Why Can't Net Attacks Bring Down Iran Big Brother Site?

Despite calls for denial-0f-service attacks, where users try to bring down a site by flooding it with traffic, all over the blogosphere and "twitterverse", Gerdab.ir is still up. The Iranian government site has photos of protesters and requests the publics assistance in identifying these "monarchists" and "counter-revolutionaries".

I am a bit suprised that all these have proven ineffective. The strongest of the attacks are not coming from users just reloading their browsers but from botnets. Users load a program onto their computer, or someone else's computer with or without their knowledge, and then it continually loads address. If you can get enough of these zombie computers together you can bring down very large sites.

In the past criminals have done these attacks against online casinos, shutting down the sites and then extorting big cash in exchange for letting the online dice roll again, according to Ethan Zuckerman, social media guru at Harvard's Berkman Center.

But the political uses, which we have seen on both sides of the Gaza War are not often effective says Zuckerman. “All you are doing is knocking the site off the web for a short time systems until the admin finds a way to block your bots. And then they go back up again think it’s a stupid tactic and ineffectve. I am not a fan of censorship of any kind this is a way that silences speech and just makes administator's life miserable. I think there is a much stronger statement going on right now."

But is it censorship to try to knockdown a site used to hunt protesters? And if it's possible to attack casino's why hasn't anyone been able to nail this site? Thoughts?

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Homicide reporting: Some Scenes I Have Seen.

The most memorable reporting I did at the NY Daily News was on murders. In some ways I feel that crime reporting is journalism at its most elemental and crucial.

Local tragedy and violence doesn't make front pages but it has tremendous importance for people in the communities affected - more so perhaps than foreign wars and national politics.

As a reporter just starting out, knocking on doors and talking to family members and neighbors of victims, showed me how important it is for people to feel that their sorrow is not disconnected from the world around them. That it has meaning and shape beyond their house or block.

Those family members were usually so eager to tell me what their child meant to the those in his or her life and how this will affect them. People always wanted to make sure I knew - and that the pubic knew - that their loved ones were separate from the violence that ended their lives. That dying by the sword didn't mean they lived by it.

I have long thought the NY Times is poor at covering the city. It's not just that Metro coverage is given secondary billing - but the level of coverage given to city news is less than what you would expect to see from a good paper in Akron.

The Times often does not cover murders in its city - which offers a hint at how they view the importance of local coverage.


But now the Times offers an interactive map that charts murders throughout the city. Readers can look at patterns in homicides across time and place and make recommendations for trend stories. This seems like a great chance for communities to become more involved in helping to direct important stories. I hope this, along with The Local project partnered with CUNY, is sign that the Times plans to take its job in the city a bit more seriously.

As I was going through the map I found many of the victims I reported on, and I wanted to see if I could use the google maps tool also - but for a more personal purpose. The Times map shows a birdeye view. But I wanted to give an interactive street view of some of my memories.


New Bronx school copes with tragedy of student murders


View Larger Map

Man killed, 2nd hurt at Bronx party


View Larger Map


Man slain in Brooklyn on grandma's doorstep


View Larger Map

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Iran has not yet flipped the switch

There has been much talk of Internet shutdowns in Iran, but according to one expert as of June 14th, Internet in Iran has been running at near its regular levels. James Cowie, CTO for Renesys, a web-analytics company, whatever shortages that happened were very shortlived.

While the government's crackdown certainly appears to be blocking individual sites, the government of Iran appears not to have made any move towards taking down the Internet as a whole – a step taken by the Burma regime in protests in September of 2007. And it would be easy for them to do, according to Cowier, who I interviewed for my story, Iran's Twitter Revolution.

The country has only one major internet service provider, Data Communications Iran (DCI) which is run by the government, and subcontracts to smaller ISPs. “The interesting thing is that they can turn the Internet on-and-off like a light switch. but they have chosen not to do it,” Cowier says.

Cowier has analyzed Internet activity from DCI and concluded that there have not been any major outages. “Iran remains well-connected to the Internet from a routing perspective,” he notes in a blog entry.

While the government has not yet pulled the plug they are definitely restricting the web in other ways.

Here is a video from ITNNEWS on internet problems faced by protesters:

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Charter 08: Chinese Activists Question Effectiveness of Popular Democracy Petition

published in Huffington Post

Jiang Qisheng was among the first to sign the pro-democracy manifesto -- which calls for a radical departure from China's current one party system. In doing so, the 60-year-old Beijing writer put his freedom, his livelihood, even his life at grave risk.

But he had lived through the massacres of Tiananmen Square, and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and had great hope in the power of this document to provoke change.

"I think the charter has addressed very well what our people have tried to accomplish for over 100 years: to change the system from tyranny to democracy," said Jiang in a telephone conversation through a translator.

But not all China human rights activists and scholars share his sense of optimism about the petition, known as Charter 08. While most agree that a petition signed by so many ordinary people inside China is a historic first, there is no consensus on its importance or that the new movement will succeed.

read more

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Under-Secretary of the UN Talks to I-House LIVE BLOGGING

Lynn Pascoe Under-Secretary of the United Nations for Political Affairs, spoke at the International House's Sunday Supper on challenges and limitations of UN peace keeping efforts.

8:23 - Pascoe said that "there have not been conflicts between major states and seemed to cite this as an accomplishment of UN diplomacy. This is partially true but it seems that the advent of nuclear bomb also played a role in this. Also lack of conflict between major states has little relation to overall levels of violence. Fighting between big countries and small ones can be plenty bad too.

8:29 "Countries come to the UN when they can't solve problem and then when we can't solve them they ask why we can't solve them." This is well put. The expectation that the UN address ills that individual states can't solve is a heavy one. It is fair to to fault the UN when it fails but these failures need to be framed around he enormous size of the goals.

8:33 The UN SG was very involved in the Gaza ceasefire, Pascoe said. Now that the firing is done its the division between the Palestinians that the UN will help to iron out. After that a reconstruction of Gaza "for the third time" Pascoe said wearily. Its seems a bit early to be jumping to those stages though - with rockets landing in Israel and a far right-wing party posed to gain significant power in the Knesset the could start again and soon.

8:35 Pascoe wondered aloud why noone seems to be very eager to get involved in Somalia. Somalia is one of those high risk low yield areas of the world. Both politically - no national leaders gain many points for throwing their hat into that stage - and in terms of the good that can be done. At best it seems like Somalia might be able to move up from an anarchic Mad Max style failed state to a loose coalition
of war lords who will maintain their bonds for as long as donor money flows their way and not one moment longer.

8:38 Pascoe explained why the UN is often not able to get involved. Other states have leverage but the UN diplomats "only have their smiles." In the case of Zimbabwe southern African leaders don't want to the UN to get involved in their sphere of influence. I don't buy this argument of not having leverage. The UN has plenty of traction and leverage in southern Africa, where it runs dozens of programs worth billions plus maintains the closest thing it has to a standing army (in the Congo).

8:41 Russia wouldn't allow the UN to get involved so it didn't, Pascoe said. I don't like this limitation because it seems to say that aggressor states get to decide whether or not the UN can take action in preventing agression. In fact this might often be the case but it is dangerous to state this as a matter of principle.

8:43 People often don't see the negotiations that the UN is involved in because it doesn't make news when people don't get killed, Pascoe said. I like this point. The UN is involved around the world in thousands of positive ways large and small and it is difficult to recognize these successes because any violence going to be more prominent then a lack of violence.

I asked Pascoe about what the UN is doing to stop fighting from breaking out again in Gaza:

"What we are trying to do is extend the ceasefire. We are going to need to get those border crossing open - the Egyptians are working on this with us."

For medium term "there needs to be Palestinian unity and then you need to restart the peace process. Annapolis was fine but it was short terms and Olmert flaming out in the middle didn't help things.

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Why its great to be a single man in Bangkok (and New York City)

In both of those cities there are many many more women - and therefore more single women - than men. The supply and demand of this means that men are able to be either more selective or much more poorly groomed and do quite well for themselves. It means that we can be slack and indulgent in a land of plenty while the other team gets vicious on a barren gaming field.

In both cities the reason might have to do with migration patterns. American women who are better educated these day then their male counterparts, flock to cities for jobs and husbands. They want guys of comparable education and earning potential, say Richard Florida, author of the Creative Class. According to Florida's singles map there are 210 thousand more single girls than guys in the New York-Northern Jersey area.



When their are fewer options those options start looking a lot better.

In Bangkok this situation is even more wonderful (from a guy's perspective). There are 547,000 more women than men in the marriage year between 20 and 44 - that's a huge number when the group we are talking about has less than 3 million.



This enormous gap (500,000!) is due to a massive in-migration of women into the city and a flight out of BKK by the men according to a report from the Economic Institute at Kobe University. Bangkok is a service economy of finance, hotels, and restaurants - all areas where women are thought to better employees in Thai eyes.

Bangkok's men (who like American men are less educated than their female peers) often leave the city to work in heavy industry and manufacturing.

This leaves the city incredibly gender lopsided - walking around Bangkok ourists often wonder - where did all the men go? The images of the protests were so female dominated that it felt like you were looking at a women's liberation movement instead of an anti-goverment rally.

But that's just Bangkok.

And its for that reason that you hear the same complaint from women there that you do here in big NYC - all the good ones are taken and the rest aren't too good.

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Western observers helped to create Thai crisis

The news in Thailand is bad and getting worse and those in the international community who voiced support for the movement against Thaksin carry some of the blame. In 2006 it seemed that the Bangkok elite and the student protesters were working for liberal values - fighting for human rights and against authoritarianism.

When Thaksin fell and the military took over in the 2006 bloodless coup - the army was in the streets of Bangkok. But so was a sense of optimism, as tourists posed in photos next to tanks, and food vendors brought sweet tea and sticky rice to soldiers wearing yellow scarves.

It felt that there had been a catharsis in Thai society. In the days after the coup, many thought the rift between the country Thais, who elected Thaksin by a giant margin, and a Bangkok elite fed-up with demagoguery and cronyism, could be healed. After a brief period of military rule, this reasoning went, Thai governance would be renewed, under a new improved constitution and the whole sequence of events would be thought of later as growing pains in the process of creating a stronger Thai democracy.

More than two years later with Thaksin going into long-term exile, the opposition's ostensive goal, the PAD has seized the Government House, invaded a state television station and is trying to push Thailand into war with Cambodia over Preah Vihear. PAD is claiming the right to use all means to overthrow any leadership with whom it disagrees and is pushing for a violent response from the government justifying renewed military rule under the royal banner.

Most disturbing is that international observers seems to have set the stage for what could well evolve into a deadly crisis. By delegitimizing Thaksin's party and sympathizing with the royalist elite, whose education and culture were mistaken for liberal bearing, the international community signaled that it was ready and willing to be taken in by the most authoritarian of forces, provided they use the language of human rights and democracy to justify their seizure of power.

Now, far to late, Thai and Western media and human rights groups are backing away from the PAD. But it seems that this time, the years of international discomfort with Thailand's democratically elected government might have already helped to take the situation past a point of no return.

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