Science and Technology

Radiofarda – Abolhassan Firoozabadi, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace (ISCC), says that if Internet platforms are not compatible with the laws and standards of the Islamic Republic, they will be censored. Firoozabadi said on Sunday that filters may be implemented on Internet content “if the platforms do not comply with Iranian law” or “create cultural, social, political …

Radiofarda – The head of the Council and Internal Affairs Commission of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammad Saleh Jokar, says that launching an Iranian national intranet is included in the new partnership being planned between Iran and China. Speaking to the pro-reform website Entekhab (Choice), Jokar said on Tuesday, September 1 that Tehran had welcomed the cooperation of countries such as …

Radiofarda – Iranian society has been fighting systematic censorship for over four decades; from the ban on videotapes in 1980s, jamming satellite television, blocking news websites in 2000s and social media in recent years. Nonetheless, a glance at the past shows that the Iranian government’s extensive restrictions have had very little if any impact on the way Iranians have been …

RFL/RE – A group of 40 Iranian lawmakers has submitted a controversial draft bill to the parliament that could result in harsher online censorship by giving control of the country’s Internet gateways to the armed forces, including the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).The bill also calls for the creation of a board that will oversee social-media platforms and deal …

Radiofarda – Iran’s Telecommunications Minister Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi on Wednesday admitted that “as shown by the incidents in November” the home-grown search engine cannot has failed and cannot meet the expectations. In November 2019 anti-regime protests broke out across the country when the government raised fuel prices three-fold. During the protests, authorities shut down the global web access for several …

Radiofarda – Dozens of lawmakers in Iran have signed a motion to replace foreign messaging apps with domestically produced ones. The proposal titled as the motion for “Organizing Social Media Messaging,” was presented to the parliament’s presidium on Monday, August 24. Signed by forty MPs, the motion has set fines and prison sentences for anyone who offers social media messaging …

Radiofarda – Iran’s Armed Forces General Command said in a statement on Monday that cyber-threats from “any government, group or person and at any level” will be “mightily reciprocated,” warning about cyber operations from foreign countries in “political, economic, social or cultural” areas, including elections. Iranian authorities have admitted on several occasions that the country’s online infrastructure had been targeted …

Radiozamaneh – The coronavirus pandemic has created a humanitarian crisis in Iran. Zamaneh Media has obtained several documents containing data from Iranian hospitals. The leaked documents indicate that the Iranian government has been covering up the actual Covid-19 infection and mortality numbers in the country. Iranian firefighters and municipality workers disinfect a street in the capital Tehran for coronavirus COVID-19 …

Al-Monitor – Google took action against Iranian government accounts for coordinated activity, the tech giant announced Wednesday. The move follows similar actions by Facebook and coincides with Twitter rolling out labels for select government accounts on its platform. Google announced it terminated 16 YouTube accounts in April that were allegedly linked to the Iranian state-sponsored International Union of Virtual Media network. …

zdnet.com – An Iranian hacking group known as Oilrig has become the first publicly known threat actor to incorporate the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) protocol in its attacks. Speaking in a webinar last week, Vincente Diaz, a malware analyst for antivirus maker Kaspersky, said the change happened in May this year when Oilrig added a new tool to its hacking arsenal. According to Diaz, Oilrig operators …