Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians: Via San Francisco Chronicle.

Until Iran's election and ensuing political crisis, many Silicon Valley companies had ignored Persian-language services almost entirely. It's easy to understand why.

First, there's an American embargo against Iran, which forbids American companies from doing business with that country.

Second, there is a perception that the Iranian community (particularly outside of Los Angeles) is not that large or significant. Third, most Iranians in the United States are well-educated, upper-class people who speak English very well.

So ignoring Iran has been convenient - there has seemingly been no real business motivation for tech companies to make their products useful for Iranians both inside and outside Iran.

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Twitter famously received a call from the U.S. Department of State nearly two weeks ago asking the company to postpone its scheduled maintenance to suit those in Tehran's time zone, rather than those on Pacific time.

Facebook recently added Persian language support for its iconic social networking site. Google took things to an entirely new level by launching its Persian version of Google translate, which allows for decent machine translation between English and Persian and vice versa. But why this newfound attention to the Persian language (and Iran) took so long remains a mystery. Google's translation capability for Estonian even came online before Persian.

Even Apple's new iPhone 3.0 software update included support for Arabic, which shares nearly all of the same letters as Persian. This upgrade allows for iPhone users inside and outside Iran to type text messages in the Persian language for the first time.

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As anyone who has followed what's going on in Iran knows, information coming out of Iran has been hard to follow at times. For every shining example of citizen journalism, such as the viral spread of the video of the tragic killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, there are also plenty of confusing examples of - and potentially government-orchestrated - misinformation spread through Twitter.

Iranians, for their part, have had a difficult time receiving unfiltered information from the outside. In addition to the usual media restrictions, mobile phone service has been spotty at best. Text messaging has been blocked on numerous occasions, and according to Dr. Siavash Shahshahanione of the Iranian academics who helped bring the Internet to Iran, the country's national bandwidth is running at two gigabits, or less than half of the capacity that the country normally uses. Online calls to perform minor-league cyberattacks against government Web sites may, in fact, be causing more harm than good by blocking internal communications.

One way to get Iranians online help is to provide support by "anonymizing" online traffic through software like Tor or creating proxy servers through tools like Psiphon and Freegate. These allow computers to send their Web traffic encrypted through other computers so that it can't be traced by Iranian authorities. But even these software tools have had little success as Iran's authorities crack down.

Renesys, a company that does high-level monitoring of Internet traffic, recently pointed out that much of the tech help coming from outside Iran "isn't working."

"It's getting harder and harder to propagate new proxies to the people who need them, as the government consolidates its hold on the filtering mechanisms," recently blogged James Cowie, the chief technology officer and co-founder of Renesys. "Any new proxy addresses that are posted to Twitter, or emailed, will be blocked very quickly."

Indeed, a recent Wall Street Journal article suggests that Iran now has the capability for "deep packet inspection," thanks to hardware and software sold to Tehran by Nokia Siemens Networks.

So instead of superficial support, like Twitter users changing their avatars to green to support Iran's reformist movement, Silicon Valley minds and money should pool resources as a way to help Iranians get around this information blockade by providing easier-to-use proxies, anonymizers and maybe even unfiltered Internet access through hardware.

Long-range Wi-Fi, 3G, satellite or other wireless communications devices from Iran's neighboring countries or even the Persian Gulf could be used to get faster and better information in and out of Iran. One Arizona company, Space Data, even advertises the capability to use helium-filled balloons to provide Internet and mobile phone access. Much of Iran could theoretically be covered with one or two such balloons.

All of that may sound crazy, but not helping Iranian reformers at their darkest hour would be even crazier.

Read Original Article:(Via San Francisco Chronicle.)