Adventures of Mr.Behi

Pings in Prison

...Iranian government is in love with technology!They are not satisfied with the current level of filtering that hunted down so many sites and blogs already. Now it is in the news that they are installing new robotic technology to trace weblogs that link to forbidden addresses and filter them away. This is crazy. Imagine the huge network of pings, links in posts and comments and you will start to understand how grave the situation is about to get for surfers inside Iran. Now people can not even link to filtered blogs!

One cool idea: Any hacker out there? Please get into major governmental websites and make some hidden links to forbidden blogs. That would be so cool to see the website of the president getting hunted by the new filters!

Imagine filtering in Iran 25 years later: Press release: Iranian telecoms company announced today the employment of new multiphase electromagnetic scanners in the national internet control system. The announcement explaines  that by the start of next month, hidden cameras will be placed in public places to scan brain waves of citizens and those who even think of writing anything against the laws or even start to think about linking to a forbidden weblogs will be prosecuted and their weblog will be filtered!

Red to my ears!

Link: BBC NEWS |Where Holocaust denial is welcomed

This is a moving report from Tehran Holocaust conference. I did not know that a KKK member was invited!! What an outrageous shame on the hosts! And they call it freedom of speech! I can not even write under my real name in this place. The government can not tolerate a single word questioning it and a KKK member can get here that easy? This is absolutely frustrating. I feel demolished as a human! ashamed, sad and angry as an Iranian! What an embarrassing news to be reported from where you live.

Shargh is closed!

My favourite newspaper that I always considered the best of the news stand is now closed by the government. It was a surprise that it could last for three years considering all the limitations for press here. Shargh became a very distinguished source of analysis and was one of the few independent papers who could reach this level of popularity. Like many other closed newspapers, Shargh can stay closed for years before a trial. I am still not sure why they closed it (update: Seems that this was the reason! and the president is offended because he claimed a ligt was around his body when he talked in the UN general assembly and the donkey in the cartoon has one and donkey in Iran is the legend for stupidity! How mean! and they clsoed a paper for that?!)  It is easy for them to make up something stupid. I will miss Shargh like I missed other tens of reformists papers that I used to read when I was a student and they all became closed in one night after Iran's supreme leader said "Some of the papers are bases of the enemy!".

Will you ever ask me what I like?

“One day a TV program was asking a question from people in different parts of the world. The question was: What is your opinion about shortage of proper food in the world?. They asked a Swiss and he replied: “What is shortage? They asked an African and he said: What is proper food? And finally it was turn for the Iranian and his reply was: What is opinion?”

These days, the parliament in Iran is busy legislating a rule that indicated “National dress code” for ladies. Today, the headline of a major newspaper was about the recent crackdown on satellite receivers. When I was a kid, video cassette players were not legal so I remember my parents so cautiously bought one from the black market to watch their favorite movies. And now the satellite receivers! one of the PMs suggested that they should make a central satellite receiver and will make a cable TV to give “appropriate” satellite channels to people (and what will be! How manipulative!). People here are always escaping the rules because many of them just do not make sense and the bad thing is that it goes on to the level that people get the habit of circumventing all the rules even those that make sense! Because in their brain something tells them “It is impossible to have a law around you with nothing wrong with it! It is just so much control from outside.

Free but slow internet

I am still using the very slow satellite connection for Internet and considering the amount of business/personal activities that I have on-line, it is very miserable. The only good thing about not using the Iranian network of fiber optics for a while is that there is no filtering machine :-) so you can surf the web without being stopped by the "Access denied" warnings. There is indeed a positive side i any misery, the point is finding it soon enough.

Iran and new assult on Cyberspaceَ

In Iran these days, you get more error messages when you surf the web saying that the site is not permitted to be viewed because of the order from the government. The new series of conspicuous activities for controlling the cyberspace is generating great negative reaction among Persian web gurus and bloggers. Most of the bloggers published this report by reporters without borders and found it informative enough to talk for itself. In summery, Iranian government is investing more and tries to be more efficient in controlling the Internet.

Apparently they appointed a company called Delta Global to make an integration in all filtering activities so that even before an ISP get the bandwidth, they can make sure it is clean from anything that is not praising the system. ISNA reports that they are using various European and US made software for the purpose. Well that is interesting! companies from the free world are helping our bytes to get into cage. I once heard the rumour that the Iranian telecomm is using cracked version of these products and that makes it even more funny while the result of all these is very regretting.

Mr.Behi and I did not find any official website for this Delta Global company to see what they are up to but whatever it is, this is not good to just wait and watch. Iranian voices are not papers to close, are not waves to disrupt, are not bytes to filter. Blogs proved that words now come not from political parties but from individuals. Each human is a unique experience of life, a pack of knowledge that has it's own interpretation. The government should be happy listening to these words but if they are fool enough that they think they should wipe out words to wipe out the ideas, hell to them but as long as humans are here, there are voices. Close it and there will be another way of making it heard soon enough.
Sorry for lecturing like this. I will cool back I promise :-)

SMS in Iran, will that last?

Rooz on-line had an interesting article today (link in Persian Update: New link in English) about the effects of SMS (Mobile short message) in Iran and how it became a tool for making people informed of events in absence of free newspapers while Internet censorship is increasingly wiping out URLs. This report talks about recent presidential election when a huge load of text message ringed into mobile phones criticising the new president and in most cases making fun of his appearance. Now there are rumours that the new administration is about to ban or limit this service to fight such incidents before they happen again. These guys are becoming enemies of 21st century technologies!

People of Iran are smart and in any way they are banned from talking freely, they soon find another way. That explains the huge popularity of weblogs when the reformist newspapers got closed. SMS is now attracting attention for letting the information flow but honestly, the biggest usage of   SMS among people I know is sending jokes! and most of the messages that was sent by the time of presidential election were about boycotting the election that I was against of. The biggest danger of SMS is that it can be traced so it is not a good idea to use it for chanting against anyone. Is there any way to send a SMS and keep your ID secrete?

A book to save our words

I have been browsing Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents and found it truly interesting. I personally liked technical information it provides about blogging anonymously and fighting filtering (which is choking us here in Iran) but also because of the interesting section on bloggers and their personal accounts in which Iranian blogs are also highlighted by a chapter written by Arash Sigarchi (Iranian journalist/bloggers who was sentenced to jail because of his words).

Glabal voices on-line held an IRC chat about this handbook that I sadly missed. Look at the script here.

Blogrolling filtered!

Iranian Telecom is famous for the filters it imposes over websites/weblogs that are containing what the government considers as "against morals of the society" or "against national security". This costly activity has already cost Iranian government many million dollars to become reality and there is a little care about the legitimacy of the reasoning that should be there behind the filtering of each URL that is swept away from the sight of Iranian web surfers.

Meanwhile, there are many social/political pages that are filtered just because they have something to say that brings bend in the eyebrow of the headmasters! yet sometimes when I hear news about recent filtered websites in the Persian blog-sphere, I can not create any logical link between my humble Gray cells and the minds of those who commit the filtering!

One of my such odd surprises came after I gathered that blogrolling.com is filtered in Iran after some days of fluctuation between availability and unavailability. So many bloggers are now complaining that why a tool such blogrolling should be unavailable? perhaps because it would make you aware that something is posted questioning the new president! Some bloggers now fear for Blogger to get filtered and with the popularity this free blogging service has among Iranians, that would be due to the huge decrease for the skyrocketing number of Persian blogs. I guess the idea of media censorship can only come from the culture that says: "If I am right and indeed I am, one that talks against me is wrong and should not be there to talk". Sweeping the URLs with political content and closing newspapers containing debates is like what kids do by hiding the broken glass in the closet pretending everything is safe an sound while everyone knows it is not and more than others, the kid himself!

Iranian web gurus; fighting filtering behind the enemy lines!

Perhaps only people of China can have sympathy with Iranians in dealing with information blackout in the cyberspace. The right to know like other rights is something to fight for and get. As Iranian government continues spending precious money on making smarter filtering armors, young computer gurus act like “Zayans” in this armed to teeth Matrix. Each day, more proxy addresses get into e-mail and SMS messages notifying people about new backdoors for sneaking out of the realm of the information cage. This new one has brought joy for orkut users who are lately blocked from using this cyber-community network.