Sunday, November 7, 2010

Internet Freedom and the Jokes!

I live in a country in which people are used to see pages that say:
"Sorry dear beloved citizen! It's totally a very bad idea that you were trying to access the cursed site with the address you've mentioned in the address bar. We are sure that was a mistake and you've never meant to go to that bad bad place. We just showed you this page for your own good. Have fun surfing the net and facing this page again and again!"
BBC is blocked in Iran
You can see my country's version of that nice statement in the above picture. Anyway, we -who live in such countries are very used to these things everyday and we don't think about it at all. It seems nowadays people find their way in the jungle very quickly.

But, what lead to my frustration today was not this sign of "road to heaven". It was the many "Access Denied"s I've been getting in past days. I don't know if you could ever imagine what it feels when you see this:
Trying to Access www.nvidia.com
What does that suppose to mean. I've discussed the issue with many guys and gals in the field and all of them agreed on the matter of political sanctions as the basis of these "Permission Denied!" messages.

Let's take a deeper look at this process. A foreign state (U.S.) thinks Iran should be under control (I don't understand the meaning of this at all in some levels!) and therefore some things are forbidden for "some" of the iranian people (most of them are officials). Ok! I can understand when you think of some one as a threat you try to keep his hands away from your assets. Fine. But please think again here... If by any chance someone in a government wants to have access to an online resource available to the public (except the Iranians), damn he could do that. There are xillions of ways to that and the most important is that they have resources like money, people, leverages and etc...

So what really happens is that we (the poor citizens) are getting blocked everywhere and hit the walls again and again. What does freedom mean anyway?!

P.S.: You can see my comment on nvidia's website here.

UPDATED on Oct. 7th 2010
Here is more screenshots of the dead ends I faced.
Google Chrome
code.google.com
SourceForge

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