Q. Why the Weblog Festival in Iran is important?
A. Because it has a big government organization backing it which spends a big amount of money on these kind of events.
There are workshops, roundtables, and exhibitions planed for it and on their website they have interviewed the IT Minister and some other officials. I'm sure it attracts a lot of people and attention.
But the thing is that while the judiciary has started a wide-spread crack-down on many medium or small sized ISPs, and given their religious and political concerns, I guess the whole IT industry in Iran is in real danger in short-term. (I really don't know why the recent crack-down has been ignored by the western media)
The hardliners are very sensative to radical anti-religious and anti-government websites. Also the student protest anniversary is to come in July 9th and like every year, they are going to fully control or close every possible channel of incoming information to Iran again, say Satellite TVs, Internet access, VoIP phones, etc. They usually become paranoid at this time of the year.
So the blogging festival is important in that it helps correct the bad image that the computer-illiterate judiciary officials and other religious groups have about the Internet. (Internet in their eyes is nothing but sex + radical anti-religious activism + espionage)
Many, among IT professionals and journalists, are seriously worried about the fate of the Internet in Iran, especially since the hardliners are coming to power.
Blogging Festival in Iran: "Attempting to form a society of the web Persian content providers, this festival tries to improve the quality of the published information by the means of discussing sessions, roundtables and the exhibition. This festival, backed by the PersianBlog team, as the greatest Farsi weblog provider, and the National Youth Organization of Iran, is the first practical attempt for sponsoring the bloggers and internet magazines."
Meanwhile, the dispute about the closed ISPs hasn't resolved yet and most of them remain closed yet.
I'm really surprised to see that translated subtitles of people's short interview clips used in Nicholas Kristof's Multimedia report from Iran, Six Questions For Iran do not match what they really say.
For instance, the young farmer in the second part of the first question, talks about someone who has been thrown out of the parliament because of his or her constant criticism, but the English subtitles are about the chance of Shah's son to return and how things were better in Shah's time, which is also mentioned by Mr. Kristof himself.
I'm not trying to say that what Kristof or the subtitles say are not truth and the young man has never said these. But I guess the Iranian editor or assistant who has selected the clips hasn't been accurate enough.
Unfortunately the young farmer's clip is not the only example of such problem.
Yesterday's raid on Chalabi's home looks to me as a clever stunt to make him an anti-American figure in the eyes of average Iraqis so it could improve his extremely low popularity in Iraq. (Based on a recent poll, Chalabi is the least trusted leader in Iraq, even less than Saddam.)
We've seen a lot of these sort of things in Iran and nobody believes these stunts there anymore.
I really doubt that Bush Administration can afford loosing Chalabi simply like this.
A dozen of small and medium-sized Iranian ISPs have been shut down over the last couple of weeks for various reasons: providing VoIP, failing to filter blacklisted websites, etc.
In a recent meeting, top judiciary officials have told the ISP association representative that that they've been studying for six months to catch those ISPs who do not filter as intense as they should. Even Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran unpopular prosecutor, has particularly said that he "won't let the Imam Hossein's dearests to be insulted" by some Iranian websites.
Apparently, in the recent crack down, both IT Ministry and Judiciary have been involved. The former to stop the VoIP that has terribly reduced their revenue, and the latter to prevent people access the radical anti-religious and anti-regime websites.
I haven't seen any report about it anywhere, by the way.
UPDATE:
- Blogrolling has announced that the issue is resolved.
- I had informed the Blogrolling.com support system about the issue at 5/12/2004 5:11 AM. So please do not accuse me of being unethical. By the way, I'm sure hadn't the issue gone public, they'd never taken it seriousely. This is exactly why media are cricial and powerful. But I do admit that I could be a little less specefic about what exactly the problem is.
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God, what a mess.
Just log on to your BlogRolling account, then find someone elses Blogroll id by looking at their page source, and then use that id with the edit_roll.phtml script on blogrolling.com, and there you go. You can edit, delete, add or anything you want to that poor blogroll. And look who is vulnarable (only some of them).
Do the guys at Tucows know this stupid security hole?
Thanks to an Iranian blogger for the tip and for being a nice person by not deleteing my links.
If you don't believe me, logon to your Blogrolling account and click here. You can do whataever you want to Blogs for Bush. (Let's add John Kerry's blog to it.)
I also recommend you to take a backup from all your blogrolls right now until they fix this.
Wilkommen to all visitors who have found this website through Spiegel's story on Iranian blogs, written by Fiete Stegers. (Here is the automatically translated English version by Google)
If you are looking for my posts during Sina Motallebi's arrest, you can find them here or through archives on the right side of this page. Other The archives may help you access all my posts about Iran, weblog, the world, etc.
Finally I launched my photoblog, titled vagrantly. (What the hell does it mean?)
In addition to new photos that I take, I'll try to post some of my old photos from Iran when I had a Nikon Coolpix 990. (Now I have a Canon G2 which I bought almost 3 years ago.)
I've also decided to put Google ads on it, if you don't mind; since it consumes a lot of bandwidth and space. So you can easily support me through them.
Comments would be off for now unless I see I can manage them--God, comments are good but take an awful lot of time to manage.
What has happened to Hosting Matters' SpamAssassin? Spam mail has been flooded to all my mailboxes since last week. Does anyone else has the same problem?
Just an irrelavant note:
From: Reviews by Mark, Aaron, and Wendy
Audience choices:
From Toronto.com