![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe Yorkshire Ranter doesn't think that there's much to the theory that Iran has been attacked by targeted viruses.
What he also notes is that Iran is making decidedly successful efforts to serve as a hub for Internet traffic in Afghanistan, where the national language of Dari is really just a dialect of Persian, and in adjoining Iraq. The Persosphere is certainly far from reclaiming its status as a language of wider communication and medium of culture, but it does seem to be organizing itself.
This would seem to more than make up for the delays in creating a multinational Persian-language television channel. Also, as he notes, the Iranian state's control of these Internet links lets it censor its domestic population at will. Que sera, sera.
this week has another superspy Iran story, Stuxnet, the worm that apparently attacks a Siemens SCADA application. Here’s JGC again, being sceptical. There’s a rundown at Alliance Geostrategique. The author of the theory that it’s an attack on the Bushehr nuclear power plant is self publicising here – I, for one, am not convinced that the fact they hadn’t got some software licence key in 2009 is great evidence, especially as the Windows .lnk exploit involved wouldn’t care either way. It’s the one from July in which Windows will execute code packed into the icon file for a desktop shortcut on a USB stick, so how pleased the Business Software Alliance is with the Iranians is here or there.
And it also seems to target Indian and Indonesian systems. Maybe its authors are protesting against Eat, Pray, Love.
To put it another way, I think we’re under a cyberattack from a sinister network of chancers and self-publicists who have glommed on to the whole issue as a way of getting their faces in the news and their hands into the till.
What he also notes is that Iran is making decidedly successful efforts to serve as a hub for Internet traffic in Afghanistan, where the national language of Dari is really just a dialect of Persian, and in adjoining Iraq. The Persosphere is certainly far from reclaiming its status as a language of wider communication and medium of culture, but it does seem to be organizing itself.
Way back in 2006, I blogged about how the Iranian government was putting impressive resources into aid to Afghanistan. One facet of this was that they had laid a fibre-optic cable from Iran to Herat; another was that the cybercafe in Kabul with the most bandwidth and the least censorship was the one in the Iranian cultural centre.
Now, it looks like the Iranian wholesale telco monopoly, DCI (Datacomms Iran), is becoming a significant transit provider to networks in Iraq, specifically Kurdistan, and Afghanistan, including the Afghan Government. As the good people at Renesys point out, this is perfectly sensible for the Kurdish operators – they’re getting rid of their expensive and slow VSAT links, and diversifying their sources of transit – but this is dependent on actually diversifying, rather than just replacing.
This would seem to more than make up for the delays in creating a multinational Persian-language television channel. Also, as he notes, the Iranian state's control of these Internet links lets it censor its domestic population at will. Que sera, sera.
