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Iran Vows to Unplug Internet
- joejohnson 15y agoIs that a really short article? Or do you have to pay to read the whole story?
- w1ntermute 15y agoLooks like the Google-the-title trick doesn't work anymore unless you clear your cookies or use another browser. Anyway, the full text is at http://pastebin.com/hhJLD6bs http://pastebin.com/hhJLD6bs
- pavel_lishin 15y agoAnyone else find it amusing - or is it ironic? - that someone provided free access to an otherwise hidden article about censorship online?
- daeken 15y agoA private corporation restricting access to information isn't censorship. If it were an article that the government put behind a paywall, you might be able to construe it as such, but even then it seems silly since there's still no limit on the expression itself.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoSorry, I didn't mean to imply that the WSJ blocking access was censorship - I know they're fully within their rights, etc., etc. I just thought it was amusing.
- JoeCortopassi 15y agoI thought it was funny :-)
- william42 15y agoHowever, the Internet treats both as damage and routes around it.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoThe government puts information behind paywalls all the time. It's called Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoOther than that, FOIA request cost a token amount.
- joe_the_user 15y agoIndeed, Now if North Korea could only arrange to become one large company with its citizens relabeled employees, its laws relabeled "conditions of employment", and their prisons as "homeless camps" then no one could object. Those who are fired are welcome to go "anywhere in the country not owned by KimCo" - IE to any of ten detention areas. Yes, I think I've found the path to Freedom for the 'Democratic' North Koreans...
- gnosis 15y ago"A private corporation restricting access to information isn't censorship." Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Censorship https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Censorship
- ryanhuff 15y agoUnfortunately, the quoted text was missing a key word. Rephrased here: "A private corporation restricting access to ITS OWN information isn't censorship."
- carussell 15y ago...none of which resembles WSJ's actions here... (And Wikipedia is hardly approaching authoritative. I'd suggest something like the OED, but given that it's another subscription service [for the online form], I guess it would fall under one of those skewed interpretations of censorship, too.)
- pavel_lishin 15y agoCool, a pedant party. Anyone bring chips?
- jonknee 15y agoGoogle-the-title worked for me. If it hadn't, a pretty good way to avoid having to use another browser or mess with cookies is to use porn mode (Chrome's incognito for me).
- ronnier 15y agohttp://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052748704889404576277391449002016.html%3Fmod%3DWSJASIA_hpp_MIDDLETopNews http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%...
- bcaulf 15y agoAnother approach is to use Privoxy http://www.privoxy.org/ http://www.privoxy.org/ and add these lines to user.action: { +hide-referrer{http://news.google.com/news/} } .wsj.com
- siculars 15y agoThe free flow of information vs. censorship is the key social issue of our time. It is almost like having a front row seat to watching history repeat itself re. Printing, radio and television.
- bluekeybox 15y ago"History repeats itself -- first time as tragedy, second time as farce" -- Marx. I suppose we are at the farce stage with the Internet.
- oelewapperke 15y agoA Marxist revolution is what brought these clowns into power in the first place. First, Marxists and other socialists topple the government, and then the Basiji started bombing and randomly killing people until they were the government. Iranian socialist turned out to be perfectly content to destroy the only organisation that protects them from these muslim lunatics, even know what they were doing ... Only to find that muslims will attack, rape, ... anyone they perceive as weak, including women, children, babies. They would enter hospitals, guns blazing, because "your life should be in the hands of allah". And socialists, well ... "fight for your right" is easy when you're not risking anything. "Non-conformism" is easy when it's really "conformism", when it's you standing between 1000s of like-minded individuals. When shit really hits the fan, and muslims fire into protestor crowds and kindergartens alike, socialists, even if they massively outnumber the lunatics ... surrender ... The story of the "islamic" revolution of Iran is a sad, sad, sad story and, frankly, changed my ideas about the "morality" of protesting against America (or Israel) for that matter. If what you're doing pushes absurd totalitarian ideologies, and you know this, you're not innocent. No matter how much arguments about human rights, abuses or whatever are made. Protesting works well against a deeply enlightened post-chrisian western government that would sooner commit suicide than knowingly killing a single protester. It doesn't work, at all, against "a tiny minority of extremists".
- maverick2 15y agoyeah .. and may be down the line registering a domain will also require a license. And the license <raj> will hail .. this should not be happening.
- omouse 15y agoSweet, back to the streets.
- swombat 15y agoOn Friday, new reports emerged in the local press that Iran also intends to roll out its own computer operating system in coming months to replace Microsoft Corp.'s Windows. Yeah, I'm sure that'll work out well. Iran has always been known as a hot-bed of bleeding-edge secure operating system design, right? And SecureBSD folks will be happy to pitch in to help build an OS that kills free speech dead.
- Apocryphon 15y agoWell, North Korea created its own Linux, so perhaps it's natural that Iran would have its own BSD... http://rt.com/news/north-korea-cyber-weapon/ http://rt.com/news/north-korea-cyber-weapon/
- juiceandjuice 15y agoNamed... ISD.
- moo 15y agoWhat? Unix is not bleeding edge dude. Iran can fork one of the free OSes. Anyway writing an OS is not like doing nuclear science. "Kills free speech dead." Something like the West that kills people dead.
- pnathan 15y agoI wonder how soon after their halal-net goes online that someone will get some bridges going and 4chan et al become available.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoMy thoughts were more of the Internet version of Radio Free Europe.
- ignifero 15y agoAhmie's time to run away is coming, it seems ...
- cheez 15y agoBefore you all get uppity, don't forget that both America and Canada are: 1) Spying on their citizens. 2) Not above an Internet kill switch. You know, for the kids.
- junklight 15y agobut the fascinating thing here is that evan Iran, who explicitly see it as an existential threat - which is way more serious than "won't you think of the children", seem unable to even think of disconnecting it entirely. There is a certain amount of political capital in shouting loudly about thinking of the children, and the evils of the net. However, if Iran can't even turn it off because they rely on it for commerce and other key functions, How much worse would a lack of net hit the west? Like the war on drugs the arising war on the net, driven in part by the death throws of big media, will be a lot more bluster, grandiose talk and rather lucrative funding of projects than effective action. (you notice I've ignored spying. I reckon Google know more about me than the government does. My generation will flap about going "ooh ooh the privacy!". My children will grow in a world that has never been different and will find ways to adapt)
- jodrellblank 15y agoevan Iran, who explicitly see it as an existential threat It probably is. The real question is should the outside let the government of Iran disconnect their citizens to keep their ideals? Should "wilful obstruction of facts known and shared by other humans" become a kind of humanitarian offence, with a bit of leeway for yet-to-be-agreed reasonable law enforcement purposes? Should it become a more pressing consideration the more the difference between rich scientific countries and closed-off/poor/controlled societies grows? The UN human rights declaration includes Education, and the Cairo declaration of human rights in Islam forbids discrimination on racial, political affiliation and belief grounds, and also "emphasizes the "full right to freedom and self-determination", and its opposition to enslavement, oppression, exploitation and colonialism." "22(c) states: "Information is a vital necessity to society. It may not be exploited or misused in such a way as may [..] disintegrate, corrupt or harm society or weaken its faith." 22(d) states "It is not permitted to arouse nationalistic or doctrinal hatred or to do anything that may be an incitement to any form of racial discrimination." (Source: Wikipedia). A right to education isn't much good if it only covers being educated in what some people want you to know. Information may not be used to disrupt or weaken the faith of an Islamic society by that convention, which the internet probably would, but censoring it for being "western" seems close to nationalistic and doctrinal hatred. (Iran may have nothing to do with the CDHRI).
- jamaicahest 15y agoOh the irony of creating software based on ideas and technology stolen from companies of the culture which they are trying to "keep out". Reminds me of the pictures of people with signs saying "Death to America", while wearing Levi's jeans and Gucci sunglasses.
- chacha102 15y agoIs it ironic that while reading an article about the 'free flow of information', I get stopped by a pay wall?
- uriel 15y agoThis is a good time to remember John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace": http://doc.cat-v.org/political_science/cyberspace-declaration-of-independence http://doc.cat-v.org/political_science/cyberspace-declaratio...
- smashing 15y agoThis is shortsighted because if the leaders in Iran listen to Eli Pariser talk or read his book “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You" they would learn that the Iranians are more likely to develop tendencies towards extremist Islam rather than away from it due to the "filter bubbles" created by the personalization features of sites like Facebook and Google.