Iran readies domestic Internet system, blocks Google | Hacker News Reader

Iran readies domestic Internet system, blocks Google

af.reuters.com

55 pointspooriaazimi51 comments

I can confirm this. http://www.google.com still works, but https://mail.google.com or https://www.google.com don't.

What's your plan once you're cut off from the internet? A satellite connection?

Would something like this work?

http://www.blockaid.me

I'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

No 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!

There 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.

> The big difference between NK and Iran is that in the Iranian case people will know what they are missing.

To begin with.

Exactly. 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.

It'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.

At least Iranian population is demographically and geographically more difficult to control than NK.

The quote is: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Is access to facebook harder to get in Iran than China? In China you can see ads everywhere selling VPNs that enable access to facebook. You can even get permission from the government for business to gain access to unfiltered internet. Some up scale hotels have done this.

A revolution

Yeah, because that really worked out so well the last time

Which 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!'

I 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?

You'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.

I'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.

Perhaps those people have "disappeared"?

I'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.

Last 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_elect...

Nearly every country has a significant amount of freedom-loving and mostly moderate people. You don't see them in oppressive dictatorships because the first priority of oppressive dictatorships is to keep the freedom-loving, moderate masses from exerting their will. Any dictatorship that's been around for as long as Iran's will be pretty good at it.

> 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.

No, Iran just run this project for "Against freedom of expression"

'Google Doodle' by Mana Neyestani in response to blocking google

http://i46.tinypic.com/4k9wcm.jpg

I'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.

This 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?.

Could Iran filtering the internet be more dangerous than a conventional war between Iran and Israel or Iran and the US?

No, absolutely not.

I 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.

The 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.

It's pretty risky and grim to try to predict where war will break out but my money would be on Pakistan/India. Extra nasty because both are atomic powers.

>Extra nasty because both are atomic powers

That is exactly why there will be no war between Pakistan and India. It just cannot happen. If they do fight a nuclear war, the entire region will be irreversibly damaged.

In fact, the possession of nuclear weapons has actually prevented conventional wars from taking place, although skirmishes do take place quite often.

Although the tensions do go high when another terrorist attack hits one of the major cities, it has yet to have caused an actual war

This strikes me more as an action against their own people than an action against the West. How much revenue on the internet is generated abroad by Iran?

It makes things less convenient but there are other entry vectors such as USB drives, Hard Drives, firmware, etc. Moreover, they could just use their local (inside Iran) assets --of course, one would probably not want to make it easy to trace back to assets, so maybe internet cafes and such.

I'm starting to wonder if these Internet Fortifications are dual-purpose - keep FB and twitter out, but also keep out stuxnet and flame etc. Iran's been under an intelligence barrage for at least a decade.

This 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

I 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.

I'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. :(

What 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".

NOTE: All data available on this website is fully investigated & researched

I modded him back up because I'm curious to see how Iran's "rest of world" propaganda machine works. If he is buried or hellbanned or whatever, we residents of Western democratic republics will know less about an enemy government than we did before. I can't see how that's a good thing.

The US invaded and occupied Afghanistan. Fact.

Afghanistan is adjacent to Iran. Fact.

The US invaded and occupied Iraq.

Iraq is adjacent to Iran. Fact.

The US and allies directly supported the overthrow of Libya. Fact.

Libya was one of Iran's most important allies in the area. Fact.

Iran is currently undergoing massive economic sanctions by the US and allies. Fact.

Iran has been subject to cyberattacks including Stuxnet. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ord... Fact.

Google is used for a significant portion of internet searches in Iran. Fact.

Internet search results are a key source of news and other information. Fact.

News and information are very important aspects of information warfare (propaganda). Fact.

Propaganda is a very important aspect of war. Fact.

You know what people, believe whatever you want. Go back to your nice happy little Silicon Valley tech bubble. You're right, there is no hegemony. The greatest, most ubiquitous and far-reaching information system in the world has no connection whatsoever with the cyber-intelligence and information warfare systems of a country that outspends its nearest competitors in military spending by a factor of 5 to 1 and has troops in 150 countries. The United States only fights for freedom. There is no real war, just people being freed from evil oppressive rulers and sometimes relieved of the massive burdens of their excessive oil supplies.

I'm not living in Silicon Valley tech bubble. I'm currently living in Iran, and probably know more (much more) than you about what's happening, and why. I can assure you it's got nothing with more security, and everything with trying to limit people access to free media.

And just FYI: I access Internet through a 256kbps (with lowercase k) connection that's heavily filtered. Sites like YouTube, Facebook, twitter, and almost every other social network, along with almost all major news gathering websites (BBC, CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post, ...) and now google and gmail are blocked. Last week it took me 1 hour and 40 minutes (yes, i timed it) to download a mere 12MB zip file from my email inbox (it was a beta software I wanted to test) because the connection just kept resetting 6.5 MB through. After that I gave up and asked them to upload their beta, unreleased software to droplr.com so I can download it.

I'd take US hegemony everyday instead of this. And am more than willing to switch my place with you.

for people trying to understand where ilaksh is coming from, i thought this was fascinating:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/bryan2.html If Iran Were America: A Timeline

This is pretty much the equivalent of the Berlin Wall. We know how that worked out.

It achieved its goal spectacularly well for decades?

You 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?

> 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.

When this comes online I'm definitely switching.

Now google not work :) :-"

Good luck with that.

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