3arabawy BookMarx 06/20/2009 (p.m.)
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إخوان أون لاين – مصر – فلاحو 5 محافظات يتهمون “طنطا للكتان” بالنصب!!
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اعتصامات واحتجاجات في الشيخ زويد ورفح علي مقتل شاب من سيناء وأنا آخر من يعلم « سيناء حيث أنا
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Good blog!
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The Traveller Within: On disclosing sources in Iran
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Because otherwise, how can we differentiate between the real information, the rumours, and the lies?
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Yesterday I put up a list of Twitterers in Iran, whom were considered as reliable sources of info, and was met with an immediate barrage of objections – some reasonable, some hysteric, some plain rude, all from Westerners and none from Iranians – suggesting that was endangering them.
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I took it off until further thinking, though I disagree overall.
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a) If they chose to write, they are doing so for a reason. They wish to be heard. And none of us armchair observers are in a situation to patronise them and suggest they are unaware of the risks they may be taking, and decide to shut them up of our will.
Our responsibility towards them, is to forward as accurate information as possible. -
b) How else can we differentiate between the real and the bullshit? Weak as it may be, we have amassed over the past few days a number of sources we consider reliable. Now more than ever, what appears to be pro-government (or just government) tweeters are trying to spread false information. Twitspam has a dynamic list of those.
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c) They are writing on a public forum, and the list is available elsewhere anyway. Google it yourself, try!
Furthermore, it only takes a trained monkey to do a search on the #iranelection hashtag and figure out who’s posting what.
A more erudite monkey will check out this website for a nicer interface and a dynamically updated info stream. -
But I surely will be re-tweeting with the Twitter usernames of the sources.
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stopwar.org.uk – Stop the War Statement on Iran
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The crisis unfolding in Iran must not become the pretext for renewed intervention by the USA or Britain in the region, nor for a whipping up of further tension around Iran’s nuclear programme.
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The responsibility of the anti-war movement is first of all to oppose the role of the British government in the region, and t
o prevent its posturing being used as a pretence to justify a US or Israeli military attack against Iran, an attack which would have catastrophic results for the whole Middle East, and the Iranian people first of all. -
The Stop the War Coalition believes that resolving the crisis is the right and responsibility of the Iranian people alone, and that external interference can play no positive role – particularly interference by those powers which have laid waste to neighbouring Iraq in a lawless war and occupation, and which unfailingly support Israeli aggression in the region.
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It would be wrong for us to take any position on the disputed outcome of the Iranian presidential election. We do, however, support the right to demonstrate peacefully, just as we support the Iranian people’s right to political, trade union and other civil freedoms and to struggle to achieve them. We unequivocally condemn the shooting of protesters and other violations of democratic liberties by the Iranian government.
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This anger can only be exacerbated by British interference in the present crisis. The British government remained silent when its ally Hosni Mubarak falsified election results in Egypt, and it has refused to deal with democratically-elected leaders in the Palestine Authority and in Lebanon. The government supports the Saudi kleptocracy, which does not need to manipulate elections because they are never held there.
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DDOS attacks on Iran’s web-sites: what a stupid idea! | Net Effect
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One possible scenario is that if the cyber-attacks don’t subside, Iran will simply pull the plug on the entire Internet in the country – this would be a logical thing to do – leaving all of us without all those Flickr pictures and YouTube videos. Now, this would be really sad – but, perhaps, also a good lessons for those who are all too eager to become “cyber-revolutionaries” in the comfort of their homes. If you want to help Iran, go organize a protest near the Iranian consulate in your city or send money to some independent online news agency – this, at least, will do no harm, unlike DDOS.
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But these little subtleties get lost on an angry online mob that wants revenge on Ahmadinejad without taking the effort to educate themselves about the repercussions of their cyber-activity. It’s a shame that some American bloggers are participating in this campaign and are even encouraging others to take up their “cyber-arms”. Not only is this irresponsible and probably illegal, it also hurts users in Iran and gives their hard-line government another reason to suspect “foreign intervention” – albeit via computer networks – into Iranian politics.
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Several visible American blogs – TechPresident (that’s where I found out about Koster’s story) and DailyKos among them – have written celebratory articles that read as if they are encouraging people to participate in the cyber-attacks (updated: Nancy Scola of TP has written it suggesting the tone of her article was not celebratory; I leave it up to you to decide). Patrick Ruffini, one of TechPresident’s
foundersupdated: contributing editors linked to TP’s post with a brief comment that said “How to DDOS (in a good way) Iran’s state-run media website”, which was then re-tweeted a few dozen times. Saying that these cyber-attacks are somehow “launched in a good” strikes me as a very ood observation; so, when someone attacks the web-sites of the Georgian presidents, the DDOS attacks are deplorable, but to strike down Ahmadinejad’s web-site is okay? I think we need more consistency here – we can’t just selectively apply moral labels simply based on whose party we happen to support in a conflict.
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FACE YOUR MANGA | Shake yourself!
Gaaaaaaaaaaamed. This is so much fun!
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
ABOUT 3ARABAWY
Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian journalist from Cairo
hossam [at] arabawy [dot] org