Behrooz Sangani – BSurprised Official Website

Many people suffer from the issues and restrictions that are politically imposed on them. Sometimes it’s by the government, and sometimes it’s by other countries because of the government. Well, in Iran, it’s both.

An amazingly large number of websites have been filtered in the recent years, there’s the law against large bandwidth usage for home and personal use, the prices for net, hosting, etc. are irrationally high and…. But we are somehow used to that, it’s been a part of our lives for years. My problem today is not this, it’s the second kind of restrictions. It’s you guys who live in other parts of the globe. Seriously, what’s wrong with you? Are you trying to help, or have a plan to make thing even worse.

Seven days ago, while I was on a trip outside Tehran, I received an email notifying me that my hosting service for four active websites has been suspended. I was not notified that I would be suspended, I was suspended already, because the US law prohibits providing services to residents and businesses located in Iran. And I have been struggling for seven days until today, I finally provided an address outside Iran, transferred my account, and managed to bring the websites back to life.

I’m neither a business, nor have any provide political views on my websites. They are either personal information, or provide cultural and artistic material which is provided by international input. Yet, I am the victim of this and the fun part is, it’s from the people who claim they are trying to solve the issues in Iran.

And this is just a starting example of what is currently going on.

• Google has banned access to services like Google Code for visitors coming from Iran. Think as a programmer who doesn’t have access to this big open source code repository.
• Same restriction applies when you try to download code from Sourceforge.
• You cannot download any Google applications from Iran.
• Godaddy has been banning any traffic that comes from Iran. This means that thousands of website cannot be viewed in Iran. There’s no message, you just assume the website is down for the moment.
• Almost all websites which provide services after you sign up, has removed Iran from their list of countries on the registration page. It’s as if 70 million people has vanished from the surface of the Earth. We do exist! At least, have the courtesy of disabling the option, or apologizing. I understand that it’s not your fault.
• And the list can go on for quite a while…

And here I am, with a big project on my hand, and a recent sign-up on another hosting service. They told me they don’t do such stuff on their service, but who knows if it was to get me to sign up, or just being nice. And I am wondering each night, maybe tomorrow another email comes. Not an apology, a notification and just like that, hundreds of hours of work goes poof!

So there now, you know why we were down for seven days.

Stay beautiful