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This prig exemplifies the legacy of 8 years of Republican paternalism, and the sooner the US is shed of them better off both it and the world will be.

In unrelated news: The Onion reports Kerr is wetting his pants about UN criticiam of the US "owning the internet", not because the US will keep information free, but because it wound render that neat little AT&T ["Your World Delivered®"] room obsolete.

There's a study from the universities of Harvard, Toronto, and Cambridge that gives some insight into which topics the legions of censors put the most energy into blocking.

Biggest surprises:

• Only 18% of Chinese-language search results for "democracy" were blocked, while 90% of results about the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party were blocked.
• Various proxy sites were generally not blocked.

Biggest lack of surprise: Sites related to the Tiananmen massacre and Falun Gong were thoroughly blocked.

This gives a sense of what the regime there is most afraid of people reading.

I suggest that Chinese readers find a proxy and read up on exactly these topics.

Here is a very comprehensive paper on the state of internet access in Iran. Executive summary: it's one of the few nations on par with China in that category. If you've got better information do share.

For the most part, sites in the local language are much more likely to be censored than foreign-language sites.

Child porn used to be legal in Japan, before the entire Western powerhouse, led by the self-proclaimed "moral" leader of the world, the land of the free, stepped in and more or less forced the Western human rights onto the Japanese.

Before anyone wrongly believes I am in favor of child porn (which I am not), I would like to point out that what is considered child porn varies from nation to nation. Typical limits are 18 in the US and the Western world, and 14 in China. In my native Sweden, it used to be a matter of maturity in the actor/actress, which is why Traci Lord movies that were banned in the US were allowed in Sweden (good stuff, btw). Now Sweden has also jumped onto the US bandwagon, as in so many other issues, and I am the first to be sorry for that.

There is still a popular lolita culture in Japan, despite the ban on real child porn. The actresses are 18 or over, but they dress as if they were 14, in school uniforms and so on.

Anyway, what Americans don't understand and will never understand is that the UN decaration of human rights was created by Westerners to be imposed onto the rest of the world. In essence, other people should not only have the freedoms we have, but they should also not have any other freedoms.

Therefore, this campaign stinks of the usual cultural imperialism that has plagued us recently, the kind of American world view that is shoved down our throats.

The page links to some country reports, for instance http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/ on China. As I have done a similar report (in China), I can only say that it is exaggerated, and its purpose is to demonize China to the maximum extent. It doesn't put things in a cultural context, and doesn't honor the changes that have taken place for the better.

The conclusion, "While there can be legitimate debates about whether democratization and liberalization are taking place in China's economy and government, there is no doubt that neither is taking place in China's Internet environment today" is completely wrong.

While I'm sure if there was money, Google would censor, I'm not sure there's enough profit in Iran to bother. (they're bowing down for China in return for access to a potentially huge market)

Its another American company that's profiting (illegally) from denying Iranians uncensored net access.

There's reports on the net that Adult diaper loving Secure Computing did not sell the software to Iranian ISPs, but given the actions of other US companies when faced with trade restrictions, I have trouble believing them.

Gotta love the way the folks in Singapore do it... "Integrity, Service, Excellence"!

Oh Canada!
My online spying land!
Telco intercept at CSIS's command

With packet sniff and account info
The True North now South and "free"

From net and mobe,
Oh Canada, we foil(*) our heads for thee.

ISAKMP our tunnels to the free(**)
Oh Canada, we foil our heads for thee

Oh Canada, we foil our heads for thee!

----
*
a) Tin Foil - Aluminum Foil has been shown not to work.

**
a) Patch to avoid DOS
b) Avoid tunneling to the US or China both have stronger anti-communication laws


Canadian Government Information Site

However, the filtering system can be bypassed - inserting an ampersand (&) into the HPPT GET request, such as "search?&q=cache", allowed access to Google's cache.
[...]
The filtering mechanism appears specifically designed to target Google's cache, since caches of other popular search engines, such as Yahoo!, worked properly. from http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/

This is probably the way the extension works: it inserts a ampersand. As others said it will be probably fixed soon, sadly. As pointed out in the article, Chinese people should anyway try Yahoo cache, when that will be blocked too, some other new search engine or cache mirror, and so on.

Freedom of information is a human right.

It's an interesting idea... but is slashdot or information the feature itself blocked by their Cisco-backed filter?

You asked me to explain to you how you could legitimately criticise anything about a person's race. I really don't know why you would want to do that. But I suppose you could criticise the entire premise that race even exists at all. I mean, personally I think that the whole concept of race is something that people just kind of arbitrarily made up to make themselves feel better. It's sort of along the lines of "I'm a Raiders fan and they are a Cowboys fan" kinda thingy. I don't even like football.

What I actually said, on the other hand, was if the government was going to prohibit people from criticising people because of differences in thier race, then what other speech was the government going to prohibit?

As an example, I talked about how my wife was studying theatre and I suggested that perhaps a controversial movie like The Last Temptation of Christ (or whatever the cultural equivelent would be) might actually be illegal there. When you start putting limits on theater like "Don't do anything that criticises the government, or might offend any religons, or might offend anyone on racial lines, you are really not left with very much.

Singapore is a great place. Don't get me wrong. It has a very clean and orderly society. There is virtually no crime. People rarely talk badly about one another.

Ofcourse, that may have to do with the fear of what might happen if you get out of line. I read somewhere that it is illegal for religous organisations and political parties to get publishing licenses in Singapore. Singapore also has some of the toughest Libel laws in the world which it uses to silence a lot of people who don't support the government. Yes, they do have many different religons in Singapore. But, they apparently want to prohibit any conflict between people because religous conflict is not tolerated in web sites or in newspapers:

http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/singapore /

"However, ONI's legal and background research demonstrates that Singapore uses other, non-technological measures to prevent online posting of and access to certain material, particularly that related to political groups other than the People's Action Party and to religious and ethnic conflict. The threats of extremely high fines76 or even criminal prosecution77 as a result of defamation lawsuits, imprisonment without judicial approval under the Internal Security Act,78 and police monitoring of computer use79 may deter users in Singapore from creating or obtaining access to potentially objectionable material. Thus, Singapore's filtering regime for political, religious, and ethnic material is primarily low-tech, yet nonetheless potentially effective. "

So, yes, I worry a bit about my liberal American wife who wants to reform the world through avant guard theatre.

http://www.opennetinitiative.net/bulletins/010/ONI -010-telus.pdf Sorry about that...

As a concerned American citizen who is fast losing faith in the honor of his government, I think this is a ploy, to direct the attention of world citizens, and especially US citizens away from our own flaws and toward the flaws of other countries.

And who's behind this ploy to poison the world's opinion of Iran to deflect the world's attention away from the US? Who's behind the OpenNet initiaive? Must be the US government, right? Oh wait, no, it's the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and Cambridge University (more info here). These are hardly conservative organizations and they are certainly not beholden to their governments. Sorry, there goes that conspiracy theory.

Anybody who read the article a few days ago about the new use of eminent domain can see that the US government has major problems with the way it functions.

Bzzzzt. Wrong. I don't agree with the decision either, but this hardly is evidence that the US is having problems with the way it functions. In fact this is exactly how it's supposed to function... individuals challenged a law in court, and it made its way in an orderly fashion through the hierarchy of courts until it made its way to the Supreme Court. The SCOTUS is granted the authority to interpret laws, and that's exactly what they did. This is *exactly* how the system is supposed to function. Don't like the law? Write your lawmaker, but don't complain that the system isn't working right.

Instead of anybody pointing out the US censors information also, we all hurry to jump on the band wagon to single out and bash Iran.

Are you new around here? Ever hear of YRO? Government attempts to limit freedom of speech are reported every other day here. Seems more like that as soon as someone points out how foreign governments are limiting their citizens' speech, somebody has got to deflect it back towards the US. As you say, censorship anywhere is bad. So in an article about Iran, let's discuss Iran. In an article about the US, let's discuss the US. We should discuss censorship wherever it arises.

>Yes, but a company can make a tonne of money and still not be evil. They two things are not mutually exclusive.

Google this:
http://battellemedia.com/archives/000919.php

And this:
--------------
Google is one of the most popular search engines for users worldwide. Google's cache function, though, allows users to access (at least intermittently) filtered content, because the request for that material goes to Google's servers, not to the blocked source's servers.168 Concerned by this circumvention method, China temporarily blocked access to Google in September 2002169; requests for Google's site were redirected to Chinese search engines.170 According to the company, Google negotiated with Chinese officials, and eventually access was restored.171

However, we found that while Google's site is accessible to Chinese users,172 the Google cache173 and certain keyword searches are blocked.
--------------
Source:
http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/#to c4

US companies Cisco and Goggle were both named in a Washington Post article as being duplicious in aiding the Chinese governments efforts to censor the internet. Although it states the study does not mention either company and both companies have denied aiding the Chinese government it still begs the question whether US companies, especially, Goggle, would put profit ahead of freedom of speech. It harks back to the business done between companies from both sides during WWII.

I think it's important to note that China's government uses the censoring and the punishment of circumventing that censoring for different goals.

By censoring they try to keep the masses uninformed. Currently a bunch of websites is blocked and search engines are limited in their results. These messures can be avoided, but most users dont know how.

Cracks in the Great Firewall
Probing Chinese search engine filtering

In the punishing of circumventing these messures however, the government has simply found another excuse to put people who they don't like in jail. The people actualy being prosecuted for and convicted of these "crimes" are either members of the Falun Gong or the China Democracy Party.

List of People Detained for Internet-related Offences in China

With a bit of effort, you could probably enjoy everything the internet has to offer, logging in from China. And probably nothing will ever happen as a result. But when the authorities decide they don't like you they are going to hold it against you. Current sentences range upto 12 years or "unknown", while even capital punishment is a possibility.

The failure here was not in neglecting to install a monitoring/blocking system, but to take proper action upon notification.

The article links to the word list.

Blocking sites with "asian" in it must really help out those poor Chinese..

Err... I'm glad that everyone has the best interests of the populations of Iran at heart, but I think there's some confusion about how anonymizer.com actually works.

Anonymizer.com is intended to keep your identity a secret only from the target web server. From the original article: "they can use Anonymizer.com as a kind of jumping-off point, also called a proxy server".

This is correct. The client sends a request for a web page (say google.com) from anonymizer.com (or sedayama.com, or barandaz.com, or whichever). The anonymizer goes out, fetches the page for them, and then feeds it back. In this way, google.com has no idea who they are.

Since anonymizer.com's server is in California, all data must be sent between the server in California and the client in Iran, through the country's firewall and whatever sniffer programs they have running.

In no way whatsoever does this process prevent the Iranian government from snooping the connection between the browser and anonymizer.com to see whatever the heck the client is looking at. In fact, it makes the censor's life easier. All they have to do now is scan for all data to or from anonymizer.com, sedayama, etc. Then they can either parse the data and see what banned sites the client is viewing, or just assume that they're up to no good, raid their house, confiscate their computer and look at the browser cache.

According to the Opennet report, the only real "anonymizing" functionality of this site comes from converting URLs from text to hexadecimal, and the obfuscation from the anonymizer site having to change URLs and IP addresses whenever the Iran government blocks one.

I think the IBB is doing these people a grave disservice by advertising that sites can be viewed anonymously, when in fact they can't. Even if the connection was completely encrypted with SSL, the government censors could determine that a connection was made to an anonymizer site, and that the client is worthy of further investigation.

Again, from the OpenNet report: "Iranian users may not be aware that their use of the service may identify them to Iranian government authorities as citizens wishing to view forbidden content, or as supportive of the ideas found within that content."

Enough said. The people who run the IBB Anonymizer project should realize it was a well-meaning but flawed concept from the start, and it can actually be counter-productive by exposing Iranians who trust the claims of anonymity.

Those claims should be retracted and a big warning banner posted on the site(s), or the project should be killed outright.

One the banned list is the word "kitt". pr0n surfers will think this refers to sites like Persian Kitty, but those of us in the know realize that this is all a plot by Knight Industries to prevent the Iranians from stealing plans for the Knight Industries Two Thousand.

John.

Well because as you could see if you RTFA, it lists what keywords are being blocked, Here.

The only way you'll be able to run an effective police state is to firewall yourself off from the free world. See here for examples of how to do it.

According to their website:

NOTE: This wired article is not exactly accurate.

1. The ICE browser does not port scan anyone, it issues a request for a URL to a proxy server and returns the results to the user. There is no scanning of any kind.

The process of scanning occurs when open, publicly accessible proxies are identified by researchers in the Citizen Lab. The only ports checked are 80, 8080, and 3128, no others.

In many cases proxies are identified based on the fact that they are listed on websites that catalog lists of open, publicly accessible proxy servers. In such cases NO scanning is done.

You can read the rest here.