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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."
He wasn't arrested for speaking.
Code is speech.
The finger was pointed at him by Adobe - a corporation.
And your government buzzed into action like the little lapdogs they are:
Adobe: JUMP!
US Govt: How high master?
Corporations pushed for the DMCA.
Your government passed it...
-- iCEBaLM
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... ;-)
I live in China, and the firewall is *very* obvious
I hear you can even see it from outer space.
Kill, Tux, kill!
That is a complete and utter fabrication. I have been living in China for seven months now, using China's public internet service the whole time, and have never experienced the above.
... there is alot of it here already, and you're not helping clear things up for anyone. Americans who know little about China will jump at the chance to believe anything negative about this country, and you are just giving them more ammunition.
Yes, China does filter out sites, but that is the extent of it. I have never received any "access denied" error when visiting Slashdot, and I visit it every day, from Beijing no less, where the Communist Party's dictums are most readily observed.
True, China's connection to the outside world is slow and unreliable at times, but that's not selective by site - it's just poor network infrastructure.
Please don't spread FUD about China
My own personal opinion is that China's filtering policy is lame and misguided, but hey, this is their country, they can do what they want with it.
We all have our problems. But in this case, its easy - you don't want your citizens to see something? Its up to you to restrict them and deal with teh consequences like being voted out of office (if your citizens have that right.
Yes in an ideal world everything would be free and all would be free to see it - but that just isn't gonna happen. Sure, we can bitch about China firewalling and filtering everything - but that's life in a communist country.
Yes, I'm American so I can take this stance since my net use is pretty much wide open unless the FBI has a bad day, but beyond that, as long as some other country doesn't try to stick their noses into an American companies business (yeah right) I'm happy :)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Keep in mind, the French were never that great at building impenetrable barriers.
I think I'll stop here.
We (just meeting the USians here) should be setting an example for freedom, not censorship and control.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
>
> This part of the article will be a non issue once satallite internet takes off in a few years.
Owned and operated, pray tell, from citizens of where?