Some of you may have noticed a few reports (painfully few in my eyes) that there's some Hubub in Iran the last couple of days. Their election was recent, and strangely enough there were some voting irregularities. Ahmadinnerjacket was declared the winner and all hell broke loose. There have been any number of fairly civil demonstrations met with gunshots from the Ahmi supporters. Shortly after that, the government started monitoring internet traffic and arresting dissidents from the web. All foreign media has been silenced or removed. At this point it appears it's headed for full on revolution.
If there is a revolution, I'm not convinced the next regime will be any better than the last, but I do know the good guys in Iran (whoever they are) don't stand a chance without communication. It turns out I'm not alone.
Anonymous stepped up hard and fast, turns out it pisses them off when people try to censor the internet and their limits may well be nonexistant so that helps.
The guys on FARK have been surprisingly civil and have done a great job of summarizing the noise from twitter, they've also done a great job of filtering the "others" from the trustworthy sources in country.
The farking state department got in touch with Twitter and got them to delay a scheduled maintenance as they're one of the few outlets for information as the press has been shut down.
Internet traffic has been heavily affected due to a huge number of semi secured proxy servers showing up overnight
(I can tell, it's my job to monitor traffic)And here's the part where you can help if you feel the need, thousands have stepped up to the plate and fired up proxy servers so that those in Iran can continue to get the message out even with the government trying to stop them. If you're interested and have the bandwidth/spare hardware fire up a proxy: http://blog.austinheap.com.nyud.net:808 ... -citizens/
If you've got a twitter account, set your location and timezone to Tehran, it seems simple, but it decreases the likelihood that authorities will find those who are actually there.
If you'd like a list of fairly trustworthy twitter accounts on the ground, email me at robert_harmon@hotmail.com
Last, please read this: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/16/cy ... for-i.html
EOD, I'm not sure where I stand on the political issues, but I'll be damned if even part of the internet is silenced because a bunch of thugs are having a power contest.
Thanks in advance for your help!
ROb
