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.

Actually, maybe this part is even better: Many radio stations transmit the names of the songs and bands they’re playing. DAR.fm captures that information and detects song breaks. In other words, if you record a day or so of a music station, you’ve suddenly got a tidy list of songs, identified (and sortable) by title or band. You can listen to individual songs, skip the turkeys and otherwise enjoy your totally free song collection. It’s crazy cool, like a hybrid of iTunes and satellite radio.

Internet entrepreneur Michael Robertson has just launched his own economic stimulus program. He’s going to provide jobs for a lot of lawyers.

That’s because Robertson has created a new online service called DAR.fm, which delivers a new way to listen to Internet radio streams. DAR.fm is a digital recorder for audio streams, capturing your favorite Internet radio shows whenever they’re broadcast so you can listen to them later. It works, it’s wonderful, and it’s very possibly doomed, because the world’s leading music recording companies will probably come after it with every attorney they have.

But for the mobile carriers the sensation it prompts is probably closer to worry. These newfound apps are bandwidth-hungry, and not only for WiFi packets. iPhone Bittorrent is a rather extreme example; EDGE-capable podcatchers are a more plausible threat. But perhaps most striking -- and therefore menacing -- is iRadio, a native application that brings Shoutcast-based streaming audio to the platform. It's easy to imagine a lot of users wanting this functionality and using it heavily, particularly given how often I forget that I've left it playing.

Of course, the percentage of jailbroken handsets isn't likely to ever get particularly high. But that won't be enough to stop these applications. For one thing, most observers think that the SDK -- which is expected to be announced today -- will allow developers access to both the phone's EDGE and WiFi capabilities. For another, streaming audio has already come to the platform without the need for any new code at all. FlyTunes offers a number of radio channels through an iPhone web interface; it works great. Similarly, WFMU offers a specialized domain for listening to the station on your mobile. More of these apps are almost certainly on the way.

It's true that this is just one device, but it's already setting a standard for what consumers expect from a smartphone -- and proving that users and savvy developers will use every bit of bandwidth they can get to. This demand will only grow as Android arrives and the carriers' grip on the mobile platform inevitably loosens. I'm hardly longing for the days of per-kilobyte data charges, but it seems likely that many carriers will soon be faced with choosing between a return to metering or a flood of customers upset by unexpected transfer caps on their allegedly-unlimited data plans.