S.F. techie helps stir Iranian protests
San Francisco Chronicle
04-Jul-2009 (3 comments)

Little about Austin Heap's first online venture, a site hosting free episodes of the cartoon "South Park," suggested he would one day use his computer skills to challenge a government. But for the past few days, Heap, an IT director in San Francisco, has been on the virtual front lines of the crisis in Iran, helping people there protest the presidential election, which opponents of the incumbent regime maintain was fraudulent. Heap's weapon in the past few days was the proxy server, a computer configured to act as an intermediary between a computer user and the Internet. Such servers have many legitimate functions, such as speeding response times, and some illegitimate ones, such as helping spammers hide their identities. What interested Heap was the use of a proxy server to bypass censorship. Properly configured, a proxy server could identify Web surfers in Iran and route them to Twitter and other sites the government had restricted. People around the world were posting network addresses for such proxies on Twitter and elsewhere, Heap said, but there was no organization and the servers were unpredictable.

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Another voice...

by Anonymous Ieani (not verified) on

From the prestigious Nature:

//www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7251/fu...

The only ones who are indifferent towards iranians are regime's islamists; the only ones who are against grass root iranians long for freedom are islamic republicans and leaders of IRI, likes of that Ugly Monkey Nejad and his Said Ali Rahbar.


Ostaad

Buyer beware...

by Ostaad on

As much as I admire the Internet and the all other social networking technologies that use it, I must say people need to be careful when using the proxy servers and the software (the agent) they need to install on their own computers in order to access the proxy servers.  People may be able to "hide" their identities and bypass filters, but they can ALWAYS be tracked.

I want to point out two issues about using proxies (anoymizers):

  1. By routing a lot of traffic through proxies, whoever wants to track the Internet traffic overwhelmingly generated in one area, in this case Tehran, will have a much better chance to monitor the "traffic".
  2. Some of the proxy providers are private companies and there are no guarantees the data they collect are not "made available" to some government agencies and/or sold for commercial purposed. In this case the use can only rely on the proxy provider's word of honor not to use the collected data for commercial and intelligence gathering purposes.
  3. The use must ensure the software they are downloading from the proxy provider's site does not contain virus, worms, Trojan Horses, Back Doors, key Loggers, etc.  The variety of malicious code going around is mind boggling.
  4. The only defense against being turned into a Zombie (a computer which is "spoofed" and can be controlled by another user remotely) is remembering what your mothers used to say when you were a kid...

DON'T TAKE CANDY FROM STRANGERS!!!

 


rosie is roxy is roshan

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by rosie is roxy is roshan on

from SF Chronicle four days previously.

//www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/30/ED4318FMT4.DTL