Last night, after posting the story about Google Reader being shut down, I received an email from someone in China, telling me that it was an even bigger deal for him, because "even with a VPN it can be very difficult to access outside news sites," but that the Great Firewall doesn't block Google Reader -- so that's his one way of reading outside news. And today, European MEP Marietje Schaake tweeted nearly the same thing about Iran. Apparently, neither country blocks Google Reader, and thus people in both countries rely on it as a tool to get around censorship. Of course, Google need not keep Reader running just for that reason, but it does highlight just how important Google Reader is to some people. And, yes, there are other RSS readers out there, but as people are quickly discovering, they tend to be much more limited (and, one imagines, more likely to be blocked in those countries).

I have to admit, I kind of like writing about Iran. They make posting about them so much fun. From their photoshopped war-machines to their plans for internet IDs all the way to their blocking useful internet services like email, it's like watching a documentary on how to be ineffective at trolling the rest of the world and your own people. But this time they've gone too far, damn it. Iran wants to take on Hollywood over Argo, specifically calling out director Ben Affleck for not including things they wanted him to include in his movie.

Side note: I consider the Iranians not protesting Gigli an act of war
Image source: CC BY 2.0

Of course, if you'd like any real details on what Tehran is planning on doing about any of this, good luck.

Iran is planning to sue Hollywood over the Oscar-winning "Argo" because of the movie's allegedly "unrealistic portrayal" of the country, Iranian media reported Tuesday. Several news outlets, including the pro-reform Shargh daily, said French lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre is in Iran for talks with officials over how and where to file the lawsuit. She is also the lawyer for notorious Venezuelan-born terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos the Jackal.

Ah, lovely. The problem is that, while Iran is dismissing Argo and its awards as CIA propaganda, because everyone knows how pro-military Hollywood is, they aren't really disputing any specific points in the movie. They just say it shows Iranians as being too violent during the hostage-taking (er...), that Affleck failed to show why Iranians were so angry at the United States (they must have missed the movie's opener), and called Argo's awards an "attack against humanity." Other than that, no details were provided on what charges they were going to bring in what court and at what time. Why?

Well, probably because there is roughly f#@$-all they can actually do about it, outside of their own borders, where their own population has been gobbling the movie up via bootleg DVDs (are copyright pirates also pro-CIA?). Regardless, a quick message for my Iranian friends: it's a movie, get over it.

You really start to get the feeling that some of these less-friendly nations aren't even trying anymore. We recently covered how North Korea tried to scare the bejeezus (technical term) out of the States with an incredibly strange movie about a man dreaming of the nuclear annihilation of America, except they used video game footage to produce it. This wasn't the first of such instances, but you begin to get the feeling that the attempts, at best, are not getting any better and, at worst, are getting even more lame. As someone who grew up in the 80's, I have to pine for the days when a possible enemy nation really put in the effort required to scare the hell out of me. The USSR did this extremely well, causing more people to build almost-certain-to-fail bomb shelters than The Discovery Channel would know what to do with. Each silly attempt only makes me shake my head, mostly because I have to wonder who these guys think they're going to fool in the era of the internet and its global group of fact-checkers.

Which brings us to the new fighter jet, unveiled by Iran and named the Qaher-313, which could well actually be able to fly, but you can't know that from the photoshopped pictures released to state run media. Here's a comparison between a stock image of Mount Damavand, a well-known natural landmark in Iran, and a suspiciously similar image with the new jet flying over it.

Look, it's not that the jet doesn't look pretty sweet flying over Mount Damavand, it's just that if the majority world opinion is that your country is still using Russian war technology because you can't build working models on your own, an easily-discovered photoshop of your plane... you know... actually flying probably isn't going to impress anyone. Put some effort into it, guys. At least figure out a way to alter the cloud formations, so they aren't identical.

You would have to be a deaf and blind person with a penchant for head-burying to have missed the drum beats of a supposed cyber war the American government has been touting over the past year or so. It's a one-sided conversation that has been hyperbolic on a level normally associated with sketch comedy. Terms like "Cyber Pearl Harbor" are thrown around without any sense of historical context. In fact, many are questioning whether the entire production is simply a political game, with no real threat existing at all. Unfortunately, many more Americans have now incorporated this manufactured fear into their psyches. Still, the drum beat continues, with the United States labeling Iran as our chief enemy in this inevitable, or perhaps already occurring, cyber war.

The problem, of course, is that anyone who spends a couple minutes studying what's actually happening realizes that this is a one-sided war, likely started by the West, and our opponent is fighting against our tanks with pea-shooters.

The first shot was probably the release of Stuxnet sometime during or before 2009. Even though no one has officially claimed responsibility everyone knows who was behind it. Stuxnet hit with a bang and did a whole lot of damage to Iran's uranium-enrichment capabilities. The United States followed that up with Flame–the ebola virus of spyware.

What did the Iranians fire back with? A series of massive, on-going and ineffective DDoS attacks on American banks. This is a disproportionate response but not in the way military experts usually mean that phrase. It's the equivalent of someone stealing your car and you throwing an ever-increasing number of eggs at his house in response.

That's what makes all of this seem so monumentally silly. The government is making use of an American public, which is massively ignorant about who and what Iran is and is capable of, to go legislatively nutbars in our own country. Don't ask me why they're doing it, but they are. Perhaps more importantly, we're being told that we need legislation to protect against an incapable enemy in a war that we started. If that makes sense to you, chances are you need psychiatric care.

And even more problematic, and frustrating for me personally, is that our government isn't even putting in the effort to fool me properly. It's one thing to have Colin Powell waving a test tube at Congress and shouting "We're all going to die!", but it's quite another to have folks like Gen. William Shelton talking about potential risks in a potential war that we potentially started with a potential threat that we created by attacking it. That's entirely too much potential and not enough blatant falsehood. If the government wants to bullshit us, they can't go in half way. I need real creative lying, not nonsense reports that they have to subsequently pull because they're...you know...made up.

ProPublica reported yesterday that a widely cited Defense Department study claiming Iran's Intelligence Ministry constitutes "a terror and assassination force 30,000 strong" has been "pulled for revisions." It seems there's no proof whatsoever that the 30,000 number wasn't pulled out of thin air.

See, it's not that I'm siding with the pea-shooters here, it's that I'm more scared of the guys that started this war with their tanks. Particularly when the result is poorly-conceived legislation.

Manned space exploration is a lofty goal that requires quite a bit of groundwork before people crawl into a metal cage strapped to a rocket. Only about a dozen countries have successfully launched objects into orbit, and the list of nations that can send people into space is much shorter (with the retirement of the space shuttles, the US arguably is not on the list anymore). But rocket technologies are only getting better and less expensive, and there are more and more plans (both governmental and commercial) for humans to explore space.

• Mars One is now looking for people willing to become astronauts, train for 8 years, and go on a ONE-WAY trip to Mars (and also be part of this globally-televised mission). The first team to go will be democratically elected from six teams of four astronauts, and the launch is scheduled for September 2022. [url]
• Iran is planning to launch a monkey into space sometime in February 2013. Iran has a goal of sending a human into space by 2020 and putting someone on the moon by 2025. (And Iran has already sent a rat, two turtles and a worm into space.) [url]
• MRI scans of astronauts who spent over a month in space show that long term exposure to microgravity can damage eyeballs and parts of the brain. The problems are similar to having intracranial hypertension -- where the brain experiences pressures that press it against the skull and eye sockets. [url]
• A simulated 520-day mission to Mars found that astronauts may need to keep Earth-like schedules or else they'll have trouble sleeping and possibly acquire some mood disorders. This ground-based study will affect plans for manned Mars missions, and it could also have implications for people who live with disrupted sleep and prolonged exposure to artificial lighting. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

For a while, Techdirt has been tracking Iran's continuing efforts to throttle its citizens' access to troublesome materials online. These have included blocking all audio and video files, and even shutting down Gmail, albeit temporarily. But stopping people accessing sites in this way is not the only approach. Here's another, from a report by Der Spiegel (original in German):

Iran's government is introducing a biometric ID card that will function at the same time as an access card to the Web. Without registration via "smart card" the Internet will be blocked for citizens -- an insidious strategy for monitoring the opposition on the Internet.

All Iranians over the age of 14 will be required to have one of these new ID cards, which will store a digitised fingerprint and other personal information in an encrypted form. Once these cards are ubiquitous in the offline world, it's only a short step to require them to be used everywhere in the online world too, which would effectively abolish all anonymity and privacy there.

Iran's latest move is a useful reminder that wherever they are used, ID cards or their equivalent can become powerful enabling tools for perfect online surveillance. Other oppressive regimes will doubtless be watching the Iran experience closely.

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It's no secret that the Iranian government has a bit of an uncomfortable relationship with the internet. First of all, it's trying to build its own internet, at which point it supposedly would like to block out that "other" internet completely. It's also pretty aggressive in censoring various sites it doesn't like. Over the past few days, it's apparently gone a step further. While there were plenty of reports about it blocking YouTube, someone who prefers to remain anonymous sent over this story, saying that Iran's Filtering Committee (IFC) has started blocking all kinds of audio-visual files, based on filetype:

Then, on October 4, 2012, the IFC began preventing files hosted on servers outside Iran from entering the country by blocking specific file extensions. At the time of writing, this policy applies to all MP3, MP4, AVI and SWF files. This kind of filtering was used after the controversial presidential elections of 2009, amidst harsh crackdowns on freedom of information, and coincides with Iran's current economic crisis and the ensuing protests.

Apparently, those blocks do not apply to those files hosted within the country -- just those from foreign sites. Still, that's a pretty extreme move: blocking all of those files takes away a significant part of the audio-visual part of the web. The article highlights a number of Iranians complaining on Twitter about how these blocks are having a severe negative impact on what they do. Still, it's yet another warning for what happens when a government can aggressively filter the internet in extreme ways.

As the fervor over the hateful Innocence Of Muslims movie is beginning to die down, you may have heard that in response to that film the Iranian government blocked access to Gmail. There has been much postulation over why Gmail suddenly became a target, including what seems to be a ridiculous claim from the Iranian Telecommunications Ministry that they were simply trying to put a heavy block on YouTube (it's been blocked since long before this movie showed up). But, as most of us probably expected, Gmail is back on.

Regardless of whether or not the block on Gmail was intentional, the obstruction to one of the world’s most popular email services resulted in many complaints from Iran officials. Legislator Hossein Garousi reportedly threatened to summon Iran’s telecommunications minister Reza Taqipour for parliamentary questioning if the service was not unblocked.

Iran continues to block any site or network that expresses “anti-government views,” including sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which helped rally citizens and circularize the massive protests following the questionable re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Now, the blocking of such sites probably doesn't shock any of us anymore. It's unfortunate, but they're doing it. Hell, Iran has previously announced plans to build their very own internet. The good news is that Iranian citizens aren't simply rolling over at their government's heavy-handed censorship of the internet. They know how to use technology to get around the filters too.

Even though YouTube was previously blocked in Iran before the film was released and Gmail access was barred, Reuters reports on the ability of Iranian citizens to “circumvent Internet restrictions” using virtual private network (VPN) software, which makes it appear as if the computer accessing the content is located in another country.

So best of luck to you, Iranian government, because you're going to need it if you think that suppressing thought and the freedom to access an unfettered internet is going to work out for you in the long term. At least you can rest easy knowing that your citizens can't play online roleplaying games. We've got that covered from our end.

A ways back I noted a rather nice story about Israeli and Iranian citizens using the internet and social media to reach out and express solidarity with one another, despite their governments' differences. I found it rather encouraging that political rhetoric from both sides could be dismissed in favor of a humanist approach, no matter the vulgar generalizations each side might hear about the other. If you weren't already aware, despite the rivalry of the two nations, United States citizens and Iranians have had ways to interact over the internet as well, such as through online gaming platforms like World Of Warcraft. That is, they were able to do so, until the US government made more noise recently about the sanctions in Iran and Blizzard finally blocked Iranian users.

"I want you!!! ...to enjoy the Mists of Pandaria Persian-free." CNN has the story of how, due to sanctions against Iran, Blizzard was forced to block gamers from Iran from playing WoW. Apparently the renewed pressure on trade with Iran resulted in this block.

Last week, a user claiming to be from Iran posted on an official World of Warcraft forum to report that the game was inaccessible. A Blizzard employee responded to the thread on Saturday, writing that "United States trade restrictions and economic sanction laws prohibit Blizzard from doing business with residents of certain nations, including Iran."

"This week, Blizzard tightened up its procedures to ensure compliance with these laws, and players connecting from the affected nations are restricted from access to Blizzard games and services," the employee said.

In a fun little addendum, the Blizzard employee also mentioned that the company is unable to refund subscriptions as well.
You can have your rials back when you pry them from our cold dead fingers...
Image source. CC BY 2.0 Now, perhaps it's just me, but color me confused as to how sanctions against Iran need to be broad enough that online gaming is caught in the mix. Perhaps more importantly, as both parties like to make a lot of noise about "internet freedom" and its application to broadening freedom and Democracy in nations that enjoy little of both, does this result from our sanctions jive with how our State Department seems to want to encourage governments around the world to allow open communication through the internet and social media? While I understand the occasional need to punish a bad government through trade sanctions, this particular result doesn't seem to do that at all. Instead, it only cuts Iranians off from those that could tell them how great freedom is.
 

I still think that one of the craziest stories of the year was the news that the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO, was caught defying UN sanctions (despite being a part of the UN) and giving computer systems to both North Korea and Iran -- officially to help both set up a database of international patents. Of course, none of this makes any sense, considering that neither country has shown much, if any, interest in respecting foreign patents. However, both have shown quite a lot of interest in building nuclear bombs... for which they need computing power.

The whole thing should be seen as a massive scandal that calls into question the judgment of those at the top of WIPO -- but it doesn't seem to be fazing too many people. WIPO recently released a statement trying to play down the whole thing, while at the same time admitting that it was changing its policies and likely would stop handing computers over to such regimes based on promises that they'd be used to setup patent databases. In other words, while it won't do it again, leadership there doesn't seem particularly apologetic for its actions.

The provision of standard IT equipment to the IP offices of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Islamic Republic of Iran that occurred in the preceding years, within the context of the Organization’s business modernization program for IP Offices in developing countries, is being referred to the relevant UN Sanctions Committees for their information and guidance.

The initial steps are being undertaken for a full external and independent review of the technical assistance provided to countries subject to UN sanctions.

A new internal instruction has been issued ending any provision of IT hardware in any of WIPO’s technical assistance programs.

It still amazes me that anyone at WIPO thought this was a good idea. The fact that they still refuse to admit doing anything wrong suggests they don't even realize how badly they were played by those governments.

Either way, WIPO boss Francis Gurry did an interview with IP-Watch where he continues to downplay the seriousness of the issue, and also says he doesn't feel any compulsion to respond to the US's stated concerns about the program. He says that they stopped sending the program because of some "ambiguity."

“There’s a relatively small number of countries who benefit from hardware as opposed to our complete software package,” Gurry said. “And since certain member states perceive that there is some ambiguity in the use of standard IT equipment – printers, cartridges, PCs and servers – we think the only complete answer we can give because of their perception of ambiguity is to say, we no longer do that.”

“We can argue for hours and hours and hours about the legal interpretation, that it’s only a few PCs, and so on,” he said. “But if there’s lingering doubt, let's eliminate it.”

Something about that statement reminds me of a particular Monty Python quote. Either way, it still seems like WIPO still doesn't understand why its actions are being questioned here.