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DUBAI — Millions of Iranians have suffered serious disruption recently in accessing email and Internet social networking sites, raising concerns authorities are stepping up censorship of opposition supporters ahead of parliamentary elections next month.

Iranians have grappled with increased obstacles to using the Internet since opposition supporters used social networking sites to organize widespread protests after the disputed 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The country is preparing to hold parliamentary elections on March 2, the first time Iranians will go to the polls since President Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election. The government denied any fraud in the vote, which ignited street protests that were crushed violently by security services after eight months.

The new Internet blockade affected the most common form of secure connections from Friday, according to outside experts and Iranian bloggers. Traffic was said to have returned to normal on Monday. "I haven't been able to open pages for days but now it's working again, although slowly," said Hamid Reza, a 20-year-old student in Tehran, who was reluctant to give his surname.

The cut-off appeared to target all encrypted international websites outside Iran that depend on the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, which display addresses beginning with https, according to Earl Zmijewski of Renesys, a U.S. company that tracks Internet traffic worldwide.

Google, which uses SSL for its Gmail service, reported that traffic from Iran to its email system fell precipitously.

Iran's Ministry of Communications and Technology denied knowing of the disruption, saying the origin was elsewhere.

"The government is testing different tools," said Hamed Behravan, who reports on Iranian technology issues for the U.S. government-funded Voice of America. "They might have wanted to see the public reaction."

NATIONAL INTERNET SYSTEM?

Many Iranians are concerned the government may be preparing to unveil its much documented national internet system, effectively giving the authorities total control over what content Iranian users will be able to access.

The authorities say it is designed to speed up the system and filter out sites that are regarded as "unclean."

"The Internet is an uninvited guest which has entered our country," said Mohammad Reza Aghamiri, a member of the Iranian government's Internet filtering committee, "and because of its numerous problems, severe supervision is required."

He told the daily Arman that Internet search engines like Google were a threat to the country.

"We have never considered Google as appropriate to serve Iranian users, because Google is at the service of the CIA," he said. "It has adopted a vivid hostile stance against us."

Opposition supporters believe Iranian authorities were targeting their attempts to hold a rally calling on the government to release leaders of the opposition Green movement, Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi.

The two leaders were placed under house arrest on February 14 last year after they urged their supporters to join a rally in support of uprisings across the Arab world.

Iranian authorities have vowed to quell any public protest against the protracted house arrest of Mousavi and Karoubi.

"It could just be a coincidence but my guess is that the system was looking to block communication between opposition supporters," said an Iranian analyst who did not want to be named.

The disruption has riled some Iranian members of parliament and they have vowed to look for those responsible.

An MP, Ahmad Tavakoli, told the semi-official Mehr News Agency that the issue was creating widespread discontent that could "cost the establishment dearly."

"This filtering leads people to break the law, and using proxies makes the blocking of sites and signals ineffective, because using proxies becomes widespread," he said.

Authoritarian Arab governments under popular pressure have sought to shut down Internet service to make it harder for opponents to mobilize protests, but with little success.

Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

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Iran's Internet severely disrupted as elections loom

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All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Mirror Image Internet Combines Key Video Streaming and Edge Computing Capabilities for Targeting and Authorizing Live ...

Forcing your friends to watch 10 hours of "S%$t chimney sweeps say" videos on YouTube could be a sign you need help.

(Credit: Elizabeth Armstrong Moore/CNET)

The so-called "bible" of the mental health profession is getting an update, and version 5.0 of the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM) could add "Internet addiction" to its lengthy list of disorders.

The different iterations of the DSM have for decades been the go-to reference many psychiatrists use to diagnose patients. The manual has been no stranger to controversy over the years, including recent charges by some that it seems written to serve the interests of drug companies as much as those of patients.

But now the APA working group in charge of revising the DSM section on substance-related disorders has proposed adding a new non-substance based affliction--"Internet addiction."

In other words, Internet addiction could soon be classified along other listed DSM disorders like "cocaine dependence" or "Opioid abuse."

As someone who is certainly un-diagnosed, but surely shows several symptoms of a potential Internet addiction problem--as I'm guessing many of you also do--I'm suddenly offended that the only way I could learn about this development was on the Internet. I can't imagine many people who suffer from alcoholism are forced to seek information on their affliction from their bartender.

Every now and then, you might come across a reference to something called "Internet Addiction Disorder," but such a disorder is not officially recognized by any major mental health organization in the U.S. However, Chinese research published last year looked at Chinese students who used a computer around 10 hours a day, 6 days a week and found that such heavy use actually did have a measurable impact on the brain. The researchers concluded that:

...long-term Internet addiction would result in brain structural alterations, which probably contributed to chronic dysfunction in subjects...

So are you and I Internet addicts? Well, it's not yet included in the DSM, so there's no "official" way to identify the symptoms and make such a diagnosis, but Dr. Jerald L. Block recently provided a few red flags in an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry:

1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible 3) tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

Yikes, as if that weren't broad enough to make any of us worry about our mental health, Dr. Block also includes gaming and texting under the umbrella of things that could be considered Internet addiction.

To its credit, the APA acknowledges that such diagnoses are problematic and will be considered "as research data accumulate."

The move to consider non-substance-abuse-based addiction disorders has also sparked a bit of a mental health smackdown between the psychiatry and psychology camps. David Elkins, president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology--a division of the American Psychological Association--has launched a petition with numerous criticisms of the proposed DSM changes. Elkins' open letter to the DSM V group includes this passage:

The Conditions Proposed by Outside Sources[13] that are under consideration for DSM-5 contain several unsubstantiated and questionable disorder categories. For example, "Apathy Syndrome," "Internet Addiction Disorder," and "Parental Alienation Syndrome" have virtually no basis in the empirical literature.

Clearly, even though the discussion has been opened on the notion of Internet addiction as a real form of mental illness, it seems the jury is still out. But if either the APA or Mr. Elkins need help in their search for data--or the lack thereof--I'm more than happy to help and dedicate endless hours combing through myriad online research journals, social networks, and other resources...it's all I'm doing these days, anyway.

(Via NY Daily News)

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Internet addiction could be dubbed official affliction in DSM-V

A Google Webmaster Help thread asks if there is an SEO benefit to going the cookieless domain route.

The simple answer is that no, there is no direct SEO impact on going with the cookieless domain. But it can impact site speed, which is now a direct SEO factor, although it likely won't have a serious impact if any on your rankings if you do use cookies, since most of the web pages on the internet that you visit and rank high in Google do have cookies.

Google's John Mueller explains why people use cookieless domain:

The idea behind a cookieless domain is that it can speed up transferring static files by the browser not having to send cookies with every request. This is something that can help to reduce the time needed to render a page, if you have static, shared content.

But does it impact rankings? John said no:

A cookieless domain does not have any direct SEO effect. However, as mentioned there are situations where we may choose to use site speed as a ranking factor, so if you have a site with extremely slow-loading pages, it may make sense to review this as well as the other page-speed recommendations to help speed things up.

For more on cookieless domains, see this page.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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Google: Cookieless Domain Have No Direct SEO Effect

The final hearings into the lese majeste charges against Prachatai webmaster Chiranuch Premchaiyaporn, who was arrested in March 2009, should be held this week.

"For three years I have had to live my life being accused of committing a crime under Section 14 and 15 of the Computer Crime Act (CCA) … without knowing when it will end," said Ms Chiranuch, in her opening statement before her trial resumed on Tuesday.

Lese majeste defendant and Prachatai webmaster Chiranuch Premchaiyaporn (Photo by Thiti Wannamontha)

Ms Chiranuch was arrested on March 6, 2009 and her trial began in the Criminal Court on March 31, 2010. At one point, she was detained in the court basement for four hours before a 300,000 baht bail guarantee was placed by her sister who was a nurse in a government hospital.

The hearings were initially scheduled for eight consecutive days in February last year but only lasted for four days with just five prosecution witnesses available. The other witnesses said they could not attend on the scheduled dates, resulting in the judges, prosecutors and the defence lawyers rescheduling a new hearing from September to October.

Because of the long time gap, the judges for the second session were changed under the annual routine shift of personnel in the bureaucratic system, she noted.

In September, the hearing of prosecution witnesses was completed and defense witnesses were then called. However, the massive flooding in Bangkok in October prevented the trial from continuing. Only San Francisco-based Danny O’Brien, a member of the Committee to Protect Journalists, was heard.

This week the trial resumed with three more witnesses giving testimony to the Ratchada Court.

Dr Kitipumi Chutasmit, director of Phusing Hospital, told the Court he was one of a few dozen volunteer moderators that deleted or hid inappropriate content found on the Prachatai web board.

The volunteer network was a system Prachatai had developed by soliciting help from regular readers or users to oversee debate and comments posted on the website, Dr Kitipumi said. General readers could also inform the webmaster if they found undesirable content, the Si Sa Ket-based doctor said.

Sawatree Suksri, a Thammasat University law lecturer, told the court that internet freedom was a fundamental human right and a UN report released May last year stipulated that intermediaries should not be held liable for any offence committed by a third party except if they collaborated or knew about it.

Better protection for intermediaries could be seen in most European countries, the United States and some Asian nations. For example the laws give 10 to 14 days for intermediaries to delete illegal or inappropriate content after they have been told by the authorities, Ms Sawatree said.

Ms Sawatree, an expert on the criminal code and computer crime, also said the Computer Crime Act's article 15 did not specify a similar clause (for intermediaries to clearly implement the law).

The authorities, since the CCA's inception, have yet to issue certain guidelines or regulations for parties concerned to understand and expedite the law, she told the court.

Jittat Fakcharoenphol, Kasetsart Unviersity's assistant professor on computer engineering, told the court that he was approached to be a director and treasurer of Prachatai in 2008 since the webmaster was increasingly concerned that the volunteer administrators who helped look for dubious and inappropriate content might not be adequate.

"I was about to develop a machine-learning natural language processor which is a computer program that  will highlight and/or spot the type of content that we set in the system as problematic so that the webmaster will be able to delete it in time," Mr Jittat said.
Prachatai was also considering hiring more staff for 24-hour monitoring of contents and subsequent debates, however financial problems had prevented them from doing so, the academic said.

The program-assisted censorship and manning ideas eventually were not put in place since the webmaster had decided to close down the web board as they faced more problems, Mr Jittat said.

He told the court that with between 300 and 400 issues - and up to 30 debates on each - it was impossible for the webmaster to handle surveillance. Even with more staff, human error was also a factor, he said.

During cross-examination, the prosecutor asked if it was the duty of the webmaster to take full responsibility for supervising the webboard administration. Mr Jittat said that was the case in principle.

The prosecutor asked if the problematic content printed as evidence shown to the court was all from Prachatai. Mr Jittat said the print-outs looked similar to the Prachatai webboard, but he could not guarantee or confirm if the alleged contents really appeared. As a general reader, he had not seen the content before.

"Technically, it cannot also be proved 100 per cent that what you see in front of the computer screen is content from the URL shown in the print-outs. Additions or deletions in the content page could take place before it is printed," he said.

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