Slashdot Mirror
Making Small Steps Against Censorship
JD writes "BBC News has an article about online censorship, blogs in particular. It points out that 'perhaps we need to accept that small gains and slight shifts in direction can make a difference to people's lives, and work for them instead of trying to blast down the walls of repression with a single blow.' Whittling away may be the only realistic way to see change happen."
Blogs are the modern versions of the small, local newspapers the Founding Fathers had. They allow lone individuals to reach the masses with minimal effort and overhead. It is no wonder that blogs are leading the freedom train.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I would have liked to have seen Osama Bin Laden censored, perhaps we could have stopped his hidden messages from reaching his Al Queda sleeper cells
You mean, the kind of censorship that OSNews.com love to do by enforcing their biased opinions towards others ?
censored
small steps, it is how we loose freedom, it is how we get it back.
always mosh clockwise
The government will use bloggers' desire to be taken seriously as real journalists as an excuse to apply the same kind of censorship the FCC effectively has doled out for some time to the traditional media.
---
Too bad my school district filters the internet. I really hate Novell Netware.
To me the most interesting part of this is the group of programmers who have built and who maintain this giant filtering, spying apparatus for China. They appear to be competent, and they're probably intelligent and educated, and I would guess that they have access to most of the information that they deny to their fellow citizens.
So what's in it for them? How do they feel about what they do? Anyone have a link to any information about them?
FTFA: "As more and more governments start restricting what their citizens can say online, those of us who live in relatively open societies need to decide what to do."
And what of those of us who live in relatively open societies where our governments, more and more, are restricting what we can say online?
Duck and cover, perhaps.
Anyway, my own primary interest is at the personal side of things. I think we need to establish some kind of defensive perimeter around our personal information, or the very notion of privacy will soon be non-existant. That will become just another power used against each of us.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
In the cases where the blogger is a hardcore fanatic of something (Linux, Democrat, Christian, etc.) there will likely always be a few people who will take this persons word, regardless of how ridiculous it is. Since these people would hold this belief anyway and are merely reading the blog for reinforcement of their ideas, it doesn't hurt anyone.
The simple fact is, that bloggers who want to serve as reporters to a wide audience, will try to report the news as truthfully and with as little bias as possible. If a company were to make a good product and then switch to making a worthless one, would people continue to buy from said company? Eventually the problem corrects itself.
In the end, there's no need for censorship, only good, common-sense from the readers.
If everyone (in the US) had obeyed the 55 MPH Federal speed limit, we'd still be saddled with it.
Likewise, without speakeasies and Mafia activity, we'd still have Prohibition.
So yes, stupid laws can get changed by demonstrating their absurdity through direct action. Don't kid yourself.
When you can just shut down the wall making machinery ...
Well, it seems to me we live in a very passive generation of people, people who love Big Brother or Big Uncle and are afraid to stand up for what they believe in.
I refuse to live in Fear.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It is unfortunate that we have gotten to the point where we have to talk about defeating censorship - it has permeated our society so much that we've grown to accept it. How did this even happen, how did we let it come so far? Several generations are to blame, but more importantly, those that were blind to the fact that this was happening in the first place.
:-/ Leave the great wall of China, in the great US of A, we've the classic, "Ihr Papieren, bitte!" scenario.
Even today, look around you - most people simply do not care about what is happening, or how their rights are being trampled on, or even that they have any rights at all. The republic is not of the people anymore, it belongs to our corrupt politicians trying to remake things in the way that benefits them.
Really, really unfortunate.
Personally, I don't think bloggers would tolerate a blogging tax in America. If anything, such bloggers would probably just host their blogs on servers outside of American jurisdiction. The blog serving business would boom in Mexico, Canada and Europe.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
unfortunately our rights get taken away in huge leaps and bounds yet we are left with this advice that we need to take them back in small steps or nudge the course of law like a goldfish shouldering a tanker.
Does anyone else feel that these are OUR RIGHTS to begin with and we should not let them be touched at all? I mean you see someone messing with your new car, you step up and sort it right away, you don't wait till the car is stolen and have the police bring you back one piece at a time from the chop shop.
flinging poop since 1969
For me Slashdot is doing some type of censoring on their own too. So I am a bit curious why they announce such an article.
Anonymous posts are limited to 10 posts now (ok we can live with that) but this new 'enter text shown in this image' is beating the hell out of me. Sometimes the chars are so hard to read that it's impossible to enter the right letters. Now if it's hard for me sometimes to read the letters how do disabled people or people with heavy eye problems feel, they are totally excluded from commenting on Slashdot because they barely are able to enter correct letters. Then there is another problem with anonymous posts a bug in the script or so. When you enter something and press submit too fast you get a message telling you that your last comment was not long ago and that you at least need to wait 2 minutes.. Unfortunately due to the bug you can easily wait 5 mins, 6 mins, 10 mins, 20 mins (which get shown too) and nothing much happens. That pretty much sucks.
they'd give everyone video blog access, especially anonymously.
By the time the abusers - the anonymous stalkers, defamers and trolls - got done with the system - no one would believe anything that comes from the masses anyway.
Recently, there was an article about how the American press is less apt to use anonymous sources for their stories now, especially after the whole Quran-gate incident. There's a lesson to be learned in this if you're a totalitarian government trying to hold onto power while transitioning to democracy.
In short, the truth could hide in plain sight among the static. The dissidents would be silenced, nonviolently, by the very system they rely on.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
It is a well-known fact in most of Europe and Britain that there were no such "sleeper cells". In fact, many of the supposed videos and recordings have been proven to be forgeries.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
On the other side is government controlled censorship, where governments make writing certain things illegal, amd use the force of law to assure that certain types of speech are stifled.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
they don't need to be taken seriously.
telling the truth has that effect all on its own.
when the mainstream media lies, distorts, and decieves it's viewers, then by definition, THEY will not be taken seriously.
it has nothing to do with bias. it has everything to do with being an arm of the government. if you didn't realize what that "Debacle" was a while ago; the mainstream liars trying to shout BIAS every 5 seconds... it was because people were starting to wake up to how much of an arm of the government they really were. they were trying to shout bias to confuse people who don't critically analyze the mainstream liars, into making them believe that iraq war wasn't illegal from the get go. that being just one example.
they DON'T want for people to have a voice. if that were to happen they would lose their control. they couldn't influence public ideas and conciousness. they couldn't make you send your children off to wars to benefit the rich and israel. they couldn't protect those war mongers who sit in washington every 4 years from public scrutiny.
btw, taxpayers don't have to pay for illegal wars. it's in the constitution, you know, that document that if you mention it, the FBI considers you a terrorist/extremist.
every one of the points i've raised (which isn't even remotely addressing the numerous issues the world and americans face today), can be verified through a search of the net. the net... the only place where truth has even the smallest hope of surviving in this day and age.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
..laws dont get changed by people breaking them because they disagree with the law. change within the 'system'
I have to disagree with that. I've helped make quite a few, and if you start from your premise your bill will never make it out of the first committee in the long series it must pass thru.
Those who marshal their forces and alter the way things are done win way more often than those who try to put down one brick in the way of a flood. You need to use a dumptruck and divert the river further upstream, not in the wide plain right before it hits the houses.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't be placing the new channel parts before you divert all the river - you have to do the groundwork for a bill just like the new channel diversion trench, before you start dumping in rocks to choke out the old channel.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
All media is like that. Blogs, newspapers, news broadcasts, etc.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Why have no blog sites come out with some form of distributed / anonymous blogging? Something similar to freenet, but optimized for blogs. It seems like a relatively simple idea to keep simple text anonymous when so much work is being put into making anonymous P2P systems.
All it would take is a simple little client app that connects to other peers around the world. A checkbox saying "Connect me directly to xxx.blogservers.com" could be turned on for users in the USA / Canada where freedom of speech isn't a problem and everyone. Give the client app the ability to read blogs (as well as having them web accessable) and I don't see why this wouldn't succeed. It certainly would be far safer than ranting about your government on an non-ssl'ed connection.
I disagree. The main difference with blogs today is that there are millions of them that only reach a small unconnected group of individuals.
Those colonial newspapers were few in number but reached almost 100% of a community (either directly or by word of mouth). It was a major form of entertainment, and could enact major social change.
The difference is today we have thousands of entertainment outlets as compared to a few dozen in colonial times. It may be easier now to reach millions around the globe, but it's harder to get anoyone to read in the first place. It's also harder to get a group of individuals with enough in common and close enough proximity to actually affect changes in government or whatever social cause you have. There's just too much noise out there on the internet.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Good point, but as an avid China watcher, I can tell you that payback is about to become a bitch for the western corporations that helped China build that insult to freedom. The Chinese government recently has passed laws that limit access to non-chinese software companies to government contracts.
One way to get around this, is to do your research and development in China. They're going to take down western corporations and they're using the greed of corporations to give them the power that backasswards commie countries can't innovate for themselves.
I'd laugh, but I don't think it is funny at all, but tragic.
But how do you define who a "liar" is when you're dealing with completely subjective material? Indeed, it is quite difficult. Should FOX News be considered "liars" because they put a neoconservative spin on their reporting? Should Indymedia be considered "liars" because they put a liberal spin on their reporting? There are no absolutes when it comes to "the truth" on various subjective topics, and therefore it is incorrect to deprive people of their freedom of expression because one thinks they are "liars".
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
As Lewis Sinclair once said (I believe)
"Woe to those who wake the sleeping giant."
I believe the giant may soon be awakened as it was partially awakened during the Rodney King trial (and especially after it). All it takes is one incident to spark the event. When Osama Bin Laudin (spelling?) stated that they did what they did to awaken the people of America - this is what he was talking about.
And no - this does not mean I condone what was done. And no - this does not mean that I want an uprising. And no - it doesn't mean anything other than just want I've said. All other statements are owned by their respective posters, please don't try to put words into my mouth I haven't said.
I like to play around with statistics and my whacko numbers are just as good as the next kook out there. The only difference is that I seem to hit things right on the head a bit more than some (and a bit less than others). Don't call me a Silvia Brown person because I'm not. But in the 1970s I did predict the dotcom bubble burst (because every 100 years the US has gone through a similar problem). Look back at the turn of the century from 1899 to 1900. What happened? Wild stock market rise followed by the biggest depression ever recorded. Not to mention two world wars. What happened when the US went from 1799 to 1800? Wild stock market (land speculation) rise followed by burst bubble and the civil war. What's happening from 1999 to 2000? Wild stock market rise (computers) followed by a burst bubble and a small war (so far). Doesn't take a psychic to predict what's going to happen next. Either another civil war or another world war. After all, the wars don't get smaller each time - they just get bigger. It could even mean the end of the US as we have known it. (And don't even get me started on the hoopla surrounding the coming of Christ every 100 years. People even went so far as to kill themselves before the turn of the century because they knew they had done something evil and didn't want to suffer the tortures of living on earth during the end times. Happens every 100 years.) Want to know what's coming? Another depression. Maybe not on the order of the Great Depression, but then there are a lot more regulations in place now than then. But it will happen (and is already beginning to happen - just look at all of the layoffs, government closings of bases, and how many more people do you see standing on the corners asking for money? In the 1970s I saw maybe one or two people. Now there are two or three people on a corner along the freeway - and no - not every freaking corner - just a lot more corners than I remember seeing in the 1970s.).
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
The population a single blog reaches may be ten or fifteen times the population a colonial paper reached. Indeed, the scale has grown significantly between the 1700s and now. These days the cross-linking between blogs makes up for the fact that one particular blog doesn't reach 100% of a community. Over the span of several blogs, in the form of a blogwork (ie. a network of blogs referencing each other's content), the ideas are eventually propagated to a vast majority of the population.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Different regime, same oppression.
Okay, here's how you do it.
Set up a home server running squid (or any other HTTP proxy) and sshd.
SSH into the computer and forward localhost:3128 to yourcomp:3128 (assuming you kept the squid ports default).
Set your proxy server to localhost:3128 and voila, it works. No more filter.
The best small step you can do to "fight censorship" is to help others communicate. Sure, geeks are known for limited interpersonal skills. But we commune with machines like brothers. And these machines are the engines for widespread personal communication. Getting more people around the US, around the world, to communicate more, and more effectively, harnesses the unbeatable power of expression. Censors benefit from centralized communication bottlenecks; geeks help people route around them. Slashdotters are part of a global mass movement of people helping each other communicate, which trumps the censors every time. I'm proud of you :).
--
make install -not war
If they had there wai wed all be liek oh noes my conputa is wattching me!
Linux|BSD 4 life yo!
Bring on the acronyms: YAZBS (Yet Another Zonk Blogging Story)
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Please register your mouth and all thoughts with the department of citizen expression. Your account will be reviwed, including a full background check that will include your sexual preference, religious and political beleifs. If you are found to be mundane and unoffensive, you will receive your liscense to speak publically via US mail within 6 to 8 weeks.
Any attempt to speak out loud in public through the use of various media's which include (but not limited to) the internet, radio, television, megaphone, telephone, and walkie talkie, will result in your immediate arrest.
If you are a major corperation, please disreguard all of the above and do as you please.
The idea of a censorship-free society is a pure fantasy, and it is the consensus of almost everyone on the planet in the 21st century that some forms of censorship are necessary.
Speech that incites hatred against favored groups in a country will simply not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. For example, see the case of Oriana Fallaci. Now she may or may not be eventually ruled to have committed defamatory speech against Islam, but the principle stands that there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed without a person being liable for government sanctions. As for the case of Europe, I predict this line will be drawn more and more in the direction that no speech critical of Islam will be permitted.
In the 21st century, almost everyone, regardless of civilization, accepts that there is no such principle as the unlimited right to publish any book.
Similarly in the 21st century, there is a consensus that some political parties should be banned. For an example, Belgium's highest court ruled that the Vlaams Blok is racist and banned it from political participation. Again, there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed. In the case of Europe, I predict the line will be drawn where it will be illegal for a political party to advocate anti-immigrant positions.
Let's see.
American Revolution
French Revolution
Mexican Revolution
Russion Revolution
umm...
Pick a country, and they've had a revolution or several.
It makes sense since this is how we have been losing our rights, whittled away bit by bit.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
I only obey the law because it's expedient, since the social contract has been thoroughly broken. I follow my own ethical rules, and laws are a poor substitute, especially in times when laws are written by evil men.
"Big Media" news organizations have actually sued for the right to lie to their viewers!
Even sadder is that the case was ruled in their favor.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Then why don't you explain mr/ms smarty pants, how *labeling* someones remarks because it STINKS, is CENSORSHIP!!
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
WE can blow the cops *scull-caps* off when then come.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
You probably did more to help make the Chinx decide AGAINST censorship.. cause... well.. How would they come up with such great f'n laffs without imput from clowns like you (us)!! =:O
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Because, that just seems wrong to me.
Enough people (in China) just kept on bloging or whatever.
What are the pigs gunna do.. arrest 1.5B people?
Meanwhile, all those young guys who are in the army have friends and loved ones who are contributing to the technological advances that allow them (the army guys) to enjoy the InterNet like everyone else in the world.
So it is not just the arswhole tech-guys that work for the government who are contributing (good or bad) to China's InterNet technologies.
I can NEVER understand why everyone always *acts like* leaders of countries have such power. THEY DON'T.. But they do have-to-have millions of people who agree with them (or not), and that is why/how they ever get anything done (good or bad).
Hitler, Sadamm and OBL would be nothing more than a *Big-Mouth* (like me) if they hadn't been so persuasive and in-line with what MILLIONS (BILLIONS?) of every-day folks already thought!
I just don't think the millions of cops or army guys in China will start arresting everyone, if it meant doing it would interfere with China's social or economic position in the world.
The question is, at what (Tipping-Point) would the amount of citizens would it take to make the leaders think that it would be counter-productive to arrest so many people. :)
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
It is wrong.
Ask yourself this question: do you have much reasonable expectation of privacy as it is? It seems like every other week there's some article on Slashdot about some huge corporation in the good ol' U. S. of A. having lost the personal data of thousands of people - personal data which, in the majority of cases, these people didn't even know the corporation had.
Don't you idiots ever get tired of being wrong about Bush? He's kicking your sorry liberal asses on every level from grass roots fund raising to the UN. Oil for food scam ring any bells?
Americans supported the Iraq war and still do because it was the right thing to do and the right time to do it. Next right thing to do will be to stomp on the Syrian terror pipeline and put Assad's ass in the wringer beside Saddam.
Read some soldier's blogs from the front if you want the real scoop. Unlike the friggin' Chicoms the USA doesn't censor those.
...but be glad to get it back slowly and in small pieces.
To keep the spyware, viri off the windows machines, to keep the elementary school kids from accidentaly getting to pRon sites, etc
I'm not a parent, and I'm curious. Why do parents feel the need to hide pornography?
I can think of the fear that little Jane might become curious and get pregnant (or John get a girl pregnant), but every kid is aware of and curious about sex, and has been since the dawn of humanity, and society doesn't seem to be collapsing with pregnant kids.
I can think of it as, maybe, kind of a gut-instict emotional response triggered by all the negative things (Drugs! Crime! Disease!) that get vaguely mentally associated with pornography, but it doesn't seem to justify the strong response.
Finally, there's the well-worn "it teaches children that women are sex objects" mantra. *Most* characters that kids encounter -- in movies, in pictures (advertisements, teen magazines, etc) -- contain people who are essentially flat objects, that aren't treated as or portrayed as "real people". But nobody seems to have a problem with the other portrayals.
And the amount of man-hours and other economic costs each year associated with isolating children from pornography is just plain astounding.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
So suppose Big Brother collects lots of information about what everybody is doing online. How does Big Brother use this to achieve "absolute social control" without letting people realize they are no longer "free-as-in-speech"?
Having the information doesn't give you any control by itself. You need to do something with it. You could prosecute people. You could give information about people to their business rivals. You could just let people know that you've got all their secrets and threaten to release those secrets if they don't do what you say. But if you do any of these things on a regular basis, people will realize that you're using collected information to control them.
Yes, the Chineese may do what the US wants and revalue it's curency upwards by 40%, but what if instead of floating it they pegged it to the Euro at the same time?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's a case of "Doctor? Heal thyself".
Bill Thompkinson has been posting on finally.com for some time. His posts are the same sort of obtuse rhetoric delivered by an "observer", not a journalist, who has managed to blind the editors he meets with seemingly insightful articles.
Bill? Your country, in which you still live in, gave up "the right to silence" a few years back, and is one of the most heavily censored societies in the world.
"At least in the UK we don't have to register before we can start a blog, and it is still legal to blog anonymously or use services that are hosted in countries that have slightly more respect for freedom of speech."
Bill? Start an anonymous blog in the U.K. praising everything single thing Al Queda does and see how fucking fast you get noticed, "visited", and stopped.
"At least in the UK..." my ass. Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, was not allowed to have his voice heard on British TV in the 1990s... an actor spoke his words.
You think you live in a "new" UK now Bill?
"At least in the UK"... what a joke.
cheers
front
How the hell does the FCC censor the traditional media, other than on issues like nudity? Political content isn't regulated in US newspapers at all, save for defamation issues, and those must be pressed in civil court. Papers are perfectly free to defame first, and pay for it later. Same goes for television. Unless you think things like revealing classified military secrets are protected journalism, you can't possibly think the US Media is controlled by the goverment without a huge tin foil hat. If you guys were right, Democratic Underground, MoveOn, Air America...none of that could exist. Neither could National Review or Free Republic, for that matter. Or Slashdot either. I know the paranoia runs high here, but Jesus, get some perspective.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
People supported iraq because it was full of WMD's, right?
Oh, wait..
Just say to the "helper" that you want to protect the youth against hate/racism/sex/porn/nazi/pedophil/whatever-your-b oogyman is... Then people will also happily do as you want, even without draconian censorship law you will then get that censorship you wish ! Remmmember that child protection act where all library would have been mandated to introduct protecting software ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Bloggers (well, intelligent bloggers) who wish to have a wide audience will report the news with as much bias as they think they can get away with (generally, a bias shared by the intended audience), and no more.
If you doubt this, try starting a blog that presents unbiased news on such topics as pornography (especially child pornography) or eugenics.
See what happens when you try to non-biasly report on the differences between Zionist Jews and neo-nazis.
Try to provide unbiased news on the debate between pro-rapists (and other misogynists) and militant feminists.
You may find that your audience shrinks the more unbiased you get.
OTOH, provide the news with a bias that your audience shares, and your ratings will soar.
This is why extremists on both the left and right are so popular.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Networks debate blogs because it polarizes people,
I think if you frequent more blogs how can that be different from the freedom of speech peopl hav been searching for? It keeps people connected.. Those who can't blog or whose jobs depend on holding some great position, in a seat of Public Relations,
of course, undoubtedly would debate bloggers, but its an unstoppable force.. Down with the dictators!!
And news nazis..
Just say no to license servers!!
You put them into jail (US currently has 2.03mil compared to the 1.51mil of China) for something.... anything.
.de example earlier, around 30% might become problematic). Not so, you just make them into slave labor. Slavery is only illegal for free citizens, which is why the prison-industrial complex loves it so. State can't afford the prisons? Privatize them.
Oh, you think that making 2-10% of the population into prisoners will hurt productivity of the economy? (note the
This has worked for even larger percentages of population, say Cambodia which had 2 out 7 people in labor camps, but that would be pretty obvious.
Now factor in how large a group subversive is. All you really need to do is hit the ends of the bell-curve, to keep the population where you want it.
Anyone know how to get ahold of Tacks?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~james/politics/Right2S ilence
So gimme more details of specifically what you object to...
Currently in the US, the only silence protected is in court, Miranda warnings and police interrogations are being flushed down the tubes - since the constitution only states that it applies during a criminal case...
And since the state is the only person who can bring perjury charges, makes it real nice for them to lie on the stand...
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL