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How will Twitter self-organisation fare if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard decides to start shooting? It's great that the Iranian people can self-organise desp

by swombat 17y ago

How will Twitter self-organisation fare if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard decides to start shooting? It's great that the Iranian people can self-organise despite all the attempted censorship of the government, and certainly the free flow of information is a powerful tool in the hands of the people... but guns are powerful tools too. It's also curious why they did not clamp down on Twitter. After all, the Chinese government had no trouble shutting down Twitter along with all the other tools of communication. Here's another thought: if things like Twitter are such a powerful agent of change, perhaps there should be a non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of providing rapidly changing and shifting anonymising proxies to people everywhere, to make it so that it is effectively impossible for any government in the world to block something like Twitter. With all that said, I wish the best of luck to the Iranian people, and I hope they prevail. This is a historic moment, and I hope their victory without bloodshed.

jazzyb 17y ago
"...perhaps there should be a non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of providing rapidly changing and shifting anonymising proxies to people everywhere, to make it so that it is effectively impossible for any government in the world to block something like Twitter." Check out tor (http://www.torproject.org/ http://www.torproject.org/). It's slow, but it's the closest thing we have to that right now.
- dagobart 17y ago
  Despite this contributes nothing to the Iran thread, I find it amazing that you say 'we'. I neither want to go off-topic here. But it occured to me that people closely attached to the web tend to realize a 'we' amongst them, across all borders.
tphyahoo 17y ago
That's an interesting idea. What if the bad-guy governments use these proxies themselves to spam/dos and generally behave badly. Proxies get blacklisted. Government can get back to rounding people up. I guess at some point, if you're going to try to overthrow the government, you have to reach out to your neighbor and take to the streets, regardless to what technology you have available.

by swombat 17y ago

jazzyb 17y ago

"...perhaps there should be a non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of providing rapidly changing and shifting anonymising proxies to people everywhere, to make it so that it is effectively impossible for any government in the world to block something like Twitter." Check out tor (http://www.torproject.org/ http://www.torproject.org/). It's slow, but it's the closest thing we have to that right now.

dagobart 17y ago
Despite this contributes nothing to the Iran thread, I find it amazing that you say 'we'. I neither want to go off-topic here. But it occured to me that people closely attached to the web tend to realize a 'we' amongst them, across all borders.

tphyahoo 17y ago

That's an interesting idea. What if the bad-guy governments use these proxies themselves to spam/dos and generally behave badly. Proxies get blacklisted. Government can get back to rounding people up. I guess at some point, if you're going to try to overthrow the government, you have to reach out to your neighbor and take to the streets, regardless to what technology you have available.