Slashdot Mirror
Geography, Laws, and the Internet
Sara Chan writes: "This week's edition of The Economist has the cover story and lead editorial devoted to how geography affects the Internet after all. The whole of China is basically firewalled. In France, Yahoo! is appealing the court ruling that banned its selling Nazi memorabilia. In Iran, ISPs are required to block immoral sites. Each country wants to impose its own laws on others, of course without reciprocation. The editorial concludes thus: "The likely outcome is that, like shipping and aviation, the Internet will be subject to a patchwork of overlapping regulations, with local laws that respect local sensibilities, supplemented by higher-level rules governing cross-border transactions and international standards." Not all new, but worth pondering."
What, now that someone in China may not be able to bid on your collection of Playboys on eBay, it is time to stand up?
Puh-lease. Rape, spy, kill, cheat, lie, steal, oppress - but don't limit our internet access! I know, the internet should be free, but a lot of things "should" be. Let's get everyone some food, shelter, and safe living conditions before we worry about whether they can ride the information superhighway. (haven't heard that term in a LONG time) :-)
www.poundingsand.com - Tshirt designs - check out Micropoly!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Right now, our notion of the "destination" of a packet is based on IP addresses, which are somewhat arbitrarily chosen and have little relationship with the physical location of the target machine. To make this work, we've needed to employ complex routing tables and algortihms with relatively large upkeep and administration requirements.
As the 'net becomes more strongly connected, there will be even more paths for packets to take, and it seems logical to try and simplify routing. If the "address" of a machine were derived from its physical geographic location, then packets could be routed simply by "sending them in that general direction". Instead of complex routing tables, routers would only need to know their relative geographic location in order to send packets toward the target. Conventional routing methods could be used on a local scale to calculate the final hop or two for the packet.
Needless to say, this method would trivialize the problems posed in the article as well.
I'm sorry, but I was working in China for 3 weeks last month on a job for a large oil company.
This company gets it's international bandwidth from a global supplier, and this also provides internet and e-mail access.
This means Chinese employees in the firm can surf the Intranet using the corporate intranet connection, and thus completely bypass any state-controls governing usage.
And for the paranoid out there, the bandwidth is provided over a cable laid from Shanghai by MCI WorldCOM. I have used the link extensively, and I found no evidence it is either tapped, filtered, or monitored.
I also used various alleged-illegal crypto products over it, and I never got a knock on my hotel-room door at 3am to tell me to stop.
You CANNOT firewall a country. There are always ways and means, and in practical terms the effort to do so is too high. Just because Chinese cyber-cafe's are monitored does not emply everything else actually is.
For an example I don't have to look very far; my site has a .uk domain, but it's actually hosted in Norway (even though I'm actually based in the U.K.). Now suppose I slander someone from China on my site - which legislation does it fall under? It's time to face up to the fact that the internet is a global system, and is difficult to regulate nationally.
I've always wondered just how they seem to think this is enforcable .. I guess the cuban tld is firewalled over at Redmond? :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Doesn't seem to stop .cn domains from spamming the fuck out of me, though.
(Paranoid thought: Red China takes a permissive stance towards their open relays and clueless admins because they want the rest of the world's to firewall them too. If they can't completely stop their people from talking to our people, they'll make us do it for them...)
(Evil countermeasure: When you block mail from a .cn host, make sure the bounce message contains randomly-generated text blocks. The string "I think it's so cool you left the relay open for us to use to send messages through" wouldn't hurt either. If enough admins did this, China's open relay policy might be, uh, reconsidered... ;-)
That's a bit harsh - the ostensible aims of DMCA and Carnivore are far from nefarious.
DMCA "aims" (completely unsuccessfully) to ensure copyright can still function profitably (a noble aim, not everybody is motivated to create without an incentive), and Carnivore aims (with more success, but with many more undesirable side effects) to negate the effects of terrorism, the activities of child pornographers, etc etc. There are valid motives behind these things, but somewhere along the line, they got hijacked by combinations of big bizness(TM), stupid senators, and fascistic neo-mccarthyists.
And as for the US setting an example for freedom, well. I don't think we (non-USians) need to be taught, actually. Freedom is one of those rather instinctive things, and I'm not going to enhance my knowledge of it by reading USA Today (yes, slightly trollish, but I'm pissy about that comment).
Americans think porn is OK, in the Middle East you can get hanged for it.