I guess Ahmedinejad thinks Buzz is going to be bigger than Twitter.

What will that government do when a fully open, distributed communication channel emerges that either replicates twitter/facebook/friendfeed/youtube/etc similar to decentralized p2p sharing tools?…if theres no one source to shut down, they could either spend all day/night trying to lock down hubs (like pirate bay) or just accept the fact that they cannot control their citizens from the want/need of communication with the outside world.

dictators ride on the back of tigers they dare not dismount.

and the tigers are getting hungry

if only everybody know this quote, people might have less desire to be megalomaniacs.

Sad.

Ahmedinejad is following you on Twitter. No, really.

Do proxy services work there? My friend has a product call paper bus http://www.paperb.us/ and its a proxy service that they use in China to get past the firewall. I think international businessmen find it indispensable for accessing facebook and google in China.

They will just keep shutting things down and what kind sucks is that while instead of having tons of twitter competitors like we would in the past, we have ton’s of twitter api apps, so when they cut off twitter its cutting off all these other sources as well. They can still use our site baduku.com or next may be we’ll see Iranian movement flowing through ebay comments.

Well, Buzz does have the potential to become bigger than twitter, based on Gmail’s installed user base and that it links in to more services and can do in-line media.

Imagine having a video of your protest/alleged-brutality instantly tweeted out as you put it on your Buzz stream and indexed by Google and appearing linked in to real-time search results.

I wish they would accept it, but I doubt they will. They would sooner lock down the entire internet, than allow said events to transpire.

Aren’t there enough tools to bypass these restrictions?

This is so weird. In the pursuit of few for power the common man has to loose their human rights and freedom.

Almost every Iranians has a Yahoo ID or Hotmail account and they can use them as an alternative to Gmail accounts. More over thanks(!) to new packet analyst system installed along side of filtering mechanism, access to rich contents such as Flash or Silverlight has been restricted for weeks.

Talk about Big Brother. This is truly scary. The inability to communicate privately will further lead to massive civil unrest and possibly civil war. Hopefully the CIA has been adequately prepping to support the eventual coup.

hopefully they will blackhole themselves.

it’s just not googles week is it?

Far from it, being banned by Iran is free press and a compliment from the regime.

After all, they didn’t get banned from China like they wanted to, so this is second best.

Next they will block the internet!

I’m glad there are not tigers here. I would not want to get eaten.

Was this the announcement that was going to stun the west?

SO WHAT !?

TURKEY is now using its own Government provided EMAIL too.

oh wait… Turkey do have Rothschild Jewish banks, NO NEED TO spread propaganda lies.

We’ll just Elect a Chinese president this time.

Anti-Iran sentiment doesn’t benefit Anyone, except Israel…

Why do AMERICANS care about whats going on in IRAN…

If its about OIL ? well Iraq just sold their OIL to CHINA CHINA CHINA….

americans are being used like slaves to fight. ass holes.

WTF???
I mean.really, WTF?

Facebook and Twitter are both banned exactly 2 or 3 days before election ( roughly about 8 months ago ). IS TWITTER NEXT? guess not, ’cause it was waaaaaaaay before Gmail.

I don’t know what your sources ( if there is indeed any ) told you, but in the country I live in ( Iran, Tehran ) , Facebook and Twitter were open only for 2 months, in the whole history! ( they were banned since the day they begin they work and got accessible for only 2 months ).

Good luck. 5 hours later, you’ll gonna see the biggest anti-government protest in the history ( analysts expext 5-6M to come, 90% are GREEN ). so don’t worry, soon everything will be fine.

Would you access Gmail through a proxy?

good one enatom……someday, Americans are really gonna be shocked to learn who really runs their country.

Its a tactic, while they blame iran and china for internet censorship. Australia, UK and US silently pass internet censorship laws.

Why i did not find a single article in mainstream tech press, about a UK man arrested for twitter joke.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/7016266/Man-arrested-under-Terrorism-Act-for-Doncaster-airport-Twitter-joke.html

Is this not as bad as what Iran and China does?

I better hope the CIA doesn’t need to get involved. It has never ended well (see previous Iranian revolution)

@sunil, You ignore that (1) he was bailed out, (2) he is speaking quite publicly about it, and (3) a major UK newspaper is reporting on it.

In China, if a newspaper reported on something like this, the government would try to shut them down fairly quickly. Dunno about Iran, but it seems likely they would also try to keep this news from coming out.

>> Why do AMERICANS care about whats going on in IRAN…

Because the Iranians used Twitter, an American service, to send us a gajillion 140-character messages about how much they hate their government.

I mean, normally, I mind my own business, but if my neighbor leaves a note on my doorstep that says, “Help, my husband is beating me,” then I feel somewhat obligated to do something.

Iran should just do it properly and ban electricity.

This news is way predicted ever since that last hack on twitter wherein the primary suspect came from iran (anyway it’s still dubious) Details: http://bit.ly/twitter-hacked-iran-responsible

You bet twitter will be next or FB

Great job enatom. You don’t let the facts confuse you and therefore lose sight of the real issue here – that Iranians are oppressed by a murderous, radical regime (with, unfortunately, millions of brutal followers – but that’s the way things work with brainwashing regimes). The world has learned nothing from the years that led to WW2.

Oh wait – that regime is against Israel – so that makes them the good guys!

It’s always remarkable to see how anti-semites would happily live with everything, including harming their own brothers and sisters – as long as it serves their anti-semitic purposes.

Thank you Ali. When I read this post, I was like, haa?! Does the writer of this article live in a cave or I was dreaming that facebook, twitter, flickr,picassa, craigslist,… were only NOT blocked in Iran for a couple months. My advice to the writer is to either fix this article or remove it.
Thank you

you know why Gmail is banned and yahoo and hotmail are not? because Gmail after the China incident only uses https that means the government can’t spy on people’s emails anymore.

Some Iranians use Whispurr! It is less known but for sure not banned!