Iran Blocks Major Web Sites
A campaign, led by Iran's Islamist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attempts to free the country of Western cultural influences, via the Internet. Human rights groups, YouTube and b3ta are amongst the major Web sites blocked. Reporters Without Borders branded Iran, along with 13 other countries, as "enemies of the Internet" in November 2006.
Iran has about 23 million Internet users which is the highest number of web users in the Middle East. The country also has more than 100,000 bloggers, some of which are substitutes for Iran's suppressed, reformist press.
Critics accuse Iran of using filtering technology to censor more sites than any country, except the People's Republic of China. Until now, targets have been mainly linked to opposition groups or those deemed "immoral" under Iran's Islamic legal code. Some news sites, such as the BBC's Persian service, are also blocked.
Read more about this topic: Controversies Surrounding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Famous quotes containing the words iran, blocks, major and/or web:
“During my administration the most unpleasant and perhaps most dramatic negotiations in which we participated were with the various leaders of Iran after the seizure of American hostages in November 1979. The Algerians were finally chosen as the only intermediaries who were considered trustworthy both by me and the Ayatollah Khomeini. After many aborted efforts, final success was achieved during my last few hours in the White House.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: the contemplation of ruins, Erikson observes, is a masculine specialty.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with characters, or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons in history. History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (18991973)
“The spider spinning his web for the unwary fly. The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield.”
—Garrett Fort (19001945)