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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?"
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.
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.
BTW did you know that the olympic torch relay was actually thought up by the NAZIs for their Olympics?
Yes and Wagner (composer of flight of the valkyries) was an anti-semite. Does that mean that we shouldn't listen to it? Does the olympic torch coming from Nazis mean we shouldn't do it? Personally I'm kinda pissed that Hitler ruined a perfectly good moustache - but I guess with all the bad stuff he did throwing that on there won't make much of a difference.
I don't think the "showing only events the US has won" deserves a response, but I'll give one anyway. The events that NBC shows are the ones that US citizens are interested in, and because they are interested in them, it is more likely that a US athelete will participate. Do you think the US is going to win the women's diving events? Almost certainly not, but we still watch it.
It takes a special kind of person to deride an international event based on the ideals of self improvement, national pride, and respect for other countries.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.