Displaying items by tag: Iran

It seems that the American government (and some businesses) are trying in all possible ways to declare Huawei an undesirable partner in the U.S. because of alleged security reasons. They could blame them, or they already have, because of something that possibly was not the direct fault of Huawei, but they are associated with it. Reuters has come into possession of documents showing that Iranian Huawei partner Soda Gostar Persian Vista and Iranian telecommunications operator MTN IranCell in November last year tried to sell American antennas. When ordering telecommunication accessories for cell phone towers, German manufacturer Soda Gostar placed an order for 36 antennas in that are produced for Huawei's telecom towers by American producer Andrew LLC. The equipment was to be delivered on the 3rd of February this year.

It would appear that the developers of Stuxnet/Duqu and Flame shared at least some source code during development. At least that is what security research firm Kaspersky seems to think. Kaspersky was the company that found the massive bit of malware that was using a compromised Microsoft Terminal Server licensing model to sign certificates for their code. Flame appears to have been a very coordinated espionage attack on Iran and has been in the news thanks to the complexity and functionality that it has.

In every occasion if you dig deep enough you will find the reasons for someone’s actions, even if they seem completely random. For a while now we have watched as congress has pushed one stupid internet control law after another. For many (us included) we have felt that this was at the request of the MPAA, RIAA and other copyright holders. After all the measures and consequences in the laws were geared toward them and helping them to “prevent piracy”.

As we told you yesterday the government in Iran is working very hard to block connections to social networks and even email services. They have gone so far as to block the use of the SSL and TLS protocols  (Secure Socket Layer and Transport Layer Security) which will block most email services with the exception of basic IMAP and POP3 mail. As of late last night it appears that they have moved into a second phase of restriction. We are hearing that they are now blocking certain sties by IP and domain name.

I love old sayings. One reason is that some are just plain funny, but another is that so many are true. In this case the old saying is “If you squeeze something too tight it will slip out between your fingers”. This is exactly what is happening with the tight internet controls that are being worked on right now.  As Google, Twitter and others are working on hiding dissenting topics and tweets that governments do not want visible in their countries people like the TOR (The Onion Router) Project are working to get around those restrictions.