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Wired on Defeating the Olympics Censorship
An anonymous reader writes "As discussed on Slashdot recently, Internet footage of Olympics events are being censored for US citizens. Wired.com is covering the issue in a recent story, discussing ways of defeating these measures. Duane Wessels, developer of the Squid caching proxy, and Len Sassaman, Mixmaster anonymity software author, are interviewed. Are they correct? Is geolocation content censorship impossible?"
Anyone with shell access to a server abroad can just SSH to a machine located outside of US and start their browser from there.
We the british public fund the BBC through our licence fee, it is because of this fee that we have impartial, and world wide recognised excelelnt broadcasts from the BBC.
This is not just restricted to BBC1 and BBC2 but also their digital chanels, where there 4 extra streams are being broadcast as well
I do feel bad for the American public have to put up with commercial crap during the games, but getting round the proxies is unfair on the BBC who are probably working hard on blocking non UK IP numbers.
After that, it was the U.S. boycott of 1980, then the Russia boycott of 1984. From 1988 on, it's been all commercials and tape delays.
Maybe this is a good way to promote P2P broadcasting?
PeerCast is an Open Source (not sure about the license but the sourcecode is available using Subversion) P2P broadcasting system which works great! I've not tried broadcasting/viewing videostreams, just listened to radiostations, but it has support for MP3, OGG Vorbis, Theora, WMA, WMV and NSV streams.
Very easy to install and use, it's just a single executable!
You just point it to a streaming source (for example your own IceCast server, a WMV stream which you have access to or your favourite internet radiostation) and the stream is available on the PeerCast network for everybody to listen to or watch, just pointing your favourite player to a http://localhost-URL.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
It's not as difficult as described in the article: Since I couldn't see the TV broadcast of the opening ceremony live, I recorded it and my recorder missed the ending. So I went to everybody's favorite bittorrent source (you know which one) and downloaded the whole ceremony in a few hours. According to the stats, some 1000 people did the same thus far. Difficult? No way!
There is a difference between a brutal, corrupt and oppresive force preventing the masses from knowing what their government are really up to, in order to prevent a revolution (censorship, a la China, North Korea, Fox News) and a broadcaster not being prepared to pay for the rights to Internet broadcast of somebody's legitimately owned IPR.
You forgot one country in this list.
The United States of America.
Sorry to put it that way, but I think that coverage of the second gulf war in Europe was a lot better.
First, we had pictures from non-embedded media.
Second, we don't suffer from hidden censorship like they have in the US.
If you want accurate information try to get a sattelite receiver with a large dish and even in most parts of the US you would be able to receive BBC world and some other news stations.
With less biased information.
(guess why the whitehouse don't invite BBC reporters anymore (-; )
If you want to read about real censorship at the Olympics, here you go.
I watched almost the entire 2000 Olympics on CBC, a network provided on our basic cable in southeast Michigan, where I lived then. The coverage was far more exciting and complete than NBC's, and not only because the CBC showed all the events live, as they happened, and NBC showed every event on tape-delay. CBC's announcers and approach to covering the Olympics (none of those stupidass human interest stories, more actual SPORTS) are simply superior to NBC's, and if I hadn't just moved here to Florida, I'd have my Canadian TV satellite dish up so I could be watching live Olympic coverage right now instead of sitting through Meet The Press.
I suggest you avoid NBC's main network coverage and watch the highlights of those "major events" on SportsCenter or some other outlet. Instead, watch some of NBC's other feeds like USA or MSNBC where they have more airtime to fill and therefore stick to the events.
Although I haven't seen it myself yet, I expect that the digital version of NBC's coverage to be very close to the style you're looking for. See, NBC-HD can only cover the events that the world feed has selected for HD coverage, and to make it to a 24/7 show it will have to repeat itself. The best coverage from a geek point of view, not surpriingly, is going to be the one that you must be a geek who has bought uncommon gadgets to see.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/1 8656.htm
August 14, 2004 -- THE Greek organizers of this summer's Olympics, which began in Athens yesterday, claim that more women athletes are competing than ever before. Women are also playing a high-profile role in making the whole enterprise, the biggest of its kind in Greek history, run as smoothly as possible. Seen from the Muslim world, however, the Athens game will look like a male-dominated spectacle in which women play an incidental part.
According to officials in Athens, the number of Muslim women participating in this year's game is the lowest since 1960. Several Muslim countries have sent no women athletes at all; others, such as Iran, are taking part with only one, in full hijab. And state-owned TV networks in many Muslim countries, including Iran and Egypt, have received instructions to limit coverage of events featuring women athletes at Athens to a minimum.
A circular from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture in Tehran asks TV editors to make sure that women's games are not televised live: "Images of women engaged in contests [sic] must be carefully vetted," says the letter, leaked in Tehran. "Editors must take care to prevent viewers from being confronted [sic] with uncovered parts of the female anatomy in contests."
Women athletes in Athens are unlikely to wear the Islamic hijab or full-length manteaux that cover their legs to the ankle and their arms to the wrist. The ministry's order thus could mean a blanket ban on images of female athletics.
Fear of Muslim viewers seeing bare female legs and arms on television is also shared by theologians in several Arab states. Sheik Yussuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian theologian based in Qatar, claims that female sport is exploited as a means of undermining "divine morality."
Ayatollah Emami Kashani, one of Iran's ruling mullahs, goes further. In a recent sermon, he claimed that allowing women to compete in the Olympics was a "sign of voyeurism" on the part of the male organizers.
"The question how much of a woman's body could be seen in public is one of the two or three most important issues that have dominated theological debate in Islam for decades," says Mohsen Sahabi, a Muslim historian. "More time and energy is devoted to this issue than to economic development or scientific research. "
Click to learn more...
Islamist theologians are divided on how much of a woman's body can be exposed in public. The most radical, the Sitris, insist that women should be entirely covered from head to toe, including their faces and fingers. The less radical Hanbalis say a woman should be covered all over, but recommend a mask with apertures for the eyes and the mouth. (A version of this, known as the burqa, was imposed on Afghan women by the Taliban).
The Khomeinist version of the hijab, invented in the 1970s and now popular in many countries, including the United States, covers a woman's entire body but allows her face and hands to be exposed. Hijab theoreticians agree on one claim: a woman's hair emanates dangerous rays that could drive men wild with sexual lust and thus undermine social peace.
But the problem of women athletes goes deeper. Some theologians claim that any form of sporting activity by women produces "sinful consequences." In 2000, for example, the Khomeinist authorities in Tehran announced a ban on women riding bicycles or motorcycles. The rationale? Riding bicycles or motorcycles would activate a woman's thighs and legs, thus arousing "uncontrollable lustful drives" in her. And men watching women on their bikes in the streets could be "led towards dangerous urges."
The problems don't end there. According to some theologians, a woman should not be allowed to venture out of her home without a "raqib" or male guardian. But that guardian must be either her husband or her father, brother, grandfather, uncle or son.
The "world feed" is comprised of the best available shot of the race at the moment as judged by a hopefully unbiased director who is accountable to all of the networks using that feed.
As a result, all of the countries who have a major compeitor in the event send a crew focused on their competitors. The world feed is then able to pick and choose... NBC's camera 3 or CBC's camera 2 or BBC's camera 5 are at his disposal, but he doesn't have a direct ability to give an order to any of the camera operators, he can only ask the national directors who actually hire the cameramen to do so.
If NBC didn't have as much resources as they did, the world would not have much coverage of the events the USA competitor wins.
You know... I've yet to actually watch an event that I've seen the US win. Hell, I'm sitting here watching Women's weightlifting and there's not a US person in sight. Last night I watched quite a bit of men's gymnastics, which focused on the Romanian, Chinese and Japanes teams. Probably saw just a couple of minutes of the US team. But you just sit there not watching the covergage while deriding it for something that's not happening to the extent your preconceptions belive it would be.
When I try to listen to the bbc world service online, all I get is something like 'due to rights restrictions we are unable to bring you this programme'
and that applies to the world news on the hour... indeed I havn't heard anything but an apology out of the bbc world service since the olympics started.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.