In his converted loft apartment in the semi-sketchy-meets-startup SoMa neighborhood, Austin Heap, 25, spends most of his time in front of his computer — a PC tower that he built himself and hacked to run Mac OS X.
OK. Austin may not be using a laptop, as the story title suggests, but not many of us are able to build our own PC. The word " laptop" works better than "custom-built PC tower configured to run Mac OS X" for a story title.
About the photo: a supporter of Democracy in Iran holds a sign that reads, “God is on our side. Do you intend to filter God, too?”
Heap didn’t have much knowledge or interest in Iran until very recently. As foreign media began to be kicked out of the country, information coming from online sources became that much more crucial.
“Three weeks ago I was very happy playing Warcraft and I was following the Iran election,” he says. “But it wasn’t until everything escalated there that I got involved.”
On June 15, three days after the election, Heap sprung into action.
On his blog, he — a technique where Internet traffic gets re-routed through another computer as a way to evade online filters.
“I felt like it was my responsibility to use my skills to help,” he adds.
Proxy servers, which have been in use in Iran for years as Iranians have struggled to get around government filters, are a constant cat-and-mouse game. As the government tracks them down, new ones take their place. Heap helped to create a flood of new ones all at once, which worked for a little while.
Non-Iranian geeks and activists worldwide are offering substantial technical support to help thousands of Iranians get around government Internet filters and to get unfettered access to information online.
And Iranians within Iran are responding. Many of the organizations and companies that make these various software tools have reported a dramatic spike in usage from Iran.
“Before the election we were seeing about one to two hundred new users [from Iran] per day,” says Andrew Lewman, executive director of The Tor Project.
“Right after the election and as the protests started we started seeing that spike up into 700 – 1,000 per day. Now we’re up to about 2,000 new users a day and around 8,000 connections sustained at any time, which is a huge, dramatic increase.”
Read the full story at Tehran Bureau, an excellent independent source for reliable news coming out of Iran.
Also see: Haystack: a program to provide unfiltered Internet access in Iran to be released
Keep up on the underground struggle for democracy in Iran by following these folks on Twitter: @ @ @
You can also follow Sam Spade's San Francisco at @
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