Comments on: Twitterverse working to confuse Iranian censors

Twitter users are changing profile settings to appear as if they live in Tehran in a bid to overwhelm censors looking for locals using the service to spread protest news.

[philpalm1]

So David are you going to also change your last name to Terdimanian? People are also adding other stuff to add to the plight of Iranians...

[kbrcatv]

What would happen if the protesters changed there location to outside of Iran?????? that might confuse the censors.

[Courtdotorg]

Yeah... wouldn't it make more sense for the Iranians to say they were in mountain time, use names like Redneck31?

[Been_there_Saw_it_before]

More rednecks are in Central Time. What is a redneck? Anyone with two first names, as in Billy Bob.

I think the Iranian government is finding out how hard it is to un-ring a bell. The light of freedom gets into a lot of dark corners and exposes evil for what it is.

[sythara]

rofl

[Dleon84]

LMFAO! @courtdotorg

[jc364]

Simply changing your timezone and city wouldn't be enough, would it? You would also have to organize fake protests afterwards.

[Polymathink]

Twitter users, forget about it. Changing your profiles is not going to work. Governments are able to filter through the traffic to tell where tweets (and most other kinds of traffic) are coming from. Iran will be filtering their traffic at different levels of the OSI and will not have to rely on user profiles at all.

[JoannaPo]

Changing profiles may or may not work in terms of confusing the Iranian government. But it will be a sign of support to the Iranian people. And I do want to support freedom in Iran.

[giveusabob]

"Changing profiles may or may not work in terms of confusing the Iranian government. But it will be a sign of support to the Iranian people. And I do want to support freedom in Iran."

The twitter profiles being sought by the Iranian government reside on Twitter's servers, all of which are located outside of Iran. Same for the profiles of anyone else using Twitter. So yes, changing your twitter profile to Tehran timezone could indeed confuse Iranian censors, as it increases the amount of information they have to sift thru to find identifiable information about people tweeting from inside Iran.

[jscov248]

I dont want to seem insensitve or God for bid to pro American BUT........
I dont see how twitting can confuse OR help. The military in Iran Im sure can track the computers in Iran. These twitters or whatever you call them in Iran, are only following in the footsteps of many Americans, who have fought and died to start this Revolution we call Freedom.
Reporters and information passers recording history that we Americans so quickly forget think we can fight all the fights in the world. LETS START WORRYING ABOUT US, Yes The U.S.

[HSB_Canada]

It seems a little simplistic to me that Tweeps changing their timezones can effectively thwart the Iranian intelligence organizations and police's efforts as they monitor Twitter. A bit like Road Runner putting thumb tacks on the road to slow down Wile E. Coyote... If the Iranian regime is sophisticated enough to have computer experts try to identify and find Tweeps located in Iran, I'm sure they rely on more than the self-indicated timezone entered by Tweeps. Most of the folks I follow on Twitter have a timezone of Quito (Ecuador) by default, because they've never set their timezone. Does that indicate that most of them are in South America...?

The importance of Twitter with regards to the events in Iran is undeniable. We have yet to understand its full impact. However, the amount of misinformation, unconfirmed rumors, urban myths being propagated at the speed of "RT" is equally astounding - and potentially dangerous.

HSB

[MegaMidget]

I've heard that one of the reasons Twitter is so powerful is that there are so many ways to post - cell, website, proxy websites, etc. I'm still looking into how this might help, but I understand the rationale that dumping a haystack on the needles can make the search harder.

I'm erring on the side of "it takes no time to switch my profile and send out a few tweets with tagwords in them."

Still researching if it's actually helping. I don't have a gun, I'm not there, and people aren't shooting at me so I figure it's the least I can do, just in case it actually helps.

[qmslager2]

Changing the time and place has at least two benefit as ***** (government tweets) are trying to connect to updaters through twitter. They are creating false twitter pages with the purpose to scam reformists into divulging their location or name. Obviously that is a sign that despite their famed technology somehow twitter is escaping them. When they try to sift through iran elections or any other trending topic they have to sift through hundreds with tehran as their home, which means it will slow the process of them sending misinformation. Second to this is the Basij who are using twitter pages directly to root out active techs and attack them. It allows for a more anonymous nature to your twittering. More importantly since the government is controlling bandwidth right now, many World citizens have created proxy sites allowing for Iranians in Iran to escape the government controls. the only way to catch these people is to data mine using search words in social sites and by giving your address as Tehran they have another person they have to sift through. The government may be using deep packet search features but those can be easily subverted by proxies or old fashioned pig latin, so they are still relying on data sifters to search through social sites