There has been a movement to launch denial of service attached on various iranian pro government sites using standard DDoS tools to simple reload scripts like http://www.pagereboot.com/ Although I can understand the desire to increase the volume of expressed displeasure with the election, I’m not sure this is really helping.  Because the government is already throttling back internet access, so flooding the current internal network with requests does not help. I think anything to keep the channels as open as possible to get good information in, out and within the country is of greater important then making it hard to see a page that is of little news value. From J.M. Hipolito

“Calling for attacks for the sake of getting their messages across is an action far from actually causing any positive development in the situation. The only thing these hacktivists are succeeding in is making things worse. So please do not participate in any of these activities,” blogged J.M. Hipolito of Trend Micro.

Now, its not like Iran does not have fat pipes and may people have DSL in their homes. If the government was not messing with the connections, a few DDoS attached on gov. sites would not have much (if any) real affect on other interweb’s series of tubes.  But from what I’ve been hearing, they have been jamming satellite singles, blocking various IPs (web services) and bring digital cell service up and down. (Cannot get a good answer on the last bit).  So its hard to know just how much traffic CAN get in and out at any one time.

There is one other consideration. If you are outside of Iran and launching DDoS attacks, the gov can continue to claim the problems are from outside agitators.

I’m 50/50 on this issue. DD0S can be a good way to display unity and displeasure, but at the same time, if web traffic is throttled, it could only make things worse.  Hard to say.

BTW: I am watching whats going on with iPhone3.0 loads and talking to people about their experience, so I will be returning to my mobile gadget focus once this whole iranElection thing is done.  Or at least the interply between world politics, technology and social media slows down.