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Iran readies domestic Internet system, blocks Google
- pooriaazimi 14y agoI can confirm this. http://www.google.com http://www.google.com still works, but https://mail.google.com https://mail.google.com or https://www.google.com https://www.google.com don't.
- w1ntermute 14y agoWhat's your plan once you're cut off from the internet? A satellite connection?
- mtgx 14y agoWould something like this work? http://www.blockaid.me http://www.blockaid.me
- w1ntermute 14y agoI'm not sure I understand. I thought Iran's plan was to physically sever the connection between its internet and the external one for the vast majority of citizens, similar to North Korea's Kwangmyong network[0]? 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_%28network%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_%28network%29
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pooriaazimi 14y agoNo it's not. The"plan" is to have an slow global Internet connection (about 256 kbps) that connects you to The Internet (which is of course heavily filtered), and a faster (a few MBps), domestic intranet that connects offices, government agencies, banks, news agencies, universities and schools together. Home users can sign up for this intranet thing too, so purchasing (and downloading) a movie (from a server inside the country) would take a couple hours, not a day. That's the "carrot". Blocking google or gmail was never in that plan; dangerous social networks, like Facebook, twitter and G+ are all blocked (and have been, for years) of course. But a search engine or mail provider theoretically should be left alone!
- tisme 14y agoThere is this a nice John Gilmore quote regarding the internet and censorship, I sure hope it works out that way in this case. The big difference between NK and Iran is that in the Iranian case people will know what they are missing.
- epscylonb 14y ago> The big difference between NK and Iran is that in the Iranian case people will know what they are missing. To begin with.
- jlgreco 14y agoExactly. Even one generation removed makes a hell of a difference. Hearing stories about something is worlds apart from actually knowing something. They are already 40 some years out from the revolution, the people who remember the proceeding society are starting to get old now. Even if the situation is not getting worse per se, they need to turn it around soon while they still have people who remember what it was like before, or they risk significant cultural loss.
- gaius 14y agoIt's weird how that works both ways. YouTube its hard to think is only actually 5 years old (possibly because it has been backfilled with content). But what people assume "has always been there" is actually quite fluid.
- shimon_e 14y agoAt least Iranian population is demographically and geographically more difficult to control than NK.
- andreasvc 14y agoThe quote is: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
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- zerostar07 14y agoA revolution
- pm90 14y agoYeah, because that really worked out so well the last time
- chimeracoder 14y agoWhich one? No, seriously, I'm not sure which one you're talking about (or if you're joking). Iran has had so many revolutions (many named after colors, interestingly). There was the one that everyone knows about (1979 - 'Islamic Revolution'), but there was also the White Revolution, the Persian Constitutional Revolution, and most recently the Green Revolution. I have a friend who is Persian and she often jokes that 'this next one had better succeed because we're running out of colors!'
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dmix 14y agoI always hear people say Iran has a significant amount of freedom-loving and mostly moderate people living there (for ex as seen in the green movement). How come we haven't heard of any protest against these moves to suppress the internet?
- nsns 14y agoYou'd probably find these on Tor, and in Persian (and putting the protesters in great personal risk). Show me one country whose people think like its government.
- dmix 14y agoI've tried Tor with a 24mbps connection, it's about as slow as 56k. While Tor is great, it's not a suitable replacement for the open internet until it gets faster.
- rmc 14y agoPerhaps those people have "disappeared"?
- shimon_e 14y agoI'd assume they don't like getting shot. A lot of Iranians have left the country especially in the past three years. I recently met a Jewish Iranian couple, who left Iran 10 days after their wedding, because the Iranian government confiscated their property claiming they are funding the Israeli government. They told me their neighbourhood has mostly been emptied of it's previous upper class (Muslim and Jewish) occupants in the past three years due to the baseless polemics. It sounds like the government is doing some population shuffling to protect it's control.
- tkahn6 14y agoLast time there was a major protest the republican guard suppressed it with rape and sniper fire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932010_Iranian_election_protests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932010_Iranian_elect...
- mikeash 14y ago
- epscylonb 14y agoThis could be seen as retaliation for stuxnet, widely believed to be a joint US and Israeli creation. I wonder if the creators of stuxnet are surprised by this. We tend to think of cyber warfare as being less harmful than the conventional kind. But could Iran doubling down on online security be more dangerous in the long run?.
- pliny 14y agoCould Iran filtering the internet be more dangerous than a conventional war between Iran and Israel or Iran and the US? No, absolutely not.
- epscylonb 14y agoI chuckled, the point I was trying to make is that I think this may make a conventional war more likely. The iranian regime seems pretty adept at holding on to power, and the ramifications of online warfare seem to helping them.
- shimon_e 14y agoThe far east seems more likely to explode. If you have been following the news going on in that region. China/Taiwan vs Japan (Islands) Hong Kong vs China (British Hong Kong flag and related anti-PRC demonstrations) South Korea vs North Korea (Missiles) Japan vs North Korea (Military threats) If a war was to break out in the far east it wouldn't take long to get to world war status as America will be pulled into any war involving Japan or South Korea.
- azth 14y ago> Iran threatened in May to take legal action against Google over its decision to drop the term "Persian Gulf" from its Google Maps and leaving the waterway between Iran and the Arabian peninsula nameless. A search on Google Maps yields: We could not understand the location arabian gulf. Persian Gulf though shows up.
- Sahebi 14y agoNo, Iran just run this project for "Against freedom of expression"
- whacker 14y agoThis is pretty much the equivalent of the Berlin Wall. We know how that worked out.
- mikeash 14y agoIt achieved its goal spectacularly well for decades?
- phillmv 14y agoYou mean, it will be an effective tool of systemic oppression that is continually improved, despite being a glaring reminder of the contradictions of the government's propaganda and will only be dismantled once the patron state of which your country is a client begins to collapse?
- zalew 14y ago> This is pretty much the equivalent of the Berlin Wall. elderly citizens of Berlin would probably beg to differ. or just punch you in the face.
- Sahebi 14y agoNow google not work :) :-"
- CountSessine 14y agoGood luck with that.
- magoon 14y agoWhen this comes online I'm definitely switching.
- ilaksh 14y agoThis is not about an evil government in Iran desiring to suppress the internet. There is an economic, informational, and covert war going on right now between the US hegemony (and its allies) and Iran. Overtly Iran has been surrounded on all sides by US/allied occupation. Google is not only the best information indexing resource ever created, it is also the most important tool that the hegemony has in its cyber-intelligence and propaganda arsenals. http://metaexistence.org/theatre.htm http://metaexistence.org/theatre.htm
- mc32 14y agoI see how this can be framed as "oppressive government can make rational decisions to preserve its status quo" while avoiding the elephant in the room. But this analysis can be applied to any oppressive government (Argentina of the 80's, Zimbabwe of the last 20 yrs, Idi Amin, etc. So, from that perspective this is true. At the same time their government is more interested in maintaining a theocracy and suppressing internal opposition than in providing a functional government for its people -all the while presenting it internally as an "us against them" issue.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoI'm quite used to that "conspiracy theory" tone (that's the tone our government always uses), but honestly I wouldn't have imagined I'd read something like that on HackerNews... I sincerely hope you don't really mean what you wrote. :(
- ucee054 14y agoWhat the US has done to Iran is well documented. Facts do not cease being facts just because the Iranian government states them. I suggest you lookup "Stuxnet", "Flame" and "Mojahedin E Khalq".
- frozenport 14y agoNOTE: All data available on this website is fully investigated & researched
- 14y ago
- ya3r 14y agoI'm from Iran. I can confirm that https is blocked on google.com domain. But contrary to what the title suggests, it is not really related to the domestic internet(small i). To my knowledge it is more related to the new Anti-Islam movie that was published on Youtube, and Google's rejction of taking it down as whitehouse asked them to.
- kapitalx 14y ago'Google Doodle' by Mana Neyestani in response to blocking google http://i46.tinypic.com/4k9wcm.jpg http://i46.tinypic.com/4k9wcm.jpg