Slashdot Mirror
Web Censorship on the Increase
mid-devonian writes "Close on the heels of the temporary blocking of YouTube by a Turkish judge, a group of academics has published research showing that Web censorship is on the increase worldwide. As many as two dozen countries are blocking content using a variety of techniques. Distressingly, the most censor-heavy countries (which includes China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Burma and Uzbekistan) seem to be passing on their technologically sophisticated techniques to other areas of the world. 'New censorship techniques include the periodic barring of complete applications, such as China's block on Wikipedia or Pakistan's ban on Google's blogging service, and the use of more advanced technologies such as 'keyword filtering', which is used to track down material by identifying sensitive words.'"
let us hope this doesn't spread- Fahrenheit 451 on the web
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Sounds to me like someone is looking for a government handout to continue their research.
Yes and slashdot is responsible for a great deal of it!
Telecommuting! What about socialization?
Xxxx xxx xxxx? xxxx x xx x xx xx xxx xx! xxxx xxx ...
xxxx xxxx Xxxxxxxx!
xxx... xxx!
XX XXX XXX XXXX XXXXX!!!!!!X!X!X!XXX
and the use of more advanced technologies such as 'keyword filtering', which is used to track down material by identifying sensitive words.
As the FCC has found out, people will just make up new words, that are worse than the old words. Like "Blumpkin".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Notably, Kazakhstan is not on the list.
...in America, you can use the internet however you like, right? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/15/145221 4
Whore Yourself... @ http://whorapedia.com/
I was just reading about *CENSORED* on the *CENSORED*, when all of a sudden some guys *CENSORED* into my apartment and started *CENSORED* my stuff and *CENSORED* my wife.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
We must protect the people from the harm caused by this new axis of evil.
Just try and search for them, I dare you!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Government, please stay off of the Internet. Freedom of speech involves some risk. Let the people choose if they take that risk or not, but if you take it from us, you take our freedom as well.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
You can't protect society without controlling society. You can't control society without controlling information. In the land of ignorance, the informed man is king. True democracies don't have kings. Information is communism. Ignorance is patriotic. Oh shit, American Idol is on -- gotta go!
web searches you?
http://www.coderoshi.com/
with this. http://www.mysecureisp.com/
As a citizen of the People's Republic of China, I can only see this as good news. It is heartening to see that the people of the world are outgrowing their childish attachment to outdated notions like "freedom" and "individualism" and realizing that future progress of humanity depends on subordination of individual drives to the good of harmonious society and beneficial development of the motherland.
At this time in history, people all over the world are waking up to the damage that capitalism and "Democracy" have brought to the world. America and Europe and their nineteenth-century ideas of "rights" and "freedom" have brought little else but war, genocide, terrorism, environmental devastation, immoral depravity, exploitation, and chaos.
Small wonder that a recent Beijing Star poll shows that People's Republic of China is the most respected nation on earth. We move forward together harmoniously into twenty-first century, the century of Communism.
Only 4 comments so far on the topic of censorship on slashdot? Damn, it's too late someone much have censored slashdot from most businesses! Oh, no, think of the productivity gains that just made.
It's too bad we didn't turn the Internet over to the UN like you guys all wanted...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Look into the freedom of speech (and press, and related) laws in the countries mentioned in TFA. Those are countries which prohibit (at least some forms of) government protesting, restrict television airwaves, and are generally unfriendly in the freedom of information department anyway. Why should the internet be any different?
Web censorship is not something that only happens halfway around the world in countries like Uzkbekistan and Burma. If you're from the UK, meet Cleanfeed, a soon-to-be compulsory system for blocking "illegal" content. Only a select group of secretive internet wizards know how it works, and a circle of elders living deep in the mountains are in charge of deciding exactly what is and isn't "illegal content". Not everybody runs it just yet, but its effects are already being felt.
Strikes me as being alarmist.
There were several incidents of prohibition during the first half of the twentieth century. We all know how well that worked out.
The pendulum swings both ways.
Apparently, the government here is also known to block blogs and such that are critical of the king, as well as other sites that may be considered "unfriendly" to Morocco. However, in my surfing I have not come across any sites that have been blocked, but then again, I am mostly looking for news and information about other parts of the world, so I guess the sites I frequent aren't worth blocking.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Many of you may not know this, but there really is a large government movement that's trying to
**The following has been censored by the government of the United States of America, we are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused**
can't let them carry out their plan. So do as I said and we should be able to stop them.
The original generic sig.
is to block censoring countries in my firewall. I encourage everyone to do so. If they want to censor their citizens, then we can all drive them crazy by providing no service to them, period.
I know, those two things are, like, totally the same, right? People don't seem to be buying it though - maybe you could spice it up with a car analogy or something.
More people than ever are using the internet. This just in: more internet users than ever are censored.
Should we be surprised here? I'm not.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
The U.S. is like the slutty girl down the street that nobodys mom wants them talking to.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
This is GOOD NEWS for the Western world Every time China or another like-minded country restricts information the Western world wins. China will never be able to compete with the US or Europe while restricting their citizen's access to information. They should do the same favors for their Olympic athletes. We need more sources like /. which bind political information with scientific and technical information. Every piece of scientific and technical information should be bound to RSS feeds from human rights organizations. Maybe those governments (prisons) are trying to protect the rest of the world from their citizens (prisoners). Is there something sinister about the people in those countries we don't know?
Whenever I read words like "on the Increase" (as well as "corroded", "falling apart", "rapidly dwindling", etc.) I automatically wonder if I am being presented with "Saturday Night Live Syndrome", where people pull out the popular opinion that Saturday Night Live just isn't as good as it used to be.
The report seems to cover 13 countries, none of which are exactly bastions of civil liberties. Only Thailand and Turkey are countries that even have a medium record of civil rights. I think the fact that people in Uzbekistan can't access sites critical of their government is both one of the smaller concerns of both the internet, and of the civil rights of Uzbekistan's citizens.
If more countries that actually had long-standing traditions of free speech, or emerging traditions of free speech, were suffering censorship, that might be a story. But as it is, this hardly seems like dramatic news.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Frag off, skeeter.
Phase 1: Internet is cool western hi-tech, yes? We get! Is nice! We are, how you say, advance-ed!
Phase 2: Internet is letting Jews do their Jew things more. Must stop this! How we do that? Oh? Wawawewa! Thank you, China!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
From the beginning of the internet there was hope that its chaotic order would lead to a place of free speech that would surpass national boundaries. Unfortunately, these already repressive regimes are discovering ways to spread their national repression to the internet. Before the controls were based on geography. Today the controls are based on technology and this is never a static condition.
Putin media decree arouses press freedom worries
Thu Mar 15 2007 11:37:07 ET
President Vladimir Putin has decreed the creation of a new super-agency to regulate media and the Internet, sparking fears among Russian journalists of a bid to extend tight publishing controls to the relatively free Web.
Putin signed a decree to create one entity that will license broadcasters, newspapers and Web sites and oversee their editorial content.
Raf Shakirov, who was dismissed as editor of the Izvestiya daily after critical coverage of the 2004 Beslan school siege, tells REUTERS how Putin's decree could extend Soviet-style controls to Russia's online media, which have been relatively free to date.
"This is an attempt to put everything under control, not only electronic media, but also personal data about people such as bloggers," he said.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Remember back in the good ol' days, when we could gamble for real money online? I do. I see nothing wrong with people who are capable of acting responsibly gambling online, nor gambling on sports. Yet for some reason, the government here has decided to become everyone's parent and prevent them from spending their money as they see fit. They claim it's because of possible addictions and the aftermath of said 'addictions', but we all know how the Prohibition fixed our alcoholic problem.
...cause I sure as hell wouldn't want to use eMule or any other P2P app without PeerGuardian, which at last count was banning over 7 million IP addresses... many of which are in such nefarious States as China and Russia.
I totally agree more and more countries and becoming selective on what we get to see. In Kuwait, some ISPs already block Meta Cafe, part of YouTube, some political anti-government sites were forced to close down, we heard about Bahrain trying to block Google Earth few months back. Few days back, Major corporate ISP provider in kuwait, KEMS blocked Blogger for some time for still unknown reason. Kuwait also are working closely with ISPs to stop the what they calle "phenomenon" of VoIP technology, just because it's losing them money. I never thought a ministry is a commercial firm that has to raise money!
..would want to censor the Internet. Content provided by the United States represent a significant portion of the total content of the Internet. Now despite what we think, many topics are heavily biased towards the United States - for instance, look at all the uninformed opinions of other countries like France and China we have. Why would a government want their citizens to be exposed to the inadvertent propaganda? The United States has the luxury of being culturally dominant and it's citizens are less open to information from sources originating from other countries, especially non-English speaking ones.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
USA didn't make the list? What about a DMCA takedown? You don't call that censorship? Freedom of speech is an interesting idea, but does it actually exist anywhere?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Goofy.
The answer is simple. End-to-end encryption of _everything_.
One wonders how the Chinese government would respond to that.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Websense Enterprise
Access to this webpage is restricted at this time.
Reason: The Websense category "Everything" is filtered.
So... why do we have internet at schools?
So China and other governments block access to wikipedia and other such sites. With the growing importance of information, and the rapid migration of most of the world's information (and most of its foolishness ;-) onto the Internet, what those governments are doing is shooting their own economies in the feet.
It's all the better for those of us who (still) have uncensored access to the Net. People who are kept ignorant can't compete with us effectively.
Actually, I had an interesting case of this some years back, here in the US. I was working on a project (an SNMP agent) for a company that was subcontracting on a government project. Due to the "security" concerns, they wouldn't allow us to use the Internet from work. In my case, there was a very useful free test suite available online. But I wasn't permitted to download it or use it. The management was especially fearful of "free" software.
So when the first versions were delivered to customers, they all immediately fed it to the public test suite - and it failed miserably. Oops! Funny thing was, even this didn't convince them that I should download the test suite and use it. They eventually lost the entire contract, in great part due to failures just like this. But by then, I'd found another job.
Similar fates await anyone who is denied access to information for political reasons. I feel sorry for them, but so far it's (mostly) to my advantage. I've learned to avoid American employers that impose such limits on their own people.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Statisticians today held a press conference concerning the rapid increase in number of violent crimes committed worldwide, noting a growth at a rate almost consistent with the rapid increase in the world's population.
Film at eleven...
Okay let's see... The first three words are "What the fuck", right? Some censorship!
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
I was in Beijing last week on business...and while online in one of the training hospitals I was able to ssh out to a server back in Ireland with prot redirection ssh -L3128:xx.xx.xx.xx:3128 remote_host and then set my proxy to localhost:3128. ....Not much use this "great firewall"....
"Distressingly, the most censor-heavy countries (which includes China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Burma and Uzbekistan) seem to be passing on their technologically sophisticated techniques to other areas of the world. "
Hey, information wants to be free!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...Hey! Whaddya got against the National Association for Marlon Brando Lookalikes of America?
;)
Countries such as China do have ridiculous and oppressive firewalls, however the USA and countries with similar attitudes to freedom do not respect free speech rights, rather they protect the rights of the "average" citizen. If you're a member of an unpopular minority group (I'm attracted to children, for example), your freedom of speech is censored, often by corporate groups who do not wish to be associated with unpopular people. By the very nature of democracy, unpopular groups will not be supported against censorship simply because governments do not want to lose votes.
I've personally had a legal website removed because it defended people who are attracted to children. Blogger received complaints from people who decided that defending attraction to minors equates to defending people who have sex with minors. The blog was hosted in the USA. I'm not saying that the methods used by China are acceptable, but for some people, they aren't much worse than the censorship which is rampant in supposedly free countries.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
What I like to do is download the windowsrge.swf, then cut out the middle man by running it directly in full screen mode in the stand alone linux flash player. The trick is to run it up front on your linux box and then tell someone that you have really screwed up your windows dual boot and could they help fix the windows registry!
Damn the evil nitwits Uzbekistan!
If the censorship is done in the countries that proclaim the superiority of liberty, then censorship is not right, because it contradicts the principles of the country. If it is done in the countries that don't do such (foolish) thing, then censorship is ok. It is people's choice. Ask Chinese, ask Pakistanis, ask all people in those countries, are they pro or against it. And even if the majority is against the censorship, why don't they kick their government ass like Americans and French did in XVIII century, like Russians did in XX century, like Chinese did in XX century, like Pakistanis together with Indians did in XX century, like Turkey did in XX century.
Peoples have options you know. Always. Sometimes they do not have guts though.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Listen everyone: Censorship is a fact of life. You may not like the way some do it; but we all do it, and most think their kind of censorship is just fine.
No matter whether we think we believe in Freedom and all that, we all know that there has to be limits to what can be said. It is generally accepted that 'Freedom of Speech' doea not allow us to perpetrate crimes on the net - such as soliciting child pornography or teaching how to fly passenger planes into tall buildings, just to mention a few. The question is where should the limit go - should we allow hardcore porn on websites that target children? No?
A very big factor in what one thinks is suitable is culture - have you ever seen those adverts for HSBC (an international bank)? They are all about how some things are different in different countries (and how important local knowledge is); like eg. that showing your bare feet may be fine in USA or Australia, but is considered extremely rude in Thailand. What I am saying here is: You and I don't necessarily know what is an absolute no-no in other countries, and we should not be too hasty in condemning what other countries choose is not acceptable on the Net. Filtering in China is after all not denying Americans access to things they feel are OK.
On the other hand, I fully understand and respect that there are certain things that should never be censored - but I don't think freedom of speech as a fundamental right is something you can use as an excuse for not being able to show a bit of cultural sensitivity. One of the main reasons that freedom of speech is important is that democracy doesn't work without it - people must have the right to know all there is to know about the decision they make when they vote; it is not primarily there to ensure that everybody can pour all kinds of tripe out in the public space.
Thank you. It is nice to see logic and reason are still valued in at least a few postings on slashdot!!
Pay no attention to the pile of burning books outside your neighbour's house.
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."