Two Strikes in a Row

This morning, two important events were waiting for me when I got online:

• Google.com were filtered out by some utterly stupid people (I'm running after those guys to take back the IDIOT award to give it to these guys!) but it was restored in less than 12 hours AFAIK.
• Robert Jordan just died! What happens to the Wheel now? :-((

Idiots on Steroids!

After the last presidential election over here, I thought I knew who the most stupid person in the world was, or alternately, the most stupid people.
Three days ago, I was proved wrong! I travel a lot (only between Mashhad and Tehran) and some of these trips are by bus. The bus tickets are sold online as well as in traditional ways. Let me add here that the online bus ticket selling system is brain-dead, but not quite as much as the train and airplane systems!
Anyways, as you might guess, I buy almost all of my tickets online, and this last time was no exception. Only this time I bought them from a bus company that I had not heard about before.
The online system works like this: you go to http://ssit.ir/ and sign in (WARNING: Internet Exploiter-only website!) and choose your city of origin, the bus company, the destination, date, bus, seat, etc. and make the purchase. It gives you a 12-digit reservation number that you present in the bus terminal along with your name, and they print out a ticket for you if the information checks out. It takes about 2 minutes online and 2 minutes at the terminal, and you don't even have to show an ID or something.
When I went to the terminal in Mashhad about 15 minutes before the departure time, I foresaw no problems. How wrong was I! I went to the counter for my bus line and asked them to give me the print of a ticket I had bought online. The guy said "OK, no problem. Give me your ticket." I thought he had misunderstood me for some reason. "No, I bought my ticket on the Internet. I want the hard copy now." (I didn't say anything about the concept of "hard copy" to him of course. He would have died of brain hemorrhaging right then!) He said "OK, but you have to give me your ticket first." I said that I don't know what he's talking about and he went on to produce a single grease-covered piece of yellow paper that was a printed snapshot of the web-page that contained the reservation number! I was astounded, but I kinda expected this (maybe I'll tell you later about the time I got on a plane without showing a ticket!) So I began explaining that that piece of paper was completely worthless and anybody could write that up in a matter of minutes. And that I have traveled by online-reserved bus more than a dozen times and all I had to provide to get my ticket was the 12-digit number. He went on and said the most stupid thing he could have said. He said: "But how could we get our money from the company that handles the online sales?" !!!
I did not laugh. I could barely contain my anger as it was. I told them to check their passenger records and see that a ticket with the same number that I was giving them and my name was in there. They called in one of their colleagues and after much conferring and discussion among themselves, they managed to view the list of the passengers for my bus, and guess what, my name was indeed in there. But this did not change anything at all. The morons still insisted that I needed to give them my "ticket"! I even suggested that they print two copies of the ticket they were supposed to give me, but no; they couldn't do that, because "their computer did not print the tickets," (which I guess means their "program" didn't print tickets) which is BS, because I know that their software is the same for all bus corporations. They couldn't even find the Farsi version of the "Print..." button (maybe the problem was the three dots? After all, three is too many!)
In the end, I went out of the terminal, found an Internet Café and printed the online confirmation page (with the buttons and menus and everything!) and brought it back to them. They took it with such looks of triumph that someone from outside might have thought they had taught me a valuable lesson on the mechanics of the universe. They wrote out a piece of paper for me, and finally I went on to the bus, half and hour late. My seat was changed and the bus still waited for another 15 minutes before finally getting on the way.
Now you understand why these people win the honor of the most stupid people in the world.

War Zone, or Tehran in Unrest

I'm writing these lines among the sound of what I hope is not gunshots being fired. The sounds have moved to a few blocks away now. We are trying to circulate the air in the house to get rid of what I hope is not tear gas. Whatever it is, it burns the eyes and throat.
The fires are still burning in the broken windows of the bank at the corner. The gas station right across the street is all smashed up. The police sirens and car horns and cries and whistles of the people have just gone quiet.
Your shreds of doubt would be stripped if you could see me right now: head wrapped in a dripping wet towel (scarf actually) to fend off the last of the tear gas.
I'm not writing from east of Africa. I'm in Tehran.
It has been one hell of a night and it's not even dawn yet.

They're Gonna Filter Our SMSs!

This one's hilarious in a very sad way. Our government is going to start filtering our SMS (and possibly MMS) messages. I read the news here, and I have no other sources with more information, but this is exactly the kind of action you could expect from this kind of imbeciles.
And if I know them, they will execute it in the most outrageous and stupid method. And they will cite "protection of civil rights" as their motive, not once mentioning other alternatives like letting people themselves blacklist the forth parties that they don't want to receive. No sir! People must be "protected" in spite of themselves. And I guess everybody in Iran knows that given the option, the first SMSs people will bar would be advertisements and other junk sent from all kinds of government organizations and corporations!
Of course, if implemented, the whole process will be closed. The contract will be given to someone's cousin, and we (the minor group called "the people") will have no way at all to influence the system or even request information about it.
Man I get angry sometimes.

Stop Writing My Nightmares George Orwell!

If you live in Iran (as I do) in any society of more than 12, you see idiocy in action every other minute. One of the major sources of these stupid acts is, unfortunately, our officials (I guess every government in the world is like that, but that's no excuse.) Having lived here for ~25 years (i.e all my life) you'd think that I'd have seen all the aspects of such stupidity. But you'd be wrong. This last act is so pointlessly stupid (or so purely malevolent and evil) that all other tales and anecdotes pale beside it. (OK, I take that back. Not all others!) It's called the Plan for Organization of Iranian Internet Sites [Farsi]. Basically, they are forcing every web and FTP(!) site owner (everyone with a top level domain name,) to "register" their own and their site's information in a central database. What this database will be used for is not mentioned. All unregistered sites will be blocked! If you feel like it, read through the regulations[Farsi] yourself. Notice that how the fact that they're going to block every unregistered site is broken up and scattered all over the document. It makes me sad and full of rage. Sad that my beloved country is in such a pitiful state and me my fellow countrymen are so stupid and inactive. Why aren't we protesting to this outrageously ridiculous invasion of our rights? It's also chillingly frightening. Is this part of a move toward an Orwellian, 1984-like society? Will we find telescreens in our homes one day? We already have some crimes very near to thoutcrimes. Thinking about these things plunges me into a dark stupor. I wish I could do something. I am really afraid, I am scared to death that when people are pushed too hard for too long, they're going to erupt. No one in their right minds want another revolution or war. By the way, if you're the owner of a web site and you live in Iran, please please don't register it. Please don't.

Wiki-back-pedia!

The English Wikipedia is back in Iran. I don't know whether it's for all ISPs (I think so) or if it's going to last. I don't even know what might have caused it, but I'm happy. Unless... this was a clever maneuver by them to make us content! What if they blocked off Wikipedia for a couple of days, then reopened it so every one would be happy and forget about all the stupid blocks they have on all those other sites. Now I'm angry and desperate!

Infuriating and Ridiculous

Ridiculously infuriating is the act of blocking the English Wikipedia by Iranian judicial system and my ISP. How can someone with a half brain decide to block a community-written wiki encyclopedia? You don't know how much I want to meet the guy who made this decision, to stare at him in such a "عاقل اندر سفيه" ("wise man looking at a fool") manner that he would wish he was never born! Or probably, being the moron he is, he would just not notice. This is on the same line as restricting all private (households, etc.) Internet connections to 128Kib/s. Why are they doing this to us and to themselves?

Bill Gates for American President? Right!

Maybe even he would be an improvement over America's last choice for presidency, George Jr. But who am I to talk, after we elected our current president? Anyway, I was going to feel all down and furious today, till I encountered this website (and this post on Dilbert blog) through Slashdot. I was laughing like crazy when I realized that they were serious, and the laughter stopped.

Ignorance on the Podium

Go and read this piece (Farsi) of news, reporting our current president's viewpoints about population control and working women, among other things, as described by him in his speech. 120 million? Right!!! Specially note the part where he says that because the rate of population growth in some developed countries is negative (the rate of growth is negative, or the growth?), they're afraid of us, and our population growth! Why did we choose this guy? Either his ideas are too deep for us (really really really deep!) or...

Ignorance in Action

Some time ago, a little less than a year, I came across "The Da Vinci Code" (the book.) It made a bold statement in the preface that all the details about places, people, rituals, etc. have been thoroughly researched and their descriptions are exactly correct. It seemed to me that Dan Brown must have been an idiot to assert such a thing with such a boldness if he had not in fact done so. Anyways, I read the book and I liked it. The plot was good and the story engaging (although cliche-ridden) and the details were indeed abundant and informative. Then, I read "Angels and Demons". Again the assertions were there, and again the book featured interesting attention to details, fascinating people and places, and a lot of historical claims that were supposed to be facts (maybe they were.) But this time around, one of the characters were supposedly one of the Hashshashin (followers of Hassan Sabbah.) This time it seemed that the authors research had given him wrong data. It seemed that I knew more about them than Dan Brown. But I didn't think much of it. After all, I'm no historian, or even a history enthusiast. I let it pass. A few weeks ago, I came across audio book of "Digital Fortress", again by Dan Brown. This novel was about cryptography. This time, what he said about it was pure nonsense. I mean, it was obvious that he had read some articles about the subject, maybe even talked to some people who knew some people whose neighbors were cryptographers, but he himself does not understand the first thing not only about cryptography, also theory of informatics and computers in general. I'm not talking about advanced stuff here. What he does not understand starts from the meaning of bits and bytes and spans through meaning of powers and numbers. For example, at one point, the main characters are looking for a 64-bit key to a specific cipher, that someone has supposedly written down somewhere. During their search, it becomes apparent that the author thinks a 64-bit key is composed of 64 characters! And he doesn't mean 64 characters of '0' or '1'; No. He writes about how the string would be composed of English letters, digits and other characters! Even a 64-bit hex string would be only 16 characters long. As another example, he talks about a code-breaking machine that has 3 million processors and can brute-force a 64-bit key space in a matter of minutes (less than 15 minutes.) Even though these numbers mean that each processor must be able to cipher at least 3.4 billion blocks per second (note that I'm not talking about 3.4 giga CPU cycles, not even cipher cycles, but full cipher - key setup, everything) for the sake of argument we consider this machine practical. Now, as the story progresses, we see that the NSA (owner of this machine) is not at all worried that they'll see a code that this machine cannot break by brute force! I think Dan Brown didn't even bother to discuss this matter with a Computer Science sophomore, or a talented highschool student for that matter. Because anyone of those would have told him that just increasing the length of the key to 80 bits would make this machine take close to 2 years to decode even a single ciphertext. I don't even want to estimate what a 128-bit key would do to his super computer! Even more ridiculous (albeit less obvious) than that, is the fact that his machine does not seem to care about the algorithm! One of the cryptographers in the book thinks to herself that the algorithm did not matter to TRANSLTR (the said machine) since it searched the whole keyspace! I mean, seriously, how stupidly ridiculous is that? Now after all that, I must say that the book is a good thriller, with all the turns and twists of one and a bit more, but the details? I myslef would never take anything in his books for granted again!