>From time to time, people in this forum make statements of the form 'we cannot do X because it would enable censorship' and go on to describe a use case that really has no connection to how the Internet is used against repressive regimes. I would just observe that we currently have a vast experiment going on that is showing exactly how the Internet is used against repressive regimes. At this point the visible hero is Twitter and the unsung hero is Tor. There are also ISPs around the globe who are helpfully blocking DDoS bots which are being run by well intentioned idiots who think that taking out the Iranian ministry of information is worth trashing the bandwidth for the resistance. This is not the first revolution to be driven by a new media, the Leipzig demonstrations were driven by fax and photocopier. The '79 Iranian revolution by compact cassette tape. It is however, the first time that mass communication technologies explicitly intended for revolutionary purposes have been critical. The basic information cycle is that information is collected inside Iran, funneled to the outside through the Internet and then re-injected into Iran via satellite TV. While satellite TV is of course illegal, the further people are from centers of population, the easier it is to hide a dish. In the population centers people can see the demonstrations first hand. In the short term what people are asking for is more Tor entry nodes and for help against the DDoS attacks trashing the bandwidth. But it is also clear that we should be thinking about improved tools for use in the longer term, possibly not even Internet connected tools at all. The Cuban resistance uses USB sticks heavily. Lots of people have been thinking about long latency Internet, this is an application. But here we have a perfect laboratory for looking at the real requirements and use cases. Twitter channels are overloaded with retweets of irrelevant material, there is no contextual memory like there is in wikipedia. There is a huge problem with Iranian government agents, supporters and spammers injecting noise into the channel. We need better means of protecting the identity of the Iranian tweeters. And whatever comes out of those observations may be useful in other contexts. Imagine if we could use the same type of social media effectively in a situation like Katrina. There were plenty of people who knew about army and airforce resources that were not being used because the President was incompetent and had not given the order to override Rumsfeld. -- New Website: http://hallambaker.com/ View Quantum of Stupid podcasts, Tuesday and Thursday each week, http://quantumofstupid.com/ _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf