have free speech/expression if we don't really even support it?

    • Re:Censorship (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Uh, you're free to speak, and you're free to write. The broadcast airwaves belong to everyone, which is why they're government regulated. For access to them, broadcasters agree to certain terms. No one forces them to use that medium.

    • Re:Censorship (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ThisIsFred ( 705426 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:40PM (#11294232) Journal
      Your constitutional right makes clear that the federal government can't abridge your right to speak your mind, especially about "grievance" with your government. It doesn't say you have access to megawatt broadcasts for nothing. And there is a free non-censored medium: Hoofing it and talking to people face-to-face. Second to that, I'll take the Internet. While it isn't free, it's damn cheap, and arguably more relevant than TV or radio.

      Also, you contends that "we don't really even support" free speech. I can't think of any outstandingly unconstitutional abridgements of free speech besides The Sedition Act and the Feingold-McCain campaign finance reform bill, one of which was repealed. Clue me in here, please.
      • Correction: "Contend", not "contends".

    • Freedom (Score:3, Funny)

      by eMartin ( 210973 )
      Hmm...

      The president tells me that we have freedom. That we love freedom. That others hate freedom. That we must force them to embrace freedom. That we must make those who choose to live their lives differently understand what freedom is all about.

      That's good enough for me.

      Your "freedom" of speech might cause people to doubt that. It would actually hurt freedom. You don't want to do that, do you?

      Are you a freedom hater?
  • I'd find it pretty easy to believe that Google is in cahoots with the US Gov't as far as information sharing and data mining go.

    Orkut is a great way to find networks of people who are unfriendly to the Iranian regime. Skilled data miners can sift through the social networks and identify people to become CIA agents/informers/whatever.

  • Or rather, let the Iranian government do this. Let them put their fists down, inconvenience and stiffle their own people, but with just enough proxy servers and new services opening cracks that the people are always getting a taste of what's available to them.

    At some point, everybody in their country will understand what's between them and what they want.

  • Iranians our friends now? (Score:3, Funny)

    by liangzai ( 837960 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @10:27PM (#11294165) Homepage
    Well, just bomb them into democracy. This worked in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq, so I guess another campaign of liberation and christening by our American friends will do the trick once more.
  • Reports are in that Billy Mathews's, age 12, mother is blocking access to certain sites she deems inapropriate. "He was really into this Slashdot thing where they show pictures of a grown man's (deleted) being spread open. And don't forget that porn... it'll make him go blind." she was reported as saying.

    Billy was unavailable for comment but his press secretary released this statement: "Thats fine, when I'm 18 I'm so gonna look at all the porn I want. Until then I'll just use anonymous proxies. lol!!!!!111
  • ISPs have been ordered to block a large number of popular Web sites, including weblogging, community, chat and email services
    Oh yeah? Don't bother, we got it [slashdot.org].
  • How can we get our Iranian friends back in the Web?

    Hey Dan, Michael, let me give you a little hint: You can't. Or, as Stalin once said of the Pope, "How many divisions does Slashdot have?"

    The Islamofascist Mmullahs ruling Iran have made it quite clear they're immune to such chimeras as "international pressure." What are you going to do, impose sanction? Yeah, that worked so well with Saddam.

    Given a regime where critics of the regime have to flee for their lives [nysun.com], and where they executed retarded rape victims for the "crime" of having sex [freerepublic.com], what makes you think any actions short of armed revolution will get their Internet access back? Who are they going to listen to? Kofi Annan? Get real.

    There are only two things which might actually allow Iranians to get back their Internet freedoms:

    1. A full-scale liberation invasion by U.S./coalition troops, a very difficult and probably quite bloody task, or
    2. A "decapitation" strike that takes out the Islamist religious leadership, possibly some high level military assets, and probably as much of their illegal nuclear weapons infrastructure as we can locate.

    The chances of either being undertaken right now are slim, and the chances of the majority of Slashdot digirati support such a move are close to zero.

    • Are a Few Blogs Worth an Invasion? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by One Childish N00b ( 780549 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @12:12AM (#11294727) Homepage
      I'm pretty sure the loss of a few blogs is less damaging to the average Iranian than the loss of their life, which is something that's bound to happen if the US try another one of their 'liberation' stunts. Look at Iraq, where people are still dying nearly everyday because of Islamic militants setting off car-bombs to kill American troops and Iraqi 'collaborators'. Do you really want that to happen in Iran for the sake of a few blogging sites? At least with Iraq, Saddam had a proven track record of genocide against his own people, so perhaps the Americans had a good reason to invade, but the fact is there is still bloodshed of innocent people going on nearly everyday. With Saddam you can turn round and say "but he killed thousands of Kurds, that's far worse than what's going on now". What are you going to say about Iran when the death toll continues to climb long after Bush declares 'victory'? Are you going to complain about how those evil dastardly Iranians stopped their people reading John and Jenny Doe's blog post about how their toddler's potty-training?

      As for executing a retarded rape victims, that's not much worse than the US executing people found incompetent to stand trial, people suffering from severe mental illness and people professionally adjudged to have the mental age of an 11-year-old child [ncadp.org]. I could probably find more, but I remember that press release distinctly and had it bookmarked. Admittedly those people had committed crimes rather than been the victim, but it's really not that big a step. Lastly, don't get me started on the 'illegal nuclear weapons infrastructure' comment - you've got the biggest nuclear stockpile in the world, who are you (as a country) to call any other nation's nuclear infrastructure illegal? Does DRM come on tactical warheads now? Seriously, this is no reason to be blowing up anyone - it's just not worth it... and doesn't China have the 'Great Firewall of China' and executions for frivolous crimes? Oh, I forgot, they're too big for good ol' George Dubya to go after.

      George W. Bush: Always picking on the little guy.
  • America will not invade Iran because they have nuclear weapons and I think GW kinda likes how things are working over there-
    Adding a religious element to American politics seems to be working for him.

  • USSR vs. Iran (Score:3, Interesting)

    by randall_burns ( 108052 ) <randall_burns@hotmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Friday January 07, 2005 @11:24PM (#11294468)
    Information technology played an important role in the breakup of the Soviet Union-a bigger role possibly than all of Reagan's sabre rattling. It had simply become impossible for the USSR to regulate the press when printing had become _so_ very inexpensive and decentralized, using the tactics the Soviet government was willing and able to use.


    Iran is a different case. Their revolution has been much more recent. I'm not sure how popular the government is in Iran-but I suspect their ruling group is larger than in the old Soviet Union. Also, I expect the Iranian government is willing to maintain itself in ways the old Soviet Union was not.


    However, the technologies have changed too. For example, wireless internet technology has advanced quite a bit. If there is popular resistance to the Iranian governments internet regulations, technologies like Mesh [defactowireless.com] networks might be rather difficult for the Iranian government to be effectively control.



    If folks want to really do something, creating technologies that governments have trouble regulating may be the route to help here-however, it isn't just Iran that has issues in this respect. A net the Iranian government can't control, is one no government can control.

  • How can we get our Iranian friends back in the Web?

    Let them earn that right for themselves.

  • This is a good topical lesson for Slashdot readers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Friday January 07, 2005 @11:32PM (#11294517)
    For those that often post of the US as a "totalitarian" state, please consider that we can post just about any damn thing we like anywhere on the internet. There is no government control of what you read or post. (There may be government monitoring, but that is a different story...)

    Even in places like Iraq where some consider us a "dictator in residence" please note that anyone can run a blog any way they like, without censorship. Even if they are critical of the US in the region!

    Please, before you post again about what a facist government the US the the terrible repressions US citizens suffer take a look at places like Iran with real repression. The US has some annoying laws that have been passed but we are a LONG ways from being a truly repressive place.

    I know I'll just get flamed eight ways from Sunday for posting this, but it simply had to be said. In order to protect my own sanity (and free time) and encourage other posts I'll encourage other more silent people to come out of the shell and respond to any flamers I might get.
  • i am really beginning to think some people's brains are just wired differently than mine. here is a subject matter everyone seems to agree on: censorship is wrong, and here we have an egregious example of it from the iranian government

    and yet i scan the comments here and what do i see? anti-american sentiment

    how does that work?

    is the usa a friend of iran? does the censorship by the us government not look like a molehill in your mind compared to the mountain of that going on in iran?

    i honestly cannot fathom how some people think: iran does something evil... therefore, let me criticize the usa

    i'm not saying the usa doesn't deserve criticism, not at all: the usa does plenty wrong that needs to be examined and castigated

    but what i am saying is that criticizing the usa in the context of what iran does is simple, pure lunacy. it's alternately hilarious and horrifying to me how some people can have so little understanding of concepts like: perspective, scale, context

    people really have to stop obsessing about the usa. no, really, you look like a fool. a fair criticism of blindly pro-american people is that they are obsessed with the usa. but some of the posts here only prove to me that the same obsession lives in the heart of anti-american sentiment too, to the same level of monomaniacal stupidity

    guess what pro-american and anti-american people: there is more to the world than the just usa. really. the world does not revolve around the usa. for real. there are other cultures and peoples and governments out there. no, really. the world does not orbit the united states. for true.

    you'd think this simple painfully straightforward observation would be dumbfoundingly patently obvious and stating it would a cause for laughter and going "duh!" but then you read some of the comments in this thread. it's absolutely mystifying the obsessive one-dimensional idiocy of those talking about the usa in this thread. when the story is about the abuses of the iranian government?

    utterly dumbfounding, this one-track obsession. please, some of you need to wake up. some of you need to ditch the fashionable propaganda of the times and try thinking for once

    • Re:i honestly don't understand how some people thi (Score:4, Insightful)

      by WildBeast ( 189336 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @01:01AM (#11295021) Journal
      I've been going through the comments and most of what I read is about invading Iran because they're censoring the net. How is that any better?

      Can we criticize censorship without bringing an invasion into the equation? And heck a few years ago, I remember a time where many around here made comments favorably or unfavorably towards one US policy or another and yet the anti-american label was rarely used to reply to such comments.

      people really have to stop obsessing about muslim countries. the world doesn't revolve around them. there are other cultures and peoples and governments ou there.

      It really stinks. You criticize something in a foreign country, all of a sudden they wanna invade it. You say something bad about a US policy and you're labeled as anti-american. wth happened?

  • This is only a drill there is no need to invade (Score:5, Interesting)

    by asad ( 65703 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @12:14AM (#11294744)
    Ok I am glad everyone all of a sudden cares this much about the bloggers in my country. But a few facts.

    * I can't get to hoders website right now but I don't belive that anyone has verified the web blocking.
    * While blogging is popular in Iran it's not the next great revolution. It's a way for people to talk, browse for porn and do all the other things most college students do in the US.
    * The Iranian people are capable of figuring out a government for themselves. When theycouldn't take the Shah anymore they dealt with him.
    * As the student demonstrations showed a few years ago the regime still has a lot of backers, eventually Iranians will figure out what they really want and how much they care about fighting for it.

    In the meantime you can get a list of some english blogs written by iranians over at http://blogsbyiranians.com/ [blogsbyiranians.com]
    it appears to be down at the moment since I suspect it's hosted at hoders server but there is always the google cache if you want to look at it right now.

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