Archive for December 2011
Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea Are All Moving to Challenge Obama
December 19, 2011 | 
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President Obama and his little merry men (and women) diplomatic team promised us change, but exactly what kind of change? That’s the question. Are they going to cave into all these nations challenging our authority like Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea? Well, those nations certainly believe so, and they see Joe Biden as a weak man, Iran will not stop making nuclear weapons or supporting proxy terrorist organizations, and North Korea has resumed? Hugo Chavez, Putin, Kim Jong Il and the President of Iran will never respect a woman like Hilary Clinton. While, I just bet the Obama Administration gets us into a World War due to their naivety.
And all this is going on as political grandstanding and saber rattling continues with regards to missile defense shields and the impending show down with Iran. Meanwhile Russia says it wants to talk with President Obama, and Iran thinks he will cave (they are probably right). After all, it was Joe Biden during the election who stated that Israel is going to have to get used to a nuclear Iran?
And you know that the world media will change fast, so President Obama has to play this right the first time. Name one president that has ever done everything right their first year in office? Impossible, and even if you did, the media can plan a created reality other than you intended.
Let’s hope the basketball player can score some three pointers and put some quick points on the board. Of course, this means he’ll have to remain engaged in the game rather than voting “present” because it’s the big time now, this is the playoffs.
Still, while everyone is looking away, I can see some major conflicts brewing on North Pole vicinity oil reserves as everyone tries to stake their claims. It’s all connected this chess board has a life of its own in a 3D sort of way. And quite frankly I have zero faith personally in the Obama Administration and if I were another world leader, you bet I’d try my luck, as you’d have nothing to lose and they know it.
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Iran, The Internet And Network Equipment
As tensions continue to escalate in Iran and with Iran and the rest of the world I couldn’t help but thinking how a vibrant online world would work in Iran. After all, many technology products are banned from sale to Iran and they would need these products to have an online presence.
Interestingly, our company received an online inquiry about one month ago through our Live Chat feature from a person requesting to purchase some network equipment. I asked where he was located and where he wanted the equipment shipped. He said that he wanted the equipment shipped to Abu Dhabi. What he probably didn’t know is that our plugin has the ability to reference the sender’s location and his showed as Iran. When I confronted him (in my text back to him) about this he said he was a businessman who traveled and did business all over the Middle East and was at a business meeting in Iran and was contacting me while he had some free time.
This got me to thinking about how many banned products were shipped, knowingly or unknowingly, to “friendly” countries and then on-shipped with new documents to Iran. After all, I’m no international super sleuth but it doesn’t seem possible to police the world against that many shipments that are neither scanned nor physically inspected at the point of shipment. Nor does it seem unlikely that these banned products could be carried by land through various routes to Iran.
With that said it seems like more of problem for users of network equipment once they get it into Iran. Censors in Iran literally block thousands of websites, including Facebook and YouTube. Even with a large educated population that includes the Middle East’s highest number of web surfers, last month Iran instituted an Internet police unit to counter the growing popularity of web-based social networks. It is estimated that 32 million people of Iran’s almost 74 million population are regular net surfers.
Internet restrictions, enforced by content-control software, are being used to block access to what the Iranian Government considers “immoral and destructive” material, which includes everything from pornography to news websites critical of Iran.
Network equipment and computer hardware experts claim that the monitoring and restricting of Internet access tightened after the controversial June 2009 Iranian presidential election, and has gotten even more restrictive with the flood of Arab world uprisings beginning in Tunisia in December.
Iran, like some other countries that ignore intellectual property rights, has zero copyright laws. This allows pirated versions of movies, games and computer programs to become available in Iran within days of their release in the United States, and elsewhere. Plus they are sold at a fraction of their list or discount US sales price. As an example, an Adobe CS5 master collection sells for $2,359 on Amazon.com, yet it costs a only $5 in Iran.
To combat Internet censorship Iranians have adopted various solutions like free service Freegate and paid services using a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Restrictions imposed by sanctions are not a problem for Iranian internet users. The real problem is internal government filtering, and extremely slow download speeds.
The Iranian people seem to be quite adaptable to circumventing Internet restrictions. So, even a government shut down of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) might only spur its citizens to set up alternative methods to surf the net.
Hal Stevens
CEO
Iran Is a Rich Country
Many say that although the current regime in Iran is completely out of control, radical and fanatical, that the country is worth saving. This is because the country is said to be rich in culture and history, strategically places and indeed has lost of raw materials. Yet we as Americans know we cannot allow them to have nuclear weapons as they also sponsor international terrorism, which is completely unacceptable. Can you imagine a nuclear weapon in the hands of International Terrorism? Consider it. But on the other hand Iran’s rich heritage is evident as well;
Andy states; “Fact #7 is so glaring that it needs to be elaborated on its own merit: Iran is a rich country in just about every meaning of the word, it is resource rich, human resource (people rich), geographically rich and most importantly culturally and educationally amongst the richest countries in the world, along with Greece and Italy who gave us the 3 great empires the world has ever seen, i.e, Persian, Roman and Greek.”
What are we now reading from the CIA Sourcebook with a re-write from a Muslim US Professor who expatriated from Iran? What is the point of this? Every nation is rich in culture the older ones are more rich?
Andy states; “Iran has the 2nd largest reserves of natural gas in the world and 4th largest reserves of oil in the world, so all this talk of sanctions and other idiotic threats is just plain stupid.”
Indeed and the miss management of what they take out of the ground is causing Earthquakes and they know, but do not give a darn about their own people. And your comments do not state the fourth largest “known” deposits, so be careful how you phrase stuff. Unfortunately Iran is not only fully exploiting their riches but also using them as an economic weapon and rather pissing off many citizens of the world to the point if they could they would vote for a war just to lower fuel costs. Consider all this in 2006.