Ecotourism, Medical tourism and educational tourism are well known phrase nowadays. But nobody talks about the BandWidthTourism (aka BWtourism). OK! Maybe it is my invention 
The word BWTourism came to my brain last week while I was spending a lazy time in a hotel room in Warsaw with a 6640kbps internet. I was going to spend the afternoon in the hotel room so I’ve started killing time on the Net.
I am from a country in which
- The minister of the communication has stated that the 128kbps is the limit for the home users (and I’m paying 27USD for it monthly)
- The internet is HIGHLY filtered/blocked. Many sites are filtered. This means if I type www.Youtube.com, www.flickr.com, www.facebook.com, … I will see a page saying “This page is blocked based on the law”.
- The internet is slow. This not only slows the Net but also changes it’s concept. Youtube is not a video source for me. It is a site with many videos which I get one of them in an email via a link. I have to click on it and wait 4 times the length of the video to load. Then I have to rewind the video and watch it. With this speed, it is impossible to search the videos and browse them. Or you can not just wander in the Facebook. You have to bypass the filtering, slowly accept your friends and upload a photo if you are lucky enough not to get a timeout.
Considering all the above, I coined the phrase Bandwidth Tourism when I was using a 6Mbps connection. I was able to open my own site without bypassing the Net, I was able to search for “U2 concert in warsaw” and watch all the videos or login into the Facebook and upload a couple of photos and search for friends or even test some of it’s apps.
I will be a TWTourism advocate from now on for my friends. I will tell them to take some time and experience the Net as it should be. Just like a person who takes time to visit the nature in it’s real state or going to a country to visit / feel it’s historical sites. I will dedicate part of my next travel to Bandwidth Tourism.
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 …
Updated!
filtering means “This site is not accesible” when you type an URL in your browser.
From yesterday these sited have been added to blacklist:
- Amazon.com. a site for buying books and getting info about them. We can not buy via internet because we do not have credit cards so we mainly use this site to locate desired books and ask friends in free countries to buy them for us.
- Internet Movie Database. I have always used this site to check movies befor watching them. Although all foriegn movies are illegal except ministry of islamic guidence says it is not, we lend these movies from each other.
- English Wikipedia.
Wow… yes ! English wikipedia was filtered in Iran yesterday ! previously kurdish wikipedia was filtered (months ago) but which silly man thought that wikipedia is against Islam, morality, national security of Iran and …. It is not filter anymore
- HastiAndish.net (farsi). A Iran feminist group's website. Mostly news about womens and their issues. This is the 3th time that this site is being filtered.
- Entekhab news. Persian news site.
I do not know wat to add ! This is silly. This filtering is MAD. We can not do anything, maybe we can but It is the same
When they came to arrest the Jews, I did not say anything, because I was not Jewish.
When they came to arrest the communists, I did not say anything, because I was not a communist.
When they came to arrest the homosexuals, I did not say anything, because I was not homosexual.
When they came to arrest me, nobody was left to speak for me.
(Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984)
story
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.
China's government is same as Iran's government: They are afraid of PEOPLEs opinions and this BLOG thing is a gret threat. Reuters writes in China moves towards “real name system” for blogs:
“A real name system will be an unavoidable choice if China wants to standardise and develop its blog industry,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted the Internet Society's secretary general, Huang Chengqing, as saying.
“We suggest, in a recent report submitted to the ministry, that a real name system be implemented in China's blog industry,” Huang said.
wow.. This reminds me my government;
“We have to develope, so there is no choice exept this limitaion”.
As I said befor (One other reason to love Netherlands) recently I was in Netherlands and I continued my job: How is access in Amsterdam. I've just updated the Fedora Core 5 Linux on my laptop and took an screen shot. Here it is:
As you can see this is 8 mega bits recieve (and 1 mega bits send) line.
My host said that this connection costs her around 20 euros each month.
Ok ! know I'm back in Tehran. I'm one of the lucky people with an ADSL access at my home. I have to mention that “being lucky” means paying 1/20 of my montly salary for this connection: 20 euros. Let's update the laptop again and have a new screenshot:
wow.. At best, this is an 128 kilo bit per seccond line and I'm paying 20 euros for it. Don't forget that this line is filtered and you can not search for “women” on it or check to “youtube” or …
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 (