Iran readies domestic Internet system, blocks Google

[pooriaazimi]

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

[w1ntermute]

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

[dmix]

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?

[shimon_e]

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.

[nsns]

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.

[mikeash]

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.

[rmc]

Perhaps those people have "disappeared"?

[tkahn6]

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...

[azth]

> 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.

[Sahebi]

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

[kapitalx]

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

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

[ya3r]

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.

[epscylonb]

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?.

[jlgreco]

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?

[pliny]

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

No, absolutely not.

[mc32]

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.

[stephengillie]

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.

[ilaksh]

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

[pooriaazimi]

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. :(

[mc32]

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.

[whacker]

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

[zalew]

> 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.

[phillmv]

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?

[mikeash]

It achieved its goal spectacularly well for decades?

[magoon]

When this comes online I'm definitely switching.

[Sahebi]

Now google not work :) :-"

[CountSessine]

Good luck with that.