Inside Iran

This laptop belongs to a good friend and she loved it when I told her that we can give a new life to her laptop using GNU/Linux. This is an Toshiba Satellite Sro 435CDS built around 12 years ago. Specs? Pentium 120, 32 MB ram, 4 GB Hard. Yes this laptop has been upgrade a few years ago to highest supported specs.

Not having a - functional - CD ROM nor a USB or even a lan card, we choose a DSL as our distro and used a USB external hard mount to write it on the hard.

With the help of my linux guru Irix (his weblog in Persian) we started a virtual machine on the host OS (debian), attached this 4GB hard as a main hard disk and mounted DSL’s iso and installed it on the hard. It installed smoothly but spit out this error during GRUB installation:

/dev/sdb does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.

remounting the external hard on the main Debian box and issuing
#grub-install –root-directory=/media/disk –recheck –no-floppy /dev/sdb

and then
#grub-install –root-directory=/media/disk –no-floppy /dev/sdb

solved this problem and installed grub successfully on it. We inserted our 16bit PCMCIA NIC in the laptop and after screwing the hard disk to it, rebooted the laptop. First boot attempt was unsuccessful but after changing the Kernel and Init parameters in the grub, everything went fine (hda instead of sda; DSL is based on 2.4 linux kernel).
DSL identified our NIC card and DHCP worked on the machine and our laptop was alive once more!


What a lovely box We felt being in a time machine. A 1997 laptop with Debian Woody on it! After installing apt (dpkg-restore) and a dist-upgrade, we have a old old laptop, alive with DSL / Debian Sarge. I have to find a usage for this box now
- Photos are taken by Irix/Abbas [FreeMind.ir (Persian)]

This animation is really stunning. Very impressive and says a lot.

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Parvin Ardalan pointed me to this animation and asked my idea about it. I really like the animation but had one criticism: Everybody is running from the problems. The signatures are helping people to escape bad situations and not solving the problems or changing the situation.

Parvin agreed and added one more point: All the problematic situations are happening in the 3rd world. It is not showing the problems in the western counties.

I do not know if I have to agree with her or not about this one. The first one (prison case) can happen everywhere but .. to some degree she is right cause the video is showing obvious Arabs and Chinese but no Americans or Israelis (say in Abu Gharib or Palestine).

I’ve got one of those junk forwarding emails subjected “best photos of 2008″. Oh.. The photos were a collection of Iran’s photos. Some of them were political and some of them were about culture and nature. I think none of them speaks like this one:

Today my wife (Leila) and I went to a coffeeshop with a friend. In Iran and specially Tehran, coffeeshops are considered as a “meeting” place. I mean if I want to go somewhere with my girlfriend, coffeeshops are one of a few choices where I will be able to spend a couple of hours without disturbance of police or the government.

In a coffee shop, you can go and sit with your girl, spend a couple of hours and pay around 5′000 Tomans for each person (that is around 5USD). Practically you are not paying for the coffee or the ice cream. You are paying for a secure time with your friend! Coffee shop owners pays the police and they will let you have a free talk with your gf/bf.

But this time a new thing happened. We were there for a Hot chocolate after the daily work at the office but suddenly the worried owner came to our table and said:

- Moral police is comming! please check your Hijab!

The girls were fixed their scarfs. Same thing happened for the other tables too. Not 30 seconds later, two polices came in. They talked with the owner for about 5 minutes and then left. When leaving the coffee shop we found out that they’ve issued a penalty bill/ticket for this coffeeshop because of serving Bad Hijabs!

Some countries filter sex. Some filter uncommon believes or disbelief. Some other, filter the sites of the opposition political parties. There are also some countries who block the individual blogs. A few also block satire. Iran blocks all of these and not only these but also some nonsense sites. Just like this one:

Here is a screenshot of a dangerous site: Web.Resource.org but luckily our wise government is here to defend us. If you try Web.Resource.org in Iran you will see nothing harmful:
Thank's to our rulers, know we are safe

I was in Afghanistan / Kabul for two weeks. I was training two NGOs to start their websites. Unfortunately both are in Persian.
This was my second time in Kabul. It is a nice city with friendly people. The main problems there are not being clean and not being safe. Everyday the are some killings in the news and you read about how “some people” killed “some other”. While I was there, 3 newspaper reporters where murdered and more than 20 polices. One day one of trainees did not attended the class. When I asked him the day after he said: “One of my relatives were killed during a conflict with Taliban; he was a policeman”.
One good point there is the freedom of expression Although it is dangerous but legally you have the right to speak out your idea. This might be only available during the “honeymoon” of the country and it seems the government is trying to decrease it because of national security.
I met many people there. I went to Afghan PEN sessions, met politicians and people from newspapers and media. This was good. Most of the people were not with the Karzai and told me that he is not doing well.

Oh and as soon as I have returned back to Iran, Police have arrested one another activist! Again an active woman from “1 million campaign”. This time Ehteram Shadfar. A 62 years old woman is in the prison because of … nobody knows.

Wow… What a brave person he is.

Let me start for the beginning. In Iran there is a semi-secret-police group called HERASAT. Literally it means “guarding/protection” and its logical function should be protecting (guarding) the entrances of the organizations, universities, offices and … (kind of doorkeeper).
This “HERASAT” - in the recent decade - has morphed from a doorkeeper to a secret police. They are scary, “big” people who can order the head of the university to throw out a student, they can introduce you to the secret police and the intelligence services, they can ask anybody to go to their office to be asked questions, they can arrest “bad hijab” people and they even can investigate and regulate professors interviews and travels!
As you can imagine, this people are becoming more and more powerful and “important”. Nowadays they have their own office in all the universities and many many compaies. They check you in the Airport in Theaters and practically everywhere.
Oh.. Let me return back to the story! These people also have an office in our university and in the previous week protests against all the problem our government is making for us, they confronted students a lot and even attacked to the students and broke the windows and …

In the photo you can see that a student had attached a Sign to this HERASATs office. It reads “HERASATs office is closed by students because of committing VIOLENCE”. Great Idea. Nowadays I am at Kabul (doing a website design training for human rights groups). I am sure these students need help and support; I wish I was in Tehran.

After one year of debate on “To publish or not to publish 50000 Rials bill”, they have published it last week. Some economists argued “By publishing this, you will raise the inflation”; But I think when the price of a house is doubled during the last year, it is logical to publish new bills. Maybe the more logical act would be eliminating some zeros from this weak Rial.
Anyway, This is our 50000 Rial bill which equals to less than 5 Euros.

For me, this piece of paper is more like a Political/Ideological Placard than a bill. It shows a map of Iran with the “Persian Gulf” written on it. In addition it has an Nuclear Energy sign and a saying of Prophet Mohammad about knowledge on it. I bet the other side includes a photo of Khomeini.

have a look at This nice collection of photos from. Then add some bombs to the photos using your imagination; Attack to Iran if the result looks attractive. We have problems here, we have human rights violations, we have obligatory was of coduncts, we have Ahmadinejad as our “selected” (not elected) president and we do not have to say we are against authorities. But BOMBs will not improve our situation.

Although I am in Kabul but this recent arrest (among them one of my organizations board members (Sussan Tahmasebi), Three of my colleagues Maryam Mirza, Mahboube Hoseinzadeh and Asieh Amini) made my boss to decide to add an English section to our “Civil Society's News site”. He emailed me to work on the English section from here because it's launch is vital. I am glad that we are going to have an English section. I have started to design it and will try to finish the first functional version just today! We need more and more news in English and other languages.
The few activists who are outside of the prison are deciding if they are going to celebrate 8th of March in streets or not. It will be VERY dangerous and most of the brave participants are in prison. I will not be in Tehran at 8th of March. May be I am lucky because I don't know what should I do.
The photo is Shadi Sadr, A famous Iranian lawer. She is among arrested people. Source: Kosoof