How Geeks (and Non-Geeks) Can Help Iranians Online: Via Tehran Bureau.

As a way to counter this censorship, there already is a growing legion of people worldwide who are helping Iranians improve access to the heavily-filtered and significantly slower Internet.

Some have installed a piece of software called Tor on their home computers.

Tor lets its users be anonymous and secure online, and also circumvents the Iranian government’s filtering system. Tor users in Iran require that other Tor users around the world have their computers configured to act as a “relay,” to pass on Iranians’ data and hide it from the prying eyes of the Tehran government. But even setting up a Tor relay requires a little bit of technical knowledge.

Andrew Lewman, executive director of The Tor Project, says that his organization has been seeing around 2,000 new users from Iran each day — about a 10-fold increase since prior to the election.

Other cyber activists mainly in the United States are currently working on a program called Haystack, which its organizers claim is custom-designed to defeat Tehran’s online filtering infrastructure.

However, not everyone is as tech-savvy as these groups.

Many Iran watchers have wondered if there is something more significant than changing their Twitter avatar color to green, or posting “Where is my vote?” signs online — but something that’s doesn’t require crazy hacking skills.

So, here are four meaningful, but non-technical ways to help Iranians online:

Read Original Article:(Via Tehran Bureau.)