A fun meme that has come up on Twitter. Change your location to Iran! There have been concerns about the Iranian Intelligence Service trying to track down people based on their locations. So, Kim, Fiona and I have all changed our locations to random places around Tehran. We’ve also changed our timezones and the background color of our pages to a shade of green I lifted off of a picture of President Moussavi . While doing this, I also used BrightKite to indicate that I’m in Tehran. Not only may that confuse the intelligence services, but it is an important show of solidarity with the people of Iran.

الله أَكْبَر

It was quarter of four in the morning in Tehran when I started writing this. I’ve been reading the #iranelection messages on Twitter. Even at this hour, they come fast and furious. I’ve been trying to get other work done today, but I’m distracted by Iran and I’m over tired. I’ve also got client work and family responsibilities to tend to, so I will save posts that require more thinking, research and editing for later.

Over on LiveJournal, one person commented in response to my #cnnfail post, “CNN's not that bad... they cater to their audience's demands, isn't that what they're supposed to do for the most part?” It is sort of like the question about whether or not political leaders should simply do what the polls tell them most people think. It really isn’t that simple. We need media and politicians that are leaders and not just followers. More on that later.

One of the trends that has been hot on Twitter today is “Functioning Iran”. The idea seemed to be to publish working proxies that people in Iran could use to get to the Internet. The problem is that the Iranian Government is also monitoring Twitter, so any proxies posted are likely to get blocked in Iran. Beyond that, most people kept retweeting the same four proxies.

What has been more interesting and helpful is Austin Heap posting instructions on how to set up a squid proxy and how to set up a squid proxy on Windows. I tried setting up the Apache2 mod_proxy service but didn’t have any luck and didn’t feel like struggling with squid, so I figured I’d try a different approach.

It turns out that using SSH, you can set up a very nice proxy. In my case, I used the –D flag of SSH to connect to my server with the connection back to my machine. E.g.

ssh –D 8831 –p 8022 user@example.com

where 8022 is the secret special port to connect to ssh on my server, user is my username, example.com is my server and 8831 is the port that I want to use for proxy.

Then, on Firefox, I went to Tools, Options, Networks, Settings and set the Manual Proxy configuration Socks Host to localhost and the port to 8831. I specified Socks5, and then went to this proxy test site. It said I was not coming in from a proxy, but it did say that I was coming from the IP address of my server, instead of the IP address of my home computer.

I tried a similar thing for Chrome, but didn’t have any luck. However, I tried it from Safari and from Internet Explorer 8, and it worked fine. For Safari users, go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced, Proxies and click on Change Settings. On the Connection tab, click on the Lan Settings button, and then check the box to use proxy setting. Like with Firefox, put in localhost as the address and 8831 as the port on the Socks line. Internet Explorer and Chrome appear to use the same settings.

So, while this might not be helpful to most people using Twitter from Iran, it is nice to know how to set this up. Next time I’m some place that blocks access to Twitter or Facebook, I can get around it. If there are geeks from Iraq that want to use SSH they can get in touch with me and I can give them limited access.

The other big techie event is that NTT America, Twitter’s hosting service scheduled a ‘critical network upgrade’ for this evening at 9:45 PM Pacific time. While any network upgrade will inconvenience people, 9:45 PM Pacific Time worked out to be 9:15 AM in Tehran. With a general strike called for tomorrow, this might not be the best time for an outage. After much discussion on Twitter, NTT America has been rescheduled until 2 PM tomorrow Pacific Time. This is likely to be more inconvenient to venture capitalists on the West Coast of the United States, but for the people of Iraq, it will be at 1:30 in the morning. Not the best time to be with limited communications, but perhaps not as bad as at 9:15 in the morning. It will be interesting to see if there is a big uptick in traffic on other sites like identi.ca or FriendFeed.