A “wages of sin” or “be sure your sins will find you out” kind of story: our senior editor David Goldman writes in his lastest “Spengler” column for the Asia Times that
much of the Islamic Republic [of Iran] runs on pirated software . . . . Most Iranian computers, though, run on stolen software obtained from public servers sponsored by the Iranian government. It would require far less effort to bring about a virtual shutdown of computation in Iran, and the collapse of the Iranian economy. The information technology apocalypse that the West feared on Y2K (the year 2000) is a real possibility.
He goes on to explore the effects of this and similar problems on Iran’s economy and its peoples’ lives.