Thursday, July 9, 2009

The Geek Who Built a Haystack For Iran


You may know of Austin Heap from his fight with Comedy Central, after he established a website to host free-view episodes of South Park. He's fighting a different battle these days: building a software system called Haystack to enable Iranians bypass state censorship of the internet - as TehranBureau.com reports:
In his converted loft apartment in the semi-sketchy-meets-startup SoMa neighborhood, Austin Heap, 25, spends most of his time in front of his computer — a PC tower that he built himself and hacked to run Mac OS X.

Heap didn’t have much knowledge or interest in Iran until very recently. As foreign media began to be kicked out of the country, information coming from online sources became that much more crucial.

“Three weeks ago I was very happy playing Warcraft and I was following the Iran election,” he says. “But it wasn’t until everything escalated there that I got involved.”

On June 15, three days after the election, Heap sprung into action....


See this article also.

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