Amnesty Calls Shenannigans on MS, Sun, Cisco

ZurichPrague writes "Amnesty International is claiming Microsoft, Sun, Nortel and Cisco, among others, have broken the law by selling filtering technology to China, helping that country implement its censorship. Is Amnesty right? Making the technology is fine, but if we know that it could be used for ill, aren't we bound to not sell to some countries and companies? C/Net has the story here."

Comments

give me a break

[twfry]

wether something is legal or not is defined by that country's laws. China has laws which require filtering. Who is anesty to say whats right.

These hippies believe the entire world needs to conform to their view point and anything and everthing else is wrong. How open minded....

Similarities with DMCA

[anandsr]

These companies should be fined. I know they did nothing wrong, but these were the very companies which did nothing to prevent DMCA from becoming a law. Actually they thought it would help them. The crime is exactly the same. They implemented something that might be used for doing bad. Actually this is much worse. While Johanson (Don't know the real spelling) only wrote DeCSS, but did nothing against copywrites, these companies actually sold their software to China for the specific use of Censorship.

While they are at it Amnesty International should also sue the companies providing censorship software to the Libraries (which blocks unsuitable material), France (which blocks nazi material), etc. Oppenheimer is actually the worst perpetrator. He produced a technology knowing well how it would be used. And it killed millions of Japanese. I think Oppenheimer should have been hanged.

At the end I think Amnesty International is after some quick bucks.

Not funny

[NineNine]

I don't think that this is funny at all. If anything, OSS is *more* to blame. OSS groups not only provide software for countries like China to use, but they do it at no cost. I think that OSS developers *should* be responsible for illegal and immoral uses of their software, also.

Re:IBM and the Holocaust

[Cheese Cracker]

The author, Edwin Black, says the scale at which the holocaust took place would not have been possible without the help of IBM's machines, and their engineers.

Did IBM supply computers to the Hutus, just so that they could pull through the 1994 massacre? 800,000 people in 100 days... that would make even Hitler green with envy.

Re:I call bullshit on this one.

[jafac]

I think that "unpossible" should be accepted into the lexicon of modern English - as a word which means what it says - "that which is not possible" - yet also communicates to the reader that the person who uttered the word is making a subtle Simpson's reference, or possibly even making a stab at George Bush's low IQ, or just plain ignorant. Words can have meanings on several different levels you know, and just because it's not grammatically correct, does not mean it's wrong.