Iran

Well, this is unusual; Londonstani confirms that the Pakistanis just arrested 50% of the Taliban high command, in so far as such a thing matters. Not only that, they’re willing to extradite one of them to Afghanistan. First of all, Pakistan and Afghanistan even talking is rare. Secondly, extradite? What is this, Germany? Don’t they…

Read More this diplomacy stuff seems to work…for some

So, what does an Iranian dissident need from outside the country? One of those integrated lawful-intercept management systems from a major European vendor (nice, aren’t they)? A barrage of cruise missiles? A lot of hot air from the President? Why not ask one? Here’s the exiled co-founder of the Revolutionary Guard. I hope that the…

Read More Sense: Iran

Ill-coordinated links. Great news in RepRapping – South Korean scientists have succeeded in getting bacteria to make polylactic acid. PLA is the RepRap project’s favourite feedstock because it’s a reasonably tractable, general purpose plastic that can be synthesised from starch. The synthesis is not exactly simple, which is why outsourcing the job to germs is…

Read More links, the light alternative to writing

OK, so the Iranian police – well, the Basij, the IRGC, the spooks, the cops, the repressive state apparatus anyway – are publishing photos of demonstrators on the Web and trying to crowdsource the job of identifying the faces on their CCTV tapes. It says here. And, indeed, here they are. Now, this is obviously…

Read More stars of CCTV

Arbor Networks has a great post with data on Iranian Internet censorship. As well as the deliberate transit shortage, they seem to be targeting specific protocols, notably SSH, the secure shell protocol one uses to administer servers and also quite often to provide a VPN tunnel. This isn’t surprising, really, but it is depressing; practically…

Read More spam

We keep hearing that the Iranian government, or at least one of the competing centres of power within it, is trying to jam satellite TV downlinks and harassing the owners of satellite dishes. The BBC World Service and Al-Jazeera have reportedly both been targeted, specifically as they both use one of the HotBird satellites over…

Read More satellite’s gone, way up to Mars…

People are talking about using “cyberwar” to assist the Iranian opposition. Let’s put some of our new cyber-warfare capabilities to the test, quietly and covertly of course, to disrupt Tehran’s ability to shut off the flow of information to Iranians and between them This makes no sense at all, even less sense than “cyberwar” usually…

Read More what is cyberwar?