Note update due to Daylight Savings Time!
Dear Commenters, please note that I have set the local time on this blog to UMT +4:30, the time zone of Tehran, Iran. Normally I’m set to Sydney time, which confuses you guys all the, um, time. So I doubt it will make your comment time-stamps any messier than usual.
Here’s the reason for this change: Censors in Iran are currently searching for blogs with Tehran local settings as a way of finding and shutting down sites that are protesting Iran’s recent (probably stolen) election. The more blogs in the world that are set to Tehran time, the harder the job is for these censors to do their job.
(By the way, if you are a censor visiting here from the Iranian authorities, welcome! I hope I have wasted your time. In other news: your regime sucks. Why not just play Tetris today instead of quelling protest? It would be more fun, and you would not personally be contributing to the suckage.)
If you, dear reader, have a blog, you can also set it to UMT +4:30. Somewhere in your dashboard or whatever is a button called “settings.” Click it and you should be able to change your local time fairly easily.
For more on the subject of censorship (in Florida*, not Iran), please enjoy this video from Maureen Johnson.
Update:
This post was quoted in the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog today! (Hidley-ho, link-following stockbroker-eenos! Come for the Iranian insurrection, stay for the YA!)
_______________
*Stolen elections and censorship, two great tastes that taste great together!
June 16th, 2009 21:22
June 16th, 2009 21:23
holy flip i waz first!!
June 16th, 2009 21:28
and wow scott-la. its a good thing that u changed it then. but lolz to the “welcome! I hope I have wasted your time. In other news: your regime sucks. Why not just play Tetris today instead of quelling protest? It would be more fun, and you would not personally be contributing to the suckage” lolz u must like tetris. and just so u know scott-la i would like u to know that im not a censor visiting here from the Iranian authorities, and u r to wasting my time. but i do enjoy tetris. do u?lolz and there regime does sucks:P
June 16th, 2009 21:43
That’s absolutely amazing! *changes blog time* It’s not just ‘Time Change’ it’s ‘Evil plot that’s awesome and involves time changing’
Yay! Tetris!
AND #4 woot
June 16th, 2009 21:44
What a fantastic idea!! I have a WP blog that uses “UTC +/-” times, so I looked up the local time in Iran and found that the setting should be “UTC +4:30 currently, to adjust for daylight saving time. You can check the link I found here:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=246
Thanks for posting an easy way for all of us to maybe make a small statement about what we think about censorship (not to mention fixed elections)
June 16th, 2009 21:49
6! And wow, Scott-la, I must say I lurve your cleverness. Bog-posting+Radical Politicness= Brilliant!
*changes blogspot time*
June 16th, 2009 22:07
For livejournal, how do I do it?
June 16th, 2009 22:08
My inner Uglies fan immediately squee’d as it remembered that this is exactly what Tally did at the end of the first book (i.e. created lots of people for the Specials to search through and get them off her trail while she rescued everyone from the Specials compound).
OK, inner Uglies fan. That’s enough. Time to go to sleep again. Go dream of hoverboards.
In other news: It’s time for true Iranian democracy, and I love how users of the Net is coming together to do anything they can to support the freedom of those who wish to make that democracy a reality. Yay!
June 16th, 2009 22:19
I found it it’s under account settings asia/tehran for people with livejournal and having trouble. not that many people have commented yet.
Hoba-la: I remember that! True…maybe Scott is like Tally. Minus the girl part.
Peace!
June 16th, 2009 22:52
Haha, Scott-la is very rebellious it seems. Nice.
June 16th, 2009 23:12
Yay Scott…your like a crim
…..
June 16th, 2009 23:13
Changed mine.
June 16th, 2009 23:14
great idea, will do. Thanks for the heads up!
June 16th, 2009 23:17
thats pretty interesting… I never check the time anyway but good to know!
June 16th, 2009 23:27
Awesome sauce. *changes time*
Yay, freedom of speech!!!
June 17th, 2009 01:24
PsychMama at comment 5 is right! Change to UMT 4:40 for DST.
June 17th, 2009 02:53
Fantastic idea.
*goes to change my blogs*
June 17th, 2009 02:58
changed mine!
June 17th, 2009 03:04
i switched my blog and two of my old blogs, I’ll tell everybody on facebook to do it too.
June 17th, 2009 04:43
Hey! Scott! You were mentioned at the bottom of this article:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/06/16/twitter-retains-spotlight-in-iran-coverage/
June 17th, 2009 05:58
Consider it done.
June 17th, 2009 06:06
Thank you for this post. I appreciate the opportunity that you are giving many fellow Persians to express themselves. Thank you.
June 17th, 2009 06:57
thanks for the tip Scott-la
June 17th, 2009 07:41
Thanks for the heads up! I changed mine, too.
In your face, censors!
June 17th, 2009 21:30
scott-la, i luv u 10 times more now!!!! thank u for supporting this issue! not that im from there, but im just a 12 yr old, and theres not much that i can do. but, u have alot more power than me, and if we do something like this together, then it can make a little bit of difference.
June 17th, 2009 22:54
Changed mine! I’ve told some of my friends too, don’t know if they have or not…
Also…It’s pretty awesome to get to your blog from the wall street journal [: [: [:
June 18th, 2009 00:42
I changed my Twitter, too. Twitter is also turning out to be a major (as CNN puts it) medium for the Iran election protests.
June 18th, 2009 01:39
Is there a way to apply this to Facebook, or is so less influential on reporting that it doesn’t really help?
June 18th, 2009 04:31
Just changed mine as well! I was just listening about this on the radio, I’m so happy there is at least something minor I could do to help out.
June 18th, 2009 06:57
Changed mine! Also going to change my twitter as well. Really glad I can help out.
June 18th, 2009 07:40
Couldn’t the Iranian bloggers just as easily change their timestamps to the U.S. or Canada, or somewhere in Europe to find anonymity.
While your gesture is heartfelt it seems like this wouldn’t really do much at all to help obfuscate the real bloggers. The timestamps on your servers are all going to be local.
Good thought though.
Enjoy.
June 18th, 2009 08:08
Just CHANGED MY BLOG TIME !!!!
=)
June 18th, 2009 08:52
Tarandon — Yes, the Irani bloggers could change their timestamps. But there are far more of us than there are of them. And you are right that the censors can check the server timestamps…when they think of it.
Even if it won’t work, I am doing it anyway. I like to annoy annoying people.
June 18th, 2009 21:29
Good idea. Changing my blog time. Wait, *thinks and thinks* what is that? I am so brain-missing.
June 18th, 2009 23:43
I already thanked you once for what you’re doing on Twitter, but now I’m thanking you again for stretching it out to your blog as well. Keep up the work and please keep advertising the cause to your fellow fans and followers. Maybe turn your blog page green? You truly would be amazing:D
Freedom and fairness for all of Iran!
June 18th, 2009 23:58
Nice, isn’t fun to waste various goverments time!
June 19th, 2009 02:34
I might make a blog just because it’s fun to mock Iran’s stupid government.
June 19th, 2009 03:50
lol that’s so fun!!!!!!!!! wasting other peeps’ time is so fool!!!!!!!!!!! (yes, i just finished The Last Days–it was so fexellent!!!!)
June 20th, 2009 05:50
yay for civil [or not so civil!] disobedience!
haha.
anywho, people should join my uglies site.
-coughcough-
<3
June 23rd, 2009 13:17
Do you think changing our country settings on stuff like Fanfic accounts would work too? We can’t change our time stamps, but putting the countries to Iran might help…
July 2nd, 2009 04:26
Yeah, you rock, Scott-la! *waves anti-censorship posters*
July 6th, 2009 09:32
Hmm…probably not the safest thing to say if Iranian authorities stumble across your site. haha It makes me think of what’s going on over there..but it has to happen. Through adversity comes progress =) hopefully…
July 11th, 2009 22:39
Let’s hope that the Iranians don’t think we’re challenging them to Tetris, they might just be good, and whoop us. xD
July 12th, 2009 19:58
jackie-la you lucky duck, you got comment 39!!!!
September 3rd, 2009 08:48
Hey good stuff…keep up the good work!
September 12th, 2009 10:00
Scott Westerfeld ROCKS MY SOCKS!!!
You are WAY more awesome than I thought… and let me tell you… that was pretty amazing already. “Bubbly” doesn’t even begin to cut it…
October 23rd, 2009 17:05
Perhaps society needs to go further and actively promote birth control and more active rewards for moving in the direction of middle class values of delayed parenthood, two parent families, and a more traditional lifestyle. ,