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Academics Take On Government Net Censorship
Anonymous Brave Guy writes "There's an interesting article from the BBC today about a group of academics at the University of Toronto who are working to investigate and break down government-imposed censorship of the Internet. Are they defending human rights, or simply trying to impose their own beliefs on people from other cultures? Incidentally, one of their people was responsible for the previous Slashdot discussion of 'five fundamental problems with open source'."
When I worked at GTE the company got the contract to lay the fiber optic cable around the border of China and put in the network centers that setup a ring around China. Total control of all the traffic in and out of the country, or so they hoped. A career limiting move came when I wrote Chuck Lee, CEO of GTE, and said we were helping the same Communist government that gave us Tianamen Square and would continue to repress the Chinese people using this technology. But Bean Counters only care about profit and damn the people that get get screwed over in the process.
As a side note, I knew a lad working near me from China who had been at Tianamen Square the day before and then the day after the massacre happened. When he saw what the army had done to their own people he went home, packed and left for Hong Kong and then to the US.
Censorship is only one way the Communists will use to stay in power and shooting another bunch of college kids can happen again.
Are you kidding me? I live in Canada and all I see is American content -- radio stations are full of American music, television is all American shows, and the products we buy are all American. Where's the censorship? It's obviously not working.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
If something cannot exists, it must exists because it cannot exists?...
I fail to follow your logic, care to elaborate?
- These characters were randomly selected.
The most popular US news channel is banned in Canada. I'm pretty sure that SciFi channel is also banned; there are others.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I'm aware of these guidelines, I'm just saying that they don't really have significant impact on what I end up seeing.
But the original issue was one of Canadian TV censorship -- which to me is still pretty funny. For example, our uber-popular comedy Trailer Park Boys is coming to the US, except they're going to have to censor the show for American viewers. (There's lots of drug use and swearing on the show). There's obviously more censorship in the US than in Canada. Superbowl boobies?I live in Dubai, which is the financial capital of the UAE. As net censorship goes, it isn't as bad here as it is in Saudi Arabia or Iran. The censorship is generally applied to "home" based Internet access, while access is open for office based Internet. Initialy, internet access was unproxied, but some neighboring countries complained about having access to "Questionable" material (anyone who has ever studied Middle Eastern politics understands how poisonous it can be), so BAM came the proxy and all the headaches that goes with it. My problem with censorship however is that it encourages the very behaviour it was intended to stop. Whenever I try to visit a site that just happens to blocked, I get so irritated that I can't help but try to defeat the proxy. Worse, there are plenty of legitimate sites that are blocked because of poor filtering parameters. There are plenty of ways around the proxy though, so its more designed to keep children out and clueless adults (The same clueless adults who are afraid of the BIG BAD net). Censorship has nothing to do with "preserving" religious values, it has everything to do with power and maintaining control by witless clerics and hypocrites. Islam flourished when muslims hungered for knowledge, it only started to decline when clerics decided that muslims already knew enough and didn't need to know more. In the UAE, we have this proxy just to shut the neighbors up, I am looking forward to the day when it finally goes down.
You are right that Freenet is very frustrating to use, but I'd rather that something like it exists and be developped so that when we start to really need it, the kinks have been worked out. That's why I run a node although I don't actually browse freenet; it's a kind of donation to what I believe is a worthy project.
It's the same everywhere, really. The first people who bought hybrid cars didn't get machines that worked as well, were as fast and efficient as those we have today (have you seen the 2004 Prius? or the 2004 Civic Hybrid? And soon there'll be Accords and Camrys) and they had to pay a higher price/deal with more problems, uglier designs, etc.
Same with the people who buy version/revision 1.0 of video cards, motherboards, etc. More bugs, higher priced, etc.
But without the early versions, we wouldn't get the killer apps later on.
I'm sure that better routing/whatever will be developped for freenet, and with bandwidth and storage becoming cheaper all the time, the network will be more efficient than it is now at equal number of nodes. It just takes time to get there... Of course there could be some theorical bottlenecks to the project that can't be easily solved without changing some of the fondamentals, but maybe that's possible too without compromising the goals too much.
My 2 cents (canadian).
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
On the contrary, western culture has not prevented our governments from actively supporting oppression in other countries in many cases.
I am not sure why people are modding your post down. The post did a nice job of being an entry point into discussing the article without being flaimbait.
I think the article is touching on something slightly larger than American culture v. the world. They are touching on the fact that if you have a system where people have access to a global media, then you will end up losing a great deal of what you consider to be your own local culture. To prevent this from happening (i.e., to preserve your culture...) you have to curtail human rights. This is not quite an "our army is bigger than your army" issue. It is a little bit more of whether or not the "world culture" should dominate your local culture.
Accepting human rights pretty much takes the ability to completely define culture out of the hands of any given authority. If your belief system demands a general authority then the global culture will always be a horrible shock.
People from Iran, for example, don't necessarily feel that first world countries are better. In many cases they long to go home. People usually go to first world countries for education, money, or to flee political turmoil. They frequently feel that their home countries are more virtuous, stable and sensible and have better food.
Our western recipe for success doesn't really work. It requires turning all the housewives into realtors or project managers or something, and leaving TV and the streets to raise the kids. It requires importing women from traditional cultures to play Mom for kids of the affluent. It requires poor and repressive countries to make our stuff. We're phenomenally good at inventing, colonizing, owning, conquering; but not at much else.
Second, these third world countries are not as hellish as you're portraying. People generally aren't shot in the back of the head. The middle east isn't a hellhole for the people that live there, although it might be for a transplanted American. Many Palestinians have houses, cars, refrigerators and olive groves, a fact I only discovered when reading how the Israelis destroy these things.
I think that most people in the world do not want or approve this kind of freedom. People are generally very happy to see dissidents with bizarre politics punished. Ask any Chinese person about Falun Gong. If the US rounded up all the Scientologists and shot them, I think it would gain more popularity than any tax cut.
Personally, I'm a product of the West and wouldn't be happy in a traditional regime. But I realize that people raised in them may feel differently.