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."
Have they gotten to /.? (Score:3, Funny)
Clearly if I'm getting a frist psot on /. then they've gotten to us to!
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Yea, but then what would you call a revolution? Putting down your teacup with a clatter, standing up abruptly, saying in a stern voice "Good DAY to you sir!" and storming out?
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Actually, the Iranian regime is Shia, not mainstream Muslim. Shia represent a minority (estimates vary from 5% to 15%) of the worldwide Muslim population that the Western media lumps together. Mainstream Islam (Sunni, counting for between 805 to 90%) is hugely different from Shia, although the Shia people are allowed into Sunni countries freely and without incident (roughly 100,000 enter Saudi Arabia annually to perform the Hajj to Mecca, without incident).
In Iran, Shia are a majority, the only country in w
Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
People judge Islam by current practice, not ancient times.
Ancient times, it bears repeating, are over, past, kaput, done, no longer applicable.
There are zero Muslim countries where one has the freedoms we expect in the secular West. Not even Turkey, praise be to Kemal Ataturk for trying, qualifies.
I've seen the best Islam can do with an unlimited budget while deployed there (before GWoT) on a friendly basis. KSA, Turkey (limited budget but more Euro influence) Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi are all places no freedom-loving person would go unless deployed or making fat contractor money. The locals are friendly (bring social skills and a smile), but Islam sucks. Imagine the US taken over by Evangelical Christians of the Fred Phelps variety. If you are like them they like you. If not...
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Hey Anonymous Coward - if you're going to write something, at least don't cut and paste from your previous post (...your post from Iranian Crackdowns yesterday):
In the absence of an external interfering force (e. g., the army of the Soviet Union), the fate of a nation is determined by its people. Period.
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.
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That's a much older copy & paste troll...
(who also shows blatant lack of any idea about the processes that led to dissolution of regimes in Central Europe 20 years ago, in his second line; ot outright lies, no difference; later it gets only worse)
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So called "force multipliers" and, more broadly, the fact that the "absence of an external interfering force" is rather like the "rational self-interested agent". At best, it is a useful approximation of the truth, at worst, it does the truth considerable violence whenever it is employed.
In this case, for instance, a subset of Iran has its hands on the levers that control internet
Re:The Grotesquely Ugly Truth (Score:4, Interesting)
Answer: Yes, 15%-18%. In every single poll on the internet I have seen almost the same number. And no, they (people) won't kill each other for it. People in Iran do not have gun and it is illegal to have it. Besides Iranian society is considered an educated community (3.5 million are in universities from which 60% are women).
Comment: The Iranians created this horrible society. It is none of our business unless they attempt to develop nuclear weapons.
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.
Then a war was exposed to Iran by Iraq (Sadam) 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 Sadam.
The same Sadam used those weapons against same Arab countries a few years later.
About your comment on Nukes I should say, USA is the only country which has both built and used nukes. US has started around 50 wars in recent history. Iran has never started any war in last150 years or more.
You want to condemn the 7000 years old culture of Iran which has the oldest history of Human rights and has been one of the cultural roots of the human being and then support your own culture and people which have started almost 50 wars (in which more than 10 million are killed) ??? have you looked at the mirror recently???
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What goes for people on a personal level also counts for a country as a whole. Change starts by looking at yourself and trying to bette
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How about -1 Moral Leper and Apologist. Seems to fit your post.
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I have a feeling that people like the parent post are criticizing the splinter in their own eye rather than the log in their neighbor's.
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But you have both direct responsibility for the splinter in your own eyes and the power to personally do anything meaningful about it. Your neighbour, on the other hand, is half a world away and, in practical terms, it may be so distant to you that it could as well be a fabricated country that only exists in the media. And as if that wasn't enough, this isn't an "either/or" thing. If you feel compelled to criticize and complain about something half a world away then you should also feel the need to fight th
Re:Have they gotten to /.? (Score:4, Insightful)
The log "in your own eye" is pretty big. Witness the near constant half-accusations in the media about Iran at the moment. The repeated "some people think the elections were rigged" claim even when the US's own research suggests Ahmadinejad won the election because he really is very popular in Iran. A sudden rush of "look at the Iranian totalitarianism" stories. The constant exaggeration and air-brushing of the protests in the media. Mousavi supporters setting fire to cars? Nothing. Police arresting people? All over the news. Ahmadinejad does something questionable? Everywhere. Any questionable behaviour by Mousavi? Never reported. Ahmadinejad blames outside forces for formenting unrest - mockery. Mentioning that the US Congress has allocated millions to supporting opposition groups within the country and that two years ago the CIA were given approval by Bush to carry out destabalisation operations in Iran (both matters of public record) - most people don't know that.
You can only have an effective democracy if the populace is informed. That's true of Iran, and it's also true of the USA. If you want to know why we're suddenly seeing news stories about Iran everywhere and outraged people appearing online everywhere, the reason is simple and very scary. The USA thinks it might get dragged into a war with Iran by Israel and wants to get pre-emptive approval by its populace. Whether or not people think the USA should go to war or not, they should at least grant or withold their approval based on the actual situation. Not "someone was censored but no, we're not giving specifics" sort of stories.
I'm going to try and outline why I think the US is doing a media war on Iran. Apologies for length, but I could write triple this quite easily.
It's news all of a sudden mostly because there's a crisis with Iran at the moment. Iran may or may not be working towards nuclear weapons. We don't know for certain. They're working toward nuclear power which they have every right to and, in fact, if they have sense, really need to develop for a number of good reasons. But there are suspicions that they are also trying to gain nuclear weapons capability. Which given the threats to them from other powers, also makes good sense for them, but they deny that they are doing this. A lot of the intelligence comes from the Israeli intelligence communities who seem pretty confident that their is a nuclear weapons program and that, although nuclear capability isn't imminent, is on the roadmap (I've heard figures like ten years passed around, but also a couple of lower estimates). Anyway, say what you like about the Israeli's ethics, they have a Hellishly effective black ops^H^H^H^H^H intelligence community. If anyone knows what the Iranian government is up to other than the Iranians themselves, it's the Israelies.
Now we don't know that they're developing nuclear weapons. But Israel is serious enough about this that they're talking about military action. Now this bit is personal opinion, but I don't think a nuclear-capable Iran would attack Israel. Why would they? It would only invite similar retribution in kind. Plus Iran hasn't initiated a war of aggression in forever. Plus they have nothing to gain in material terms. Not even in political capital as even the Palestinians don't want to see Israel suffer nuclear strikes (they just want their own state and bit less bombing, please). If Israel went to war, the Palestinians would suffer more than anyone. But what a nuclear capable Iran would mean would be that the Palestinians suddenly had a big brother that couldn't be threatened and it would change the regional power balance quite heavily. It looks like Israel wont countenance that possibility, hence the talk of pre-emptive strikes.
Now sorry for having been so long-winded in all this, and that much of it has been about Israel, but it really is the elephant in the room. The nice thing here however, is that the USA is in some ways, finally back in the roll of the good guy (which is exactly what the r
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Well, neither one, as far as we know at the moment.
OTOH Yahoo is charging them between $30 and $40 for the contents of your Yahoo account. [slashdot.org] But it's still up in the air what business ties exist between the government and Google- and how much (and to what extent) they're charging the cops for access to your gmail account.
As for Slashdot, I guess it depends on whether law enforcement thinks your posts are really wor
Proxification? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone hosting tor ports to assist? I considered, but I'm nervous about having some /b/onehead abuse my address.
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Re:Proxification? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Proxification? (Score:4, Funny)
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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!
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Free to go to jail for unwillingly/unknowingly receiving a picture of a child.
Free to go to jail for someone else pirating something and clumsy morons tracing it back to us.
Free to go to jail for exercising the right of free use.
Free to be exploited first by corporate monopolies, then the government, then both at the same time.
That said, we're also:
Free to deny the holocaust or make "hateful" racist statements
Free to insult Turkishness
Free to insult the Thai monarch
Free to call for the overthrow of the gove
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Aw, come on man, carpet bombing is good clean fun
Right up there with dropping a nuke on someone else's city
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Flamebait because it's flamebait. The US is not perfect, far from it. We've done more meddling than we should have at times (case in point, the lunatics in Iran are our fault), but it seems like the US is the scapegoat/boogieman of choice when some crackpot dictator needs to justify their own regime or blame their problems on, however crazy the case may be (oh noes, we're ruled by an iron fisted dictator, our economy and human development index lag despite the fact that we're sitting on a huge pile of th
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Re:Proxification? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Proxification? (Score:4, Insightful)
Freedom of speech? You can hardly show tits on TV.
Even politically you impose self-censorship, at the least. What were doing your news outlets when the ones in the rest of world were casting serious doubts at, say, "Iraq has WMDs"?
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Even politically you impose self-censorship, at the least. What were doing your news outlets when the ones in the rest of world were casting serious doubts at, say, "Iraq has WMDs"?
Bad example since a) Iraq had recently had WMDs in the past and had disposed of their WMD and related technology without telling anyone at some point after 2001 (kind of ironic since they were claiming at the time that they didn't have WMD), b) nobody in the media knew enough to second guess the US government and its pretty pictures and fancy claims, and c) anyone who did have a real idea, didn't bother to correct the US's claims. The genuine serious doubts came afterwards when the US couldn't come up with
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I routinely handle DMCA complaints related to Tor node abuse. My stand
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I'm not sure how often my ISP cycles it. That's the thing to check, I guess. Sometimes when I run tor/provoxy, I get blocked by a few sites because the end node has been "spoiled" and the IP blocked.
Re:Proxification? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If all Internet traffic in and out of Iran is being slowed down, running through a proxy outside of Iran won't help because traffic to and from it will be affected just as much as everything else.
Not necessarily. That is, if the proxy did something like convert rich media to simple ASCII art it would provide a bandwidth savings and perhaps be useful.
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I'm kind of curious how many more situations like this will occur before people develop point to point 3G networks using old, root'd G1s and directional dishes. With the ability to just turn off the internet at will, eventually someone will develop a tethered G1 that can talk to other tethered G1s in a point to point situation. I think packet HAM radio does this to an extent already, but you should be able to push 10mb/s easy across p2p 3G packet radio, which then interfaces with a building's internal netwo
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I would imagine with directional antennas one could crank the gain up pretty high and still keep a usable signal, though I haven't tested that myself.
Slow? (Score:3, Interesting)
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They have also ordered foreign journalists to stop reporting and stay home for a few days, to prevent the beating of protesters showing up live for the world to see.
Let's do it right this time. (Score:3, Insightful)
They're one of the few countries without McDonald's' and I'd like to see them stay that way.
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Your sentimentalism sickens me.
How can your anti-globalization sentiment outweigh the fact that Iran is a highly oppressive, human rights abusing theocracy?
You wouldn't be able to set foot there to enjoy the McDonalds free streets, before being tortured, and used as a political bargaining chip.
Re:Let's do it right this time. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, emotions. Why can't we all be robots?!!!!!!!!
Read the post again. I want what the people want. They don't want a 14-th century theocracy and they don't want a bunch of greedy American meddlers entrenching themselves into the political infrastructure, exploiting the people, and cheapening a proud culture.
As the song goes, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss". The Iranians are trying to prevent that vicious cycle, unlike the apathetic Americans who encourage it.
Re:Let's do it right this time. (Score:4, Insightful)
And if any change does occur, it'd not stop sympathetic conspiracists from blaming the downfall of an Islamic state on whoever they damn well wish: The US, the UK, or a sinister cabal of Zionists.
Of course, this is discounting the major problem the anti-government Iranian students are facing; that those they oppose were revolutionary students once, ruthless ones at that, and know a few of the tricks.
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Most don't seem to comprehend that this is exactly what happens in the US.
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You make this sound like a good thing.
There's no need to prevent someone from saying or printing anything they think - most of their thoughts are already under control - if not, their readership interprets any unrecognised opinion within the framework set by big media.
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Whilst it's of course only human (the good side :) to care about fellow humans living in oppression in foreign lands, does it not seem strange that your government (and mine) will happily provide weapons used to kill these same individuals but as soon as there a more pressing need than immediate profit, their former business colleagues from abroad are denounced for anti-American behaviour?
It's called manufacturing consent (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:It's called manufacturing consent (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, what's the story again?
We're at war with Iran, we've always been at war with Iran. We've never been at war with Iraq.
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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".
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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.
Overt, covert, what's the difference?
Considering America's past, without proof to the contrary, I'm going to assume that we are and have been messing around with Iran's internal politics.
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http://www.whatwouldsatando.com/Newpages/rants/mcshit.html [whatwouldsatando.com]
Above: Authorities take Ronald McDonald away after they find evidence of his crimes against humanity. Crimes including. Hitler-esque, ritualistic slaughter of millions of animals, Subliminally tricking parents into feeding absolute garbage to their children, and posing as someone who gives a fuck about anything other that "a few billion more sold."
In short,
BurgerKing FTW!;)
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How long can they make it last? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How long can they make it last? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that it doesn't matter how it looks.
Re:How long can they make it last? (Score:4, Insightful)
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They don't much care how they look, but I'm sure no/slow Internet is hurting their economy. That involves money, which is much more serious than PR.
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:How long can they make it last? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, living in the US, I don't see a parallel there at all.
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They will continue as long as Nokia, Vodafone, and Siemans continue work with the Iranian government.
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I think it is more about taking away the tactical organization of the protesters. I wonder if you could build a true P2P communication app to run on phones. Servers inside Iran would be vulnerable to police action and servers outside Iran can obviously be filtered. Something like each node (phone, laptop, etc) keeps a list of the IP addresses of other phones in the mesh. New members can join by manually typing in the IP address of a friends phone. IP addresses in the mesh are distrbuted through the network.
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I disagree: The longer they can delay it the less fresh it becomes, the less people care about what actually happened, and the more easily can history be changed. They look their worst when they initially do it.
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Actually, the ones that aren't fine with the status quo no longer live in Iran. My co-worker left as soon as he could; so did a previous co-worker. They have families, and they don't want to have them grabbed or imprisoned just for saying, "this is bullshit!". (A right that we have in the West, but one that sadly, is not conferred to the rest of the world.)
They're both Engineers -- Iran's loss, our gain. At the rate they're going, they won't have anyone left in the country smart enough to change a light bul
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I think the only reason the US ever broke away from "big evil england" and lived to tell the tail is because we were too far away from the motherland for them to squash us like bugs.
In iran, things are far more topheavy and anyone who gets out of line can be whacked very easily and without a trace.
"Not on their end and not a technical glitch" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Streamed video is another cornerstone of fast distribution of information, though. Twitter, text messages and Facebook were essential, but it were the Youtube videos that really let the world watch the protests.
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Um, what? Nothing we were discussing had anything to do with the American end of things. I didn't even mention the United States and you think that there is a problem with "American naval-gazing"? Moreover, you seem to be a bit confused about the history. The US supported the Shah and the Iranian revolution happened anyways. Iran-Contra was years later when certain parts of the US government make backroom deals with the new Iranian regime. If anything, this history shows how democracy won in Iran out despi
Re:"Not on their end and not a technical glitch" (Score:4, Funny)
You are aware that the US has been running terror attacks inside Iran ever since the Bush administration, right?
No, we are not aware of this. I suspect after you enlighten us, we will find that you aren't aware of any such attacks either.
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I suggest you start enlightening yourself for a start then - it's pretty useless to argue the existence of a program that has been part of the public record since at least 2006/2007 by now. Especially with someone whose personal predisposition tells me he would rather want to feign ignorance of its existence altogether.
Do you have evidence of this program? Or are you going to keep teasing us?
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Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Everybody needs a little revolution now & agai (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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]
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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. :(
Bandwidth-wasting social sites (Score:2)
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Re:Bandwidth-wasting social sites (Score:4, Interesting)
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Isn't there enough decent free servers for this purpose?
You don't alt.binaries or long retention to communicate.
First post from Iran (Score:3, Funny)
Do have Comcast in Iran? (Score:5, Funny)
If so, that would explain everything.
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What's their downside? (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:What's their downside? (Score:4, Insightful)
"I feel for those affected, but at some point the people inside the Matrix need to do more to help themselves."
They are too comfortable for violent revolt, or they would violently revolt.
They aren't fighting Islam, which is the root source of all their problems, they are merely wanting their piece of the Iranian pie.
I'll be impressed when they have the balls to fight like the Jihadists they face, and wear IEDs into Republican Guard facilities.
What do you know about Islam?? (Score:2)
Do you *really* believe that? Just how much do you really know about Islam anyway?
there's a guy named sun yat-sen (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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 [slashdot.org]
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
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"bread and circuses" - encourage p2p use! (Score:4, Funny)
They're doing it wrong.
they should encourage p2p software use, increase the bandwidth, then everyone will stay home watching lost or house.
time to train some runner, perhaps? (Score:2)
Especially those who are expert in Parkour? So that the net is not needed.
Sounds Familiar (Score:2)
Oh, I have such a difficult time telling the difference between those two.
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The revolution will not be tweeted.
The "twitter revolution" that many people cheered about went no where, and the Iranian government used those tweets to put people in jail. If the Iranians are going to have a revolution, it isn't going to happen on social networking sites. They aren't even good to organize with, because the government can easily put out disinformation, and see where, and
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At least here in the U.S. they don't gun you down in the street, as they did in Iran after the election.
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However, during 8 years of the inept Bush administration, even he never had anyone shot in the street for protesting. (His VP may have shot someone in the face, but that's a whole other subject!) The point I was trying to make, was by comparing it to recent history. If we want to go back to Kent State, or the civi
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In fact there wasn't an analogy in my statement at all, so are you just responding to the wrong person, or what?
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Not the election, just the candidates. ALL of 'em, except Sarah Palin. I don't think she has enough active braincells to be a fraud.
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What you were not sarcastic?