the 4 stages of life

[ Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed on this site are my personal views, not those of Neda Communications, Inc. or the Free Protocols Foundation or any organization with which I am associated. ]

I have been involved with the evolution of the Internet for a very long time, and consider myself a student of the medium.

And this website is part of that experiment. And it is a perpetual work in progress. Not everything on this site is in final form. Please drop me a note with your thoughts about my writings, errors you may notice or help with the half baked stuff.

By profession, I am an engineer. My Professional Biography and Resume describe my professional background. Here I will say a bit more about myself, and describe some of the events and experiences that shaped my philosophy, and led me to where I am today.

I went to high school at Andisheh (Don Bosco) in Tehran. Here are a few pictures of my Andisheh days. In 1978, I took Iran's national university entrance exams (concours) and ranked 290th out of about 400,000 participants that year. But I decided to go to the US to attend Seattle University, and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1981. I observed and experienced  the Iranian revolution in Seattle. Here are a few pictures of my Seattle University days. I then continued with graduate school at the University of Washington. I finished my Master's thesis in 1982 and dropped out of the Ph.D. program in 1983. Here are a few pictures of my University of Washington days.

Between 1983 and 1991 I worked for 9 different companies, large and small. Then I decided to start my own company. In 1991 I founded Neda Communications, and have been running that company ever since.

The first time I read the GNU Manifesto was in 1987. Even though as an engineer I was naturally aligned with the Free Software movement, it was not until the mid 1990s that I really understood the power of Free as it applies to the digital domain (replicatible non-material world). That power of Free remains generally not understood and there is a lot more that we engineers need to cultivate.

Around 1997, when AT&T Wireless abandoned pACT, on my own dime I took the orphaned protocols and published them as RFC-2188 and RFC-2524. Those protocols are now totally open and free.

Throughout the late 1990s, my engineering and business philosophy became increasingly radical and nonconformist. This was the dotCon era. The dot-com bubble was a massive fraud perpetrated by financiers against the engineering profession, honest businesses, and the public. When dealing with Venture Capitalists, I make this professional conflict clear. For me personally, the dotCon era was a call to action to take steps to protect my profession and expose fraudulent business practices.

In 2000 I formed the Free Protocols Foundation, with the mission to maintain the integrity of public protocols, software and services. And throughout the early 2000s I wrote a series of papers challenging exploitative business models, and proposing truly open and free alternatives. These include The Wap Trap and Operation WhiteBerry.  More generally speaking, since 1997, nearly all of my software and most of my writing has been copyleft and libre.

The Internet has become a dominant medium for communication, information exchange, and the expression of ideas. As the first generation of Internet engineers, we have a particular responsibility to protect the integrity of this critical societal resource. I invite you to participate in the activities of the Free Protocol Foundation.

In 2000 the New York Times made partial publication of a leaked CIA document titled, "Clandestine Service History -- Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran -- November 1952-August 1953." This document describes the planning and execution of an act of obscene criminality against a nation and its people, conducted by the American and British governments. This document is critically important to understanding the political relationship between the US and Iran today. Yet the New York Times published this critical document with the names of many of the criminal perpetrators censored. The New York Times also limited its publication to scanned image (bitmap) format, rather than machine-readable text. It was through the actions of people like myself, not the New York Times, that this document was eventually  published properly -- in text form, and fully unexpurgated. It is by reading documents like this, and understanding how they came to be published, that American citizens can better understand the actions of their own government, and the costs of those actions. The word blowback appeared for the very first time in this document. The great majority of voting Americans remain completely mystified about the underlying causes of the events of September 11, 2001. But to me, and many others throughout the world, there is no mystery at all.

I feel more comfortable when I protest than when I conform. Since 2003, I have participated in as many anti Iraq war protests as I could. Here are a few picture of our anti-war protests. The mainstream US media has failed miserably in communicating the truth. Since 1992 I have been running various mailing lists including Iran-News at payk.net  where a broad specturm of news related to Iran is available.

The free software movement embodies principles of freedom, openness, non-control, and non-authority. These principles maintain the integrity of software, and protect society from exploitation by controlling interests. Since 2000 I have developed a model for applying the same principles in the Internet Services arena. I call the resulting model the Libre Services model. I have written a series of articles to document every aspect of this model. On the public side, under the auspices of the Free Protocols Foundation, I and others have written the "Libre Services Manifesto." And on the private side we have analyzed the business and commercial dimensions of this model, and documented this in the form of an open business plan.

The website you are looking at is a Libre Service. It is based completely and exclusively on patent-free protocols and free software. This website is also part of the By* family of Libre Services. The By* services provides users with comprehensive computing and communications capabilities, while preserving critically important civil liberties such as privacy, freedom of information, and freedom of speech.

I invite you to try ByName out for yourself, and join the By* Libre Services community.