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Access to the Internet's most-used sites and tools is being choked in Iran at a politically charged period, blocking communication channels for local businesses, bank clients, scientists and foreign media.

Attempts to get on Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo and foreign news pages were either met with an Iranian page saying in Farsi that "Access to this page is a violation of computer crime laws" or the connection was slowed to such an extent to make it nearly impossible.

The restrictions add to the online censorship that authorities have long imposed in the Islamic republic.

Until now, sophisticated Internet users had been able to get around the blocks by using software known as a Virtual Private Network (VPN) -- the sale of which is illegal in Iran.

Since last week, though, even most VPNs offered no solution. Internet service providers (ISPs), under the control of the state, seemed to be targeting the Internet's most popular social networks and communication sites.

While authorities have given no reason publicly for the systematic curbs, the extra filtering came at a politically sensitive time for them.

Iran last week celebrated the anniversary of its 1979 Islamic revolution, and in less than three weeks' time it is to hold legislative elections.

A call has gone out -- on the Internet -- for "Green Movement" opposition demonstrations on Tuesday, exactly a year after protests that resulted in a severe crackdown and arrests.

On top of that, the Iranian government has said for some months that it is preparing to launch a "national Internet" that reportedly would exclude almost all non-Iranian or non-Muslim websites.

However, one member of the Iranian government's net filtering committee, Mohammad Sadegh Afrasiabi, denied the initiative was linked to the Internet problems.

"This network will only be put in place in four years' time and the blocking of emails isn't part of it," he was quoted by the Hamshahri newspaper saying.

More broadly, Iran is in a worsening showdown with the West over its suspect nuclear programme. It has accused the United States and Israel of conducting covert operations against it, including through Internet subversion and the deployment of computer viruses.

Whatever the motives, the strangulation of the Internet is making life very difficult for many Iranian businesses, especially those needing to access emails and documents online through services such as Gmail.

Importers were "angry or desperate" at being cut off from communicating with suppliers abroad, said one source in the trade sector.

Businesses in Tehran were being forced to turn to fax machines and motorbike couriers to send or receive invoices and other documents, the source said.

"I'm waiting for urgent documents to prepare a contract with a Turkish company and my Internet is completely blocked," said the owner of a small Iranian electronic import firm who demanded anonymity.

The Hamshahri daily said the additional restrictions were "provoking disturbances in commercial and scientific exchanges in the country, with evident consequences even for urban traffic and for banking."

Foreign journalists and diplomats in Iran were also finding it difficult or impossible to communicate via the web, several told AFP.

The few Tehran cafes offering wi-fi connections regretfully told laptop- and smartphone-toting customers that their Internet service was off-line.

Iranians with family living abroad were despairing. "I haven't had any connection with the outside world for several days. I don't have any more contact with my son who works in France," said one mother living in Tehran.

A top conservative lawmaker in Iran, Ahmad Tavakoli, warned that "such annoying filtering will cost the regime dearly," according to the Mehr news agency.

"If there are justifications on security grounds, officials should explain them clearly to the people," he said.

But the head of one ISP, Mohammad Hassan Shaneh-Saz of the company Shatel, was quoted by Mehr saying the added restrictions were "not related to the quality of service from the ISPs."

He claimed that the proposed "national Internet" would improve the situation when launched, by increasing available bandwidth.

The Internet is widely used Iran, where nearly half the 75-million strong population is connected.

It played a major role in a wave of anti-government protests that rocked the country after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.

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Iran chokes Internet at politically sensitive time

Traditional entertainment corporations and the U.S. government rejoiced as the Internet felt the hard-handed impact of MegaUpload’s take-down. But a study released by DeepField Networks, titled “File Sharing in the Post MegaUpload Era,” has offered compelling data proving that the effect on file sharing was only temporary, and that the celebration among copyright advocates was entirely premature.

MegaUpload formerly sat at the throne among file-sharing services and accounted for 30 percent to 40 percent of all file-sharing-related traffic at any given time. To give some idea of its massive scale, total Internet traffic dropped between 2 percent and 3 percent during the hour following the MegaUpload raid on January 18.

The drastic decline is attributed to DeepField’s revelation that that merely six file-sharing service providers cater to the majority (80 percent) of total file-sharing traffic.

Megavideo accounted for 34.1 percent of total file sharing traffic on Jan. 18 before the raid. The second-largest file-sharing service, Filesonic (which has shuttered its file sharing functionalities following the raid), once accounted for a hefty 19.1-percent market share.

But as DeepField’s data from Jan. 19 shows, traffic post-raid did not permanently hamper MegaUpload users. Rather, users redirected their loyalty to other existing services, thereby crowning Putlocker the new king.

The inconvenience as a user that comes out of Megavideo’s shut down, due in part to a heavy dependence on the American server provider Carpathia Hosting, is rather minor. Now most file-sharing services’ servers are relegated to more expensive hosting, and users may experience slightly slower download speeds, provided that they’re downloading across continents. The greater issue arose when the U.S. government decided to deny temporary access to MegaUpload users’ files, both legitimate and pirated.

With this in mind, it’s possible that “too big, too quickly,” contributed to MegaUpload’s downfall. MegaUpload’s subscription and advertising model supported a lavish lifestyle for CEO Kim Dotcom and other execs. Among the seized property from MegaUpload executives were a 2008 Rolls-Royce, 2010 Maserati, 1989 Lamborghini and 14 Mercedes-Benz vehicles, sporting vanity license plates that included, “CEO,” “HACKER,” “GOOD,” and “GUILTY.”

Despite the lucrative market for pirated content, and unfounded claims of piracy’s purported negative effects on the entertainment industry’s bottom line, copyright advocates have entirely underestimated the resiliency of users, and the gusto with which they bounced back.

For example, The Pirate Bay has moved toward magnet links, which allow users to access torrents without having to download a file. One Pirate Bay user scraped the service’s 1,643,194 torrents into a mere uncompressed 164MB. In the event that The Pirate Bay disappears off of the face of the Internet, you could conceivably stash away a complete index of its pirated offerings on a thumb drive.

At the end of the day, MegaUpload is just one large head on the mythical Hydra beast of file-sharing networks. Chop one head off and two more regenerate to replace the fresh stump. Has the MegaUpload takedown tackled piracy? It has. Was it effective? Not really. The hive mind that is the Internet will get what it wants. DeepField’s finding is just one example of why resisting is futile and unproductive, short of the Great Firewall. But even then, you can always bypass it using a virtual private network.

This article was originally posted on Digital Trends

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Study finds Internet piracy resilient despite MegaUpload takedown

BERLIN (AP) — Germany has delayed signing an international copyright treaty that has some Internet users worried about online censorship, joining Poland and the Czech Republic in hesitating on the issue.

The Foreign Ministry said Germany held off on signing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, "to leave room for discussions" after the Justice Ministry voiced concerns. An official signature is needed before the deal can go to Parliament for approval.

ACTA aims to harmonize international standards on protecting the rights of those who produce music, movies, pharmaceuticals, fashion, and a range of other products that often fall victim to piracy and intellectual property theft.

Detractors fear it will also lead to blocking of content on the Internet and have planned demonstrations across Europe on Saturday.

ACTA shares some similarities with the hotly debated Stop Online Piracy Act in the U.S., which was recently shelved by lawmakers after a swell of opposition that included Wikipedia and Google blacking out or partially obscuring their websites for a day in protest.

The U.S., Japan, South Korea and others say ACTA is needed to fight the growing global trade in counterfeit and pirated material. But Poland and the Czech Republic suspended the treaty's ratification last week following protests and attacks on government websites.

The Justice Ministry argues there is no need for the legislation in Germany and that the European Parliament should debate and vote on ACTA before Berlin considers it. The European Parliament is set to debate the legislation early this summer.

"We do not want ... the possibility to block Internet access because of copyright violations," Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said this week. "Internet providers are not auxiliary sheriffs."

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a member of the Free Democrats, the junior partner in the coalition government, has long opposed state or corporate interference with civil rights, sometimes taking positions that have irked Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives.

Germany's main industry lobby group, BDI, lamented the government's hesitation, saying it is damaging to "Germany as a country of innovation."

"The government must now take its responsibility and swiftly sign the agreement," BDI managing director Markus Kerber said.

But Internet activists welcomed the decision, while saying that planned protests against ACTA will still take place on Saturday. About 50 protests are planned in Germany alone.

Germany's opposition Greens maintain that the ACTA is a "repressive agreement" that "would curb the freedom of information on the Internet."

"We need a modern copyright that takes necessary legal protections into account and recognizes the reality of the digital world," party leader Renate Kuenast said.

Activists of online platform STOP ACTA say the deal "puts the regulation of freedom of speech in the hands of private companies because it forces third parties, such as internet providers to control online content."

___

Juergen Baetz can be reached on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jbaetz

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Germany stalls on Internet copyright law treaty

The Iranian government has reportedly begun blocking access to the Internet. A post on Hacker News explains that since yesterday, it’s been difficult to impossible to get online. “Since Thursday Iranian government has shutted [sic] down the HTTPS protocol which has caused almost all Google services (Gmail, and Google.com itself) to become inaccessible,” Sara70 writes. “Almost all websites that rely on Google APIs (like Wolphram Alpha) won’t work.”   

This month marks the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution (a celebration which continues through March), and the Iranian government is allegedly attempting to contain potential demonstrations by quieting citizens’ connection to the rest of the world.

Websites using HTTPS are many: in addition to Google and its various Web products, they include Facebook, Hotmail, and Yahoo. An Iranian citizen who wished to remain anonymous told Cnet this morning that despite the widespread news, the government is denying these actions.

If the Iranian officials plan to cut off citizens during the entire holiday, that means Iran could be in the dark until next month. Iran operates its Internet much like China, meaning it has its own state run firewall. According to various reports, work-arounds typically used to circumvent this are not working.

Last year the Middle East fell into a similar Internet blackout when protestors’ demonstrations began making the rounds via various social networking sites. Despite the heavy-handed censorship, the Arab Spring revolutions continued on and there were even spikes in activism as a result of the black outs.

Still, the Internet has proved a powerful tool not only in reaching the outside world but in uniting forces on the inside. Facebook and Twitter have particularly been mouthpieces of the people during these recent rebellions. Although this should cause everyone to wonder how Twitter’s new International censorship policy will work in practice. 

In 2009, Iranian citizens used Twitter to organize what have become called the “Twitter Revolutions.” The microblogging site even delayed scheduled maintenance so that it could remain up and running for the protestors. Relationships between US-based Web companies and Iran have remained tense since, and intense restrictions remain. However, any progress that’s been made may be hurt by the nation’s decision to restrict citizen access. 

This article was originally posted on Digital Trends

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Iran blocks the Internet

Protests against Internet censorship will blanket Europe this weekend, while Germany and Latvia announced Friday they would put the brakes on signing a copyright treaty that has sparked controversy across the continent.

More than 200,000 people have committed to attending rallies in 200 cities to protest the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or "ACTA."

[More from Mashable: WikiLeaks Founder Assange Fighting Extradition]

"The map of planned protests is just breathtaking," said Holmes Wilson, co-founder of anti-ACTA group Fight for the Future. "You've got tens of thousands of people taking to the streets in small cities, in countries where large street protests are not common."

Proponents of ACTA say that the treaty will help fight global copyright theft. Opponents, fresh off the SOPA and PIPA battlefields, argue that ACTA will harm free speech on the Internet. They also accuse the treaty's architects of holding negotiations away from the public eye.

[More from Mashable: Obama: Protect The ‘Fundamental Integrity’ of the Internet]

"This is truly the Internet's Arab Spring," said Fight for the Future co-founder Tiffiniy Cheng. "People are rising up against anti-democratic laws that stifle individual freedoms. And they're organizing spontaneously, without leaders, using tools available to everyone."

SEE ALSO: What is ACTA? | ACTA 'Is More Dangerous Than SOPA'

Public opposition to the treaty has already struck Europe. Last month, thousands of people in Poland took to the streets in protest while the European rapporteur for ACTA resigned after calling the negotiation process a "charade."

It appears some European leaders have been listening to ACTA's naysayers. Germany and Latvia's decision to delay signing ACTA puts them in league with Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, who have also halted the process.

A German foreign ministry spokesperson said that the country needed "time to carry out further discussions" about the treaty, the " target="_blank">BBC reported.

ACTA was signed by the U.S. and Japan in 2006. Australia, Canada, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea signed on last year and the European Union signed last month, but no country's legislature has yet ratified the treaty. ACTA will go into force when ratified by at least six countries.

Would you hit the streets to protest ACTA? Is ACTA just as bad as SOPA and PIPA? Let us know in the comments below.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, richterfoto

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Europeans Plan Widespread Protests Against Internet Censorship