© the eyeranian

As for anonymous posting, it seems that someone in Iran might use an encryption program like PGP to send an e mail to an associate in the US or Canada, who could post the decoded message to a blog. I haven't kept up on anonymity on the net lately, perhaps there are easier ways. I have taken comfort in the huge number of people who join cyberspace each day. I don't worry too much about being tracked or followed, but I live in the US. As long as I keep porn off my hard drive I don't have much to worry about.

Sure that would work, but it would work even better if there was an automated program that could make the posting to the blog. However, then you can just look for people sending encrypted emails... So instead, you'd have to encrypt the email locally, then post it via a web mail service.

One thought I had was to get the movable type guys to include some sort of XML-RPC relay cgi with MovableType. Then any MovableType installation could relay to any other movable type installation.

There could even be a relay chain, so that you could have multiple bounces. You could go from my blog to eyeranian, to instapundit to movable type, etc.

I'm going to try to contact the MT guys today and see what they think.

با سلام و احترام آقاي معلميان. چه فرقي ميكنه كه آمريكا چند وقت قراره تو عراق بمونه ؟ چه فرقي ميكنه واقعا" ؟ ما اگه عرضه داشته باشيم خودمون در مورد سرنوشت خودمون يك كاري ميكنيم قبل از اينكه مثل عراقيها قيم پيدا كنيم. بعدم من نميفهمم اين همه دايه كه واسه عراق پيدا شده تو سراسر دنيا و بخصوص ميون ما ايرونيا, كه كاسه داغتر از آش شديم, حرف حساب و آلترناتيوشون چيه ؟ يعني بايد اون مردم زير دست صدام جلاد جون ميكندن تا ابد ؟ معذرت ميخوام بابت لحن تندم ولي يه كم خسته شدم از سينه زني و هوچي گري همه كه هي هوار ميكشن جنگ نميخوايم. همه فقط بلدن انتقاد كنن. بلاخره شما ها كه قشر تحصيلكرده مملكت ما هستين چه پيشنهادي دارين و راه پياده شدنش چيه ؟ هنوز هم با احترام. هاله

Uh, could someone translate that.

I have an updated post on my blog relating to what I think should happen for movable type users.

To Pierce - First, let me thank you for opening this topic and your attempt to make this world a bit safer for many bloggers world-wide. I will reply to the comment before you in Persian (she is unhappy with my poll about how long US troops may stay in Iraq as well as my anti-war posts).

Here's what I do know about this topic though, as it relates to Iranian bloggers: - Many use persianblog.com (Persian version of Blogspot). - They also use net cafe's or university connections and may or may not have net access from home. - "Internet Cards" which sort of work like long distance phone-cards are very popular. - There will be plenty of people like myself (I'm sure) living abroad who may volunteer to regularly help in maintaing these blogs, as long as it is not time consuming and as easy as forwarding e-mails, etc.

I wonder if the GodFather of all Persian blogs, Hoder may be able to shed more light on all this. I'll email him about it but if he reads this, please email me with some suggestions, as I know you don't like to leave comments.

Hi Pedram, I am not unhappy about your anti-war views. I am opposed to war myself but like everyone else have been unable to offer an alternative that would rid the good people of Iraq of Saddam. I do not oppose your view in itself, but am just tired of all the criticisms which are not followed by any practical alternatives. It is easy to point out something you don't like but much harder to offer a solution which would have the desired outcome. I do not challenge the everyday people on the street but as you position yourself as a literate person who is heavily into politics I suggest that in addition to your criticism of the war you also proffer an alternative, and hopefully better suggestion. What do YOU think should happen that would put an end on this sort of dictatorship and how would YOU implement it? Realisticaly.

Hi Haleh - Since this is off topic here, I recommend you read my earlier post "What To Do" which has a few practical suggestion as to how to get rid of dictatorships and establish democracies. the direct link for that post is:

http://www.eyeranian.net/archives/000012.html

If you'd like more, search through my previos blog's archives for more than one post on what I think needs to be done, or just e-mail me and we'll continue this dialogue.

Now, could more people offer suggestions on The Bastard's technical solutions?

Thanks to pedram and Pierce T. Wetter III,
Well, there are several ways,, but I was not hoping that we get use to anonymity! There are MANY, MANY ways, to handle these problem,, I highly doubt they want to track down the readers, but I won't be surprised if they try to track down the writers! As suggested proxy server is the best way to handle this problem! (This solves the problem to some extent!)
As per Anonymous proxy server, I guess anybody outside the country can setup proxy server (there are software you can by for win) but if you have linux (cheep, linux box , can handle that) you can just configure the Free Apache webserver as proxy server (there are thousands of article on that on internet) I put a comment in persianlearn recently on how to do that! The most they can do is to ban the proxy server IP addr,, which by simple IP renewal you solve this problem,,,
Anyways,,, be glad to help,,, I like working in a network/community fashion, I think this is where the new world should head too! This is also an answer to Khanome Haleh, only by creating a network, and having every member to contribute something to the network!
Regards,

It's a question of secure authoring of content and not having a static location from which to read content.

I am assuming that the authorities in Iran monitor content with a negative commentary and censor these sites by blocking that site's IP address. Therefore irrespective of whether the people in Iran want to upload new content of download / read articles they face the same problem - they need to "get" to that site (which has a well known name). If the site is relatively static, it would presumably be filtered out. The site would no doubt be located outside of Iran and would prefer not to be hopping around too much in terms of IP address, DNS name. The use of external DNS servers shouldn't be too problematic for these users in Iran i.e. they could use any number of alternatives (e.g. 158.43.128.1) so long as they can get port 53 outside of the country.

What Mamad_Lin is referring to is the relative ease with which an individual could set up a small web server that could act as a proxy for the intended site. Eventually a proxy would become well-known and would be filtered out by the authorities, at which point a new proxy server could be set up by someone else willing to participate in this community of free speech. The important point to remember is that the proxy server genuinely does need to proxy traffic, i.e. the originating web browser does need to request documents off the proxy server, which fetches them from the original site, rather than implementing a simple redirect - all this would achieve is a redirect for the originating browser to then request documents off the original site itself, which of course would be blocked by this stage.

In terms of security for authors - I imagine a mechanism similar to those we see in weblogs would be the starting point. The emphasis would be to ensure all content authoring and editing takes place entirely within the web browser, and encrypted. No data should be stored locally in case of confiscation of PCs / equipment. I've not done extensive research in this area, but can imagine an SSL-based encrypted session allowing authors to write or submit new articles should be entirely achievable. Most browsers can be configured to not store encrypted contents off-line (e.g. IE6 - Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, Security section - Do not save encrypted pages to disk). The web interface allows great control over the customisation of the authoring environment, and provides a useful way of using proxy servers to allow people to get at content.

Of course, as Mamad_Lin also says, there are many alternatives to solving this problem. Something that immediately springs to mind is the use of NNTP / netnews because of the synchronisation between different news servers, and the ability to configure clients to point to multiple different news servers. The downside to this is that a scripting interface would have to be written to pick up the posted news articles to present through a web interface (unless, of couse, the entire "community" were to be a newsgroup), and that the configuration of a newsgroup, including feeds, is more complex than, say, Squid.

In terms of a dynamic community of "helpers" outside of Iran who wanted to share content with those on a fluid basis that was resistent to interception and blocking, I think an interesting alternative would be to look at some of the Gnutella programs. This way, a number of nodes could hold a copy of the articles and posts - stored locally on PCs outside of the country. Then, when people want to read the material, they can search for it via a Gnutella client (I seem to recall BearShare was a reasonable windows Gnutella client - no doubt there are vastly more). The logical extension to this is to look at programs like Groove (www.groove.net) which is _precisely_ aimed at providing a peer-to-peer replicated collaborative environment. It's also free for personal use, and was written by the guy who wrote Lotus Notes (Ray Ozzie). Quite how receptive the users will be to downloading a 27MB file remains to be seen, however as it is free for personal use it could end up being shared via CD-Rs soon enough.

Ultimately no one solution is likely to be readily identifiable as the correct soluion to the prolblem however there are multiple technologies available to circumvent the obstacles placed in the way.