Just read this off CNET. Iran is blocking GMail in advance of the demonstrations set for Thursday. But just GMail? Why not Yahoo? Or Hotmail? Or other email systems? I would guess they figure cutting just one will disrupt enough communications to accomplish there goal. I’m also sure Twitter and Facebook will get blocked as well as SMS service a bit before and after thursday.. Now their excuse is that they are going to build a national email service. First off, if they do I’m signing up! I’ll never use it, but I want the email address. 
But lets think about this for a second. If suddenly, without warning, my email was cut off, AND if that was my primary, or worse, only email system. Then that means I lost all of my messages AND contact information. To get around the problem you can access other systems that read in your email from Gmail and still function. But what are you really accomplishing here but reinforcing the fact that you do not trust your own population. I can imagine a few business people that rely on gmail being pretty pissed off losing past emails and contact information.
This will be interesting to watch. I will guess most people will have found a workaround before thursday; and I also do not imagine a national system will be up anytime soon.
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gmail, iran, iranelection
I put this together pretty quickly in just a few hours, so I’m sure there are plenty of bugs, but I wanted to get it out there as soon as possible.
here is the link: http://www.twittfilter.com/iranElection.php#
A problem I have with twitter search during the election is some many RT’ed messages saying the same thing. So I decided to extend the normal twittFilter search page to hide any message where 90% or greater of the content is the same per search. I also added per person grouping in search. So if someone is doing a LOT of posting, you will only see the first three posts. I also have #iranElection, #gr88, and #iran9 as default searches. You should be able to change to whatever you want and it will remember it using cookies. If there are better tags, please let me know.
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iranelection, twitter search, twittfilter
There has been a movement to launch denial of service attached on various iranian pro government sites using standard DDoS tools to simple reload scripts like http://www.pagereboot.com/ Although I can understand the desire to increase the volume of expressed displeasure with the election, I’m not sure this is really helping. Because the government is already throttling back internet access, so flooding the current internal network with requests does not help. I think anything to keep the channels as open as possible to get good information in, out and within the country is of greater important then making it hard to see a page that is of little news value. From J.M. Hipolito
“Calling for attacks for the sake of getting their messages across is an action far from actually causing any positive development in the situation. The only thing these hacktivists are succeeding in is making things worse. So please do not participate in any of these activities,” blogged J.M. Hipolito of Trend Micro.
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DDoS attacks, iranelection, pagereboot
Today Zannel released a modification to its service to follow hashtags from twitter to support people posting media regarding the #iranElection hashtag. This would have been really useful 24 hours ago, but still, a great potential resource. Since this was just live today, there has not been a lot of action on the site, but I’m sure that will change as more people hear about it. There has been a bit of tweeking to the site based on my screenshots, and at one point it seemed spammed, but in the last hour they seem to have things under control.
Here is more directly from Zannel
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iranelection, twitter, zannel
{update} I created a search on twittFilter that hides duplicate from a twitter search. This is useful for #iranElection
here is the link: http://www.twittfilter.com/iranElection.php#
I’m sure most of you who use twitter are already aware of what has been going on. Because of the media blocks in Iran, social media tools like twitter, friendfeed, flickr and facebook have been used to maintain information flow in and out of the country. What’s interesting is watching the real time evolution of a self structured networks of social media users working to keep the flow of information open. We have also seen the social network encouraging services to be sensitive to unfolding events. Using twitter as my example, we first saw the request of twitter to delay a schedule maintenance operation in order to insure twitter was still up during peak times in Iran. Stories have gone around that the US gov. also made a request for this delay. (this is confirmed). I would bet both the public, the US gov and perhaps a direct appeal from Mirhossein Mousavi himself have all taken place.
The last I’ve heard, cell phone and internet service are cut off during the rallies and only spotty afterward. I’m not sure how people are able to communicate via media during these times, short of satellite, but somehow, the social network seems to organize and function.
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iranelection, social media, social networks, twitter
Just read this off CNET. Iran is blocking GMail in advance of the demonstrations set for Thursday. But just GMail? Why not Yahoo? Or Hotmail? Or other email systems? I would guess they figure cutting just one will disrupt enough communications to accomplish there goal. I’m also sure Twitter and Facebook will get blocked as well as SMS service a bit before and after thursday.. Now their excuse is that they are going to build a national email service. First off, if they do I’m signing up! I’ll never use it, but I want the email address. 
