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.
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.
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That,and of course stop all those comments regarding dubya's intelligence :)
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.
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.
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! --
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.
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.
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 :).
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make install -not war
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.
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.
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..