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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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.
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!
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.
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.
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