I was watching the last few minutes of the PBS NewsHour last night. Margaret Warner was interviewing Reza Aslan, author and assistant professor at UCal Riverside and Robert Faris of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society about the role Twitter is playing in disseminating info on the chaos in Iran. Warner asked Faris:

“Give us a little more, for those of us who aren’t technologically as savvy as some of these young people are, how exactly the protesters are using these various avenues? And which ones are still up and running, and which ones are pretty much shut down?”

Faris said a lot of words but didn’t answer the question. So Warner tried again: “But explain, then, how they can still continue to use Twitter, because that is Internet-based?”

And again Faris dropped the ball. Blahblahblah.

“Answer the #%$$^%* question! Tell her about proxy servers! Tell her about Tor! Auuuuuugh!” I yelled at the screen. My wife, munching on the disgusting green goo she calls avocado, looked at me like I was about to go off the deep end. (Which I was. So I went into the kitchen to do the dishes instead.)

Anyway, today the WSJ Digits blog does just that. (Finally!) The post quotes Andrew Lewman, the executive director of The Tor Project, as saying that he’s seen Tor users with Iranian IP addresses double in recent days.

I’ve been testing Tor for about 8 months now. It’s easy to install and use, although it really slows your Web traffic. But I’m just playing around with it — for many Iranians, Tor is their only way of letting people know what’s going on in their country.

UPDATE, June 22 - Here’s another excellent article:

“Perhaps the strangest thing of all, given how diverse and active and vocal the proxy server farmers have been, is that by and large, it isn’t working. The rate with which new proxies are being created has slumped over the last few days. It’s getting harder and harder to propagate new proxies to the people who need them, as the government consolidates its hold on the filtering mechanisms. Any new proxy addresses that are posted to Twitter, or emailed, will be blocked very quickly. People we talk to inside Iran say that almost no proxies are usable any more … The authorities are said to be using power interruptions as a cyberweapon, causing brief outages during rallies that cause computers to reboot, just as people are trying to upload images and video.”

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
on June 18, 2009 - 12:06 pm

Comments (0) | More Internet, Privacy/Security, Service Providers, Technology Posts