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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?"
... Corporate Control.
The "Olympics" (tm) is Globalization defined. Duh. Who wants to watch that?
I doubt the majority of people either have a machine overseas, or know how to SSH to one. I also doubt they want to watch the games on their computer.
Even if you use a broadband or other high-speed connection, I wonder how much bandwidth you could get through the overseas connection that would be required to view a European stream.
Bandwidth may certainly be getting cheaper, but with a ping to an overseas IP takes over 100 ms, you'd better hope that everything arrives in order or else you'll suffer from too many dropped frames as packets get lost (especially as more people from the US try to get into the same relays online).
Besides, are the Olympics going to get better ratings this year then they did in Salt Lake City?
yes.
but that doesn't mean that it doesn't work for the tv networks purposes(which is why these clausees that make bbc & etc limit the feeds only to their areas). their purpose is just to make it hard enough that the average customer will wait for the time delayed showing in the states rather than go on and somehow proxy it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
Grow up. This is not censorship. It's licensing. Confusing the two makes you look stupid, your arguments weak, and provides ammunition to those whom you may have a legitiamte gripe with regarding IPR whilst reducing the travesty of true censorship to something akin to you not being able to watch some TV.
I'm actually pretty disgusted that you've used the word censorship like this. This will get modded down as trolling, but I really think you guys need to get things into perspective. I feel sick.
Tossing around a word like "censorship" when it really does not apply only dilutes the term and renders it ineffective when you really do mean to use it.
NBC is airing full coverage every Olympic game somewhere here in the USA. Every hour during the day right now, there is coverage on at least one of the NBC-Universal networks which include NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, USA and Telemundo. Also, in areas where digital TV service is fully functional, NBC is providing a 24/7 HD feed, but that is only available to you if you have a digital TV decoder.
You don't need to pay NBC to get the digital service, but you do need to provide the hardware to get access to it, and you have to hope that your local station has done the same. DirecTV is also offering the digital feed on their service, but you must have an HD decoder for DirecTV and your local NBC station or stations must have signed off.
Censorship is the intentional destruction of information in order to kill off a taboo topic. That's not what's going on here, NBC is simply letting its business need to sell ad content affect in what ways they're distributing coverage. And part of that means that no Internet coverage from other nation's rightsholders can be tolerated.
If you're not NBC but ESPN, you must comply with NBC's rules and limits on the usage of the TV coverage to put highlights on SportsCenter. In fact, even if you're the sports reporter on an NBC affiliate station, you have to agree to those rules or not use them.
Sports highlights are not free. There are strings attached to their usage usually dictated by the league who wants the right mix of promotion of their sport while also not giving away the store when it comes to their TV rights money.
Only NBC would be able to put streaming video games coverage on the Internet for USA consumption, only the CBC can do it for Canada, etc.
Just like sports leagues who try to limit distribution of their games to their local marketplace by teams, the Olympic carves the world's broadcast rights up by territory too. They just have larger zones to play with.
Wow. Carter's boycott must have worked all too well, erasing the entire 1980 summer games from memory.
The 1980 summer games (the real olympics) were in moscow.
The 1980 winter games (a smaller, ancillary companion) were held n Lake Placid, New York.
The NBC has a government supported monopoly over Olympic Broadcast in the US. They face no competition at this point because they won a bidding war, or someone got a little cashola. There are other venues that are providing superior online Olympic Coverage. As a US citizen (not saying only US citizens can do this), I am used to shopping for the best product in a free market enconomy (although patent law is slowly erroding the variety of that market.) I have no choice in this matter.
Why do I say government supported monopoly? I am sure there is some obscure law somewhere that makes it illegal, although it is a little incovenient and impratcical, to tap into the British only BBC streams. They will not be using government funds, just government muscle.
What can you do about this? Well, if you live in the US, just boycott the NBC broadcasts completely. If a product is bad, do not use it. Everybody in the US complains about problems and issues and erroding rights, but no one does anything about it. If NBCs ratings are bad, then they get a clear message that something is wrong.
Of course, if they see their online ratings are bad, they will just paint it as no one wanting to see online coverage, as opposed to no one wanting to watch their spotty, incomplete, pleebian coverage. Peel back the paint.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
How is this "insightful"? This is NOT censorship! I repeat: THIS IS NOT CENSORSHIP. If you think it's censorship, show me the law telling NBC they have to tape-delay their broadcasts, or the IOC (a non-US entity) that they must write geographical restrictions into their broadcast contracts.
The ignorance of some of you astounds me.
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Important difference: there's no actual censorship going on here; the Olympics made a deal with NBC and that deal included blocking any other "broadcasts" (loosely defined) of the Olympics to the US. If you're going to blame someone, blame the IOC for selling us all down the river; the US government's only role here is that its court system enforces the contract and the copyrights (held by the IOC) of the broadcasts. Read the Areopagitica for more on censhorhip.
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.
We the British public fund the BBC through a totally unfair poll tax and it is because of this that a millionaire, like Greg Dyke, or someone claiming Income Support on the poverty line, pay exactly the same amount of money. If you refuse to pay the licence fee you will obtain a criminal record and possibly be sent to prison. Don't look for regular discussions of the fairness of the licence fee on the BBC because they avoid them like the plague. The BBC is nothing more than a byword for second rate programmes, censorship, and punitive taxation.
Stop seeing the world in black and white. It isn't a question of who's anti-American and who isn't. It's about the issues and you are not allowing for a fair discussion if all you care about is letting others know that you are blindly patriotic.
I'm not talking about the kind where the (and by far) biggest producers and consummers of porn in the world suddenly feel pure when seeing a metal covered tit during the superbowl and take "measures" so that it doesn't happen again.
I'm talking about the one where only US athlete will be shown, when they win or could and before the dope test, so as to again falsely give the impression to the american population that they are the best. Hell on forums troughout the net most americans will tell you they've been the most cheered country during the countries announcement when, actually, they were boo'ed. This is not a coincidence, some stuff is happening before it gets on their TV. How many time in the past did world athlete did exceptionnal stuf and it wasn't even covered in american medias, all that was covered is their guy loosing, they just can't stand not being the center of attention. The country which is the least aware of the world is the one that judge it the most, how sad, one wonders why?
Yes, they would do what they always do and get the feed from the BBC.
Since what NBC is doing is being made available to other nations' media outlets through a content sharing relationship, a lower quality USA feed would effect a lot of smaller nations' TV outlets.
You mean that they would see more than the US competitor out in 6th place?
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because censorship is done by governments
Actually, that's an incredibly narrow view point to hold (and a dangerous one, IMHO). Censorship can be performed by any entity which has control over lines of communication. This could be the government, or it could be a giant media conglomerate. After all, what happens when the giant media conglomerate is in cahoots with the government and chooses to "select" only content that's favourable to the incumbants? I'd call that censorship...
OTOH, what's happening with the Olympics is most definitely *not* censorship, and the submitter should be severely chastised for invoking that word in this situation, as it simply serves to further confuse people regarding what does and doesn't qualify as censorship (an incredibly important issue in this day and age).
THE Greek organizers of this summer's topless 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 Western 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 Western women participating in this year's game is the lowest since 1960. Several Western countries have sent no women athletes at all; others, such as the United States, are taking part with only one, in full clothing. And state-owned TV networks in many Western countries, including Canada and Britain, have received instructions to limit coverage of events featuring women athletes at Athens to a minimum.
A circular from the FTC in America 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."
They blatantly don't, as the BBC is constantly in trouble with the government for doing what the hell it wants :) Remember pretty much everything before the Iraq war? If it was smoking the government pole, none of those scandals would have even aired.
In your "information wants to be free" world, the word "censorship" might be redefined to mean "any restrictions on passing on information", but out here in the real world, that's not what it means. Censorship is preventing you from saying something because of its content. If you're thrown in jail for criticizing President Bush, that's censorshp. That is not what's happening here.
Here the Olympic Committee is saying that, in the US, only NBC, who paid them a lot of money, is allowed to show their competition. As the Olympic Committee is in charge of the competition, they're allowed to say that. Similarly, if I was holding a competition in my garage, I could set restrictions on who can televise it, and I would not be "censoring" people by doing so.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sounds like a perception problem to me. You've got to be overly sensitive and expecting things from other people that you really shouldn't. I meet plenty of canucks here in Michigan and it's true that a lot of them disagree with much of the current economic and political trends... but they're hardly anti-American for having differing opinions. It's not like they're planting bombs in our embassies.
It's like people expect them to be flag-waving patriots for the US, despite the fact that they aren't even citizens. I don't know how most just shrug that off. I'd be livid if, say, some brit gave me shit for not supporting the monarchy.
But then again, once upon a time the Olympics didn't cost 6 billion dollars to organize either. It's a sad reality, but keeping sponsors happy is the only thing that makes such an event possible nowadays.
6 billion dollars is a lot of money in any country. But it's especially a lot in a country of 10 million inhabitants.
Anti-Americanism is the instinctive belief that nothing the US (or its citizens) can do no right. American jingoism is the instinctive belief that the US (or its citizens) can do no wrong. They're really the same thing; we see far too much of both these days; and they of course feed each other.
Just more proof that Enlightenment democracy is hard.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Well - several reasons. First of all, there weren't 200+ countries competing in 776BC or 1896. If you want to host the Olympics you have to build stadiums, and accomodations for the athletes, coaches and visitors. And improved infrastructure to the city. There is no way around it - you can't have millions of people converge on a city at the same time and not do some serious work to handle that. There is not one city in the world capable of doing it without massive constructions (unless you want to have the Olympics in the same city over and over like in 776BC). Also, security by itself is costing upwards of $1 billion for these games. In short: your answer is time has changed.
Could some of the costs could be avoided by not putting such a fancy show on? I don't doubt it for a second. However, I don't think it will add up to much savings - in the end most of the costs is still brick and mortar (and concrete), not Bjorn's gigantic dress.
Only sabre fencing is being shown on US TV, to the exclusion of foil and epee.
The reason for this is that the strongest US medal contenders in fencing are sabre fencers.
This is great for people who want to paint their face with the stars and stripes and chant USA USA, but not very good for fencers (who, I think, this is sort of geared toward.)
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Filmmakers lie. That's life.
Actually, it's entertainment. If you want historical accuracy, watch a documentary - but the point of making movies (aside from the moneygrubbing and casting couch aspects of which there are many) is to entertain.
Should it be to educate? Probably, but the public seems pretty satisfied with entertainment and they're the ones driving the demand. Change that equation on the supply side, and it's a long downhill slide to the poorhouse.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.