After the blockage of my first weblog in Iran (around 2 years ago), I’ve started writing in English and also started a new Persian blog at the FreeKeyboard.net . I used to have 5000 unique visitors in my first blog and after a while, the second one also got this momentum and used to have around 3000 daily visitors a couple of months ago.
The first censorship was very difficult for me. After it whoever (including myself) who typed the URL (www.jadi.net those days), would see an annoying page.
I’ve lost around 80% of my internal readers. The second time happened a couple of months ago. This time I just continued writing in my blog based on the hope that more and more people are learning to bypass this silly censorship.
After two months, have a look at my weblogs stats:
Lovely chart! The censorship has no effect of the number of my visitors. I’m not happy just because I still have readers but I’m very glad to see that the majority of Iranian people are able to bypass regimes filtering.
Filtering is always silly. The regime may improve it’s technical abilities and may spend more and more money on censorship. It may even succeed in preventing people from reading about “other” ideas but filtering will still remain a silly act, because one day people will read whatever they want. And the loosed will be the person who is afraid of this.
Dear Censor! If you know that people will not accept your ideas if they read “other” ideas, it’s time to update yourself.
censorship, internet
My previous post was about V for Vendetta and music being illegal in that future UK society and it’s incident similarity to Iran today I was searching for the lyrics of Florent Pagny’s Ma liberté de penser but the first search result was blocked!
I’ve checked other sites and found out that many of the lyric sites are filtered in Iran, including:
No need to say that the www.Youtube.com is also filtered here but we can access it trough ca.youtube.com, uk.youtube.com and …
BlogRolling.com this service call itself “A web service designed to make your blogging life easier.” This service is the most famous service in Iran which people use to make FRIENDS LISTS for their weblogs. Using this service all the people will know when you've updated your weblog and vice versa.
This service is unavailable from 2 days ago. If you type www.Blogrolling.com in your browser you will reach to the page which says: “The requested page is Forbidden“. Why ? because this tools can empower weblogs and weblogs can empower civil society. This is simple.
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (called Sepah or Sipah)definition in Wikipedia is the pro-islamic militia of Iran and is separate from, and parallel to, the Iranian army. This military group announced that they are holding a seminar called “Women and Internet in the Third Millennium” !
This is last part of its Directors' message:
Women on one hand are responsible for treating their children and on the other hand as a spouse have moral responsibilities .
So paying attention to the condition of women's society is very effective in the whole society.
We really appreciate those researchers , scientists and attached people who help us with achieving this goal
Many cyberactivists and journalists are angry about this. We say in a country in which many many feminist and womens organizations are filtered (you can not access to those site in Internet) and you can not even google the word “women” because “It contains pornographic results“, how you can conduct an conference by the censorship forces called “women and internet in the third millennium” ? and look at the fun part: if you search for the name of conference in any search engine you'll blocked by the “Access to this site is Denied” message because the name of the conference contains the rude word “women” !
We can not do anything about this because Sepah is very dangerous, nobody is brave/silly enough to demonstrate there and we do not even have the permission to enter the salon! We only can send emails to the head of the conference and ask “how you can call a conference
women and the internet in the third millennium while the word women and many many womens sites are censored on the Internet ?” and for sure, he will not answer. But we are doing so because we believe that it is good for him TO KNOW THAT SOMEBODY DOES NOT BELIEVES IN HIS LIES.
What a shame ! Mahmoud Khorsavi (head of the organazation which regulates communications in Iran) have send a letter to all the ISPs and ORDERED them “not to give anybody an Internet connection faster than 128kbps” !
Nobody knows the reason and nobody in the government dares to say a reason. It is just an order. But in a country in which governmet has full control over all the media and in a country in which websites are filtered and in a country in which having a sattelite reciever is illegal, limiting the Internet bandwith to 128kbs can mean one thing: you have no right to download a movie, you can not watch TV / News on the Internet and you can not publish or listen radios or podcasts.
What people can do ? I don't know right now. we have to chat and talk with friends to see what can we do.
In Iran government filters internet sites in 2 ways First they filter some urls so you can not type'em in your browsers and visit them.
The seccond method is making it impossible to search for some phrases in internet. for example you can visit a site with the url of “http://www.gettingpregnant.co.uk/” but you can not search for the term “pregnant” in Internet !
I'm working on a project to find all censored words. This is going to be a silly / funny list, some known words are
condom
annmarie (female name!)
chandice (female name!)
chastity
bath
belly
dita
ebony
I'll send a more detailed list when the project is done.
I don't know if you know about google trends or not. It is a service in which you can search for any term and it lists country / city names with most search requests for that term.
I've searched it and tested it for a while and found out some interesting information. I knew that a censored country with a restricted media and 30 years of Islamic government seems to have many problems. as you can see here, if you check Jeffier Lopez in google trends, Tehran is the first with about tree times more searches for this woman.
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Top cities (normalized) |
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Tehran, Iran
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Lima, Peru
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New Delhi, India
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Delhi, India
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Izmir, Turkey
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Zagreb, Hrvatska
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Ankara, Turkey
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Mumbai, India
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Istanbul, Turkey
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Chennai, India
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Next interesting issue for me was filtering and how people bypass it. In Iran most people google for PROXY and find new proxy servers and bypass filtering using them. I've searched for farsi equavalent for PROXY to see in which cities people are trying more to bypass filter and as I guessed, QOM (the holy city for iranian shi'i mullahs) was the among the firsts. It means that QOM which is considered to be Islamic Republics major support has the most searches on how to bypass filtering ! have a look your self:
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Top cities (normalized) |
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Kermanshah, Iran
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Qom, Iran
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Ahwaz, Iran
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Arak, Iran
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Babol, Iran
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Qazvin, Iran
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Rasht, Iran
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Shiraz, Iran
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Esfahan, Iran
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Karaj, Iran
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It's awfull ! Again I searched for some gender / sexual related terms. While searching for farsi equavalent for BREAST, QOM was seccond again ! and doubtless this holy city was among first cities searching for pornographic content.
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Top cities (normalized) |
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Yazd, Iran
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Qom, Iran
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Esfahan, Iran
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Ahwaz, Iran
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Shiraz, Iran
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Karaj, Iran
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Tabriz, Iran
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Tehran, Iran
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Mashhad, Iran
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And the fun part ? when government arrests people / webloggers, they give us full prints of our weblogs (wow.. what a waste of paper / amazon jungels) and asks us why we wrote about this and that. Funnier part is there is no one person which I can show these results and ask'em WHY AFTER 30 YEARS OF ISLAMIC GUIDENCE AND ISLAMIC RISTRICTED MEDIA, THIS IS OUR CASE?
Just an hour ago, three feminist sites are censored (Filtered) in Iran !
- www.Hastiandish.org is an feminist NGO which helds workshops and advocate for equal rights. Their previous site (www.hastia.org) was censored once and about one year ago, they've switched to this new site. Now this one is censored too.
- www.HerLandMag.com is also a website of a feminist group which is censored previousely. After their first site (www.IFTribune.com, a women news portal) was blocked, they've started this new site which is a weekly magazine.
- www.ParastooD.com is another famous weblogger in Iran. She is a feminist journalist. Her weblog is one of the most famous weblogs in Iran.
In one hand I have to say “I don't know why these site are blocked” but in the other hand I have to say “It is obvious why Ahmadinejad filters these sites”. None of these sites ever wrote about violence or sexual contents. They were defending womens rights and asking for equal rights. These websites were among main websites who reflects todays events. Today is 12 June and all women groups and activist are going to demonstrate in streets demanding equal rights. Government have been called most of them and announced them “If you participate, we'll arrest you!” or “If this demonstration takes place, we'll shut down your organazation”. This is ridiculus but is REAL.
Three months ago, police attacked women in 8th of march and beat them with battons. I wish health and security for every woman participating in this demonstration !
p.s. Around six months ago, ahmadi jenad announced that nobody is allowed to promote feministic, liberalistic and nihilistic ideas in Iran !
In Iran using sattelite recievers are illegal. The reason ? because we may know about REAL news and not the governments propaganda ! Although having a sattelite reciever will cost a 5000 euro penalty (and my salary is only 400 euro each month) but most of people have one because it is the only way out of governmental (awful) TV propaganda.
But these days it seems that Irans regime starts to censore some channels by transmitting high power signals in the air. Some people say it is dangerous for health of people but no body cares. These days I can not watch to the CNN, BBC, Euronews or any other news source but all the pornographic channels are available. It's a shame.
I'm Jadi, an Iranian blogger from inside Iran. I'm blocked in my own country so I've decided to write in English for outsiders (