Update: I heard from someone in Tehran; Iran's Internet connectivity is apparently considerably better than I had thought. I still, mind you, feel that DDOS is a very poor form of protest, but it is at least less likely than I thought to cause serious disruptions for normal people.
People on Twitter are encouraging participation in a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on an Iranian government website, to protest the outcome of the recent almost-certainly-rigged election. This sounds like a very nice form of peaceful protest; it is anything but.
Politically motivated DDOS has been going on since public Internet access was available. It's old news. Even the tech media can barely be bothered to report on it these days. And it does no good. Does Khamenei really care if a government website is a little slow? Will it persuade him to have proper free elections? Of course not. It won't even be particularly embarrassing; there's not a major government who it hasn't happened to at one time or another.
So, they don't do any good. In this case, interestingly, it could actually do some harm.
You see, it seems that the offending website is actually hosted in Iran. Iran is not your modern open developed nation with gigabit links coming out of its ears. It does not have unlimited transit, and it is likely that all its transit it through one or two carriers. If these links are overwhelmed by armchair protesters DDOSing the website, then Internet access from Iran to the outside world may be disrupted, and it's even possible that the carrier, which will also be catering to other under-developed nations in the region, will simply pull the plug to protect the rest of their network.
This is a particularly large problem because the Internet is probably about the best source of uncensored news in the country at the moment. Iran, of course, does censor the Internet, but such censorship is never entirely effective. Its current attempts to jam international radio and regional satellite broadcasts, on the other hand, seem to be going rather well.
So, you can click the handy ready-made DDOS link, and feel smug about making Khamenei cry. You may, however, be preventing actual Iranians from getting real news about the current situation. Your call.
This is rot. This kid simply doesn't know what he is talking about. The total bandwidth of Iran is far greater than the amount of pointed traffic required to take down a handful of websites. He is underestimating Iran's internet infrastructure and perhaps doesn't know that many households have DSL there.
ReplyDeleteI should Also agree with the first commend Iran has more Internet capacity than in used inside Iran. The government keeps the bandwidth inside the country very low on purpose. But the bandwidth for communicating with outside is much much much higher than what is being used.
ReplyDeleteThis is largely an superbly un-informed argument. The primary reason is that the islamic republic has already ordered ISP's to vastly limit their available bandwidth to a crawling halt so that they're unable to participate in social media/mediums. It is in fact far more important to show the freedom seeking protesters that we care, and give them the moral support that energizes them to go out and risk their life on a daily basis, when they see that outsiders care and join them in bringing down the propaganda arm of this filthy regime (i know because they are more brothers, sisters, and cousins -literally). KEEP their severs down and ignore this nonsense: delicious.com/freeiran
ReplyDeleteYou don't actually think that DDOSing one site could effect the internet infrastructure for a whole country (even if one had a bad infrastructure)?
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