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Censorship is Changing the Face of the Internet
Lucas123 writes "Amnesty International is warning that the Internet "could change beyond all recognition" because state-sponsored censorship has spread from a handful of countries to dozens of governments that apply mandated net filtering, and because companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have remained complicit, according to a BBC story. '"More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online and major internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts,"' said Tim Hancock, Amnesty's campaign director."
If you don't want problems with censorship, net neutrality, etc... make your own internet. No one said you have to use the main domain name system which the rest of the internet uses. And no one said you have to communicate purely via TCP in traditional ways. Most of these censorship systems are bricks which are designed to restrict clueless users who don't know about tunneling traffic through various secure & anonymous means.
At the extreme end of the scale, a country could do censorship on a "white list" basis where all the sites available do not allow user-submitted content. Trying to access any other port/protocol/IPs not on the white list would result in an error. This is where the real problems occur, as it blocks out even the most tech-savvy hackers.
Democracy hasn't seemed to work all that well lately, at least in a two party system.
What makes you think that? Did I miss a popular uprising that failed to affect the country?
Democracy is working just fine. If it seems like there's been little effect by the Nov 2006 elections, that's because only 4/12 of the federal democracy was up for review. Expect a stronger effect in 2008, when 10/12 will be up for review. And that 1/3 had more than a little effect, as the soon-to-pass immigration compromise underscores.
"could change beyond all recognition"
As opposed to... What? Change is expected - along w/unrecognizable traits.
"Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have remained complicit"
'remained' - remained..? You mean like they haven't taken any time-outs yet...? Or, they get together in Bermuda twice a year to compare notes and plan how they will rule...?
The gentrification of the internet is always a concern, I suppose, but I am reminded of a phrase that was coined 'long about the first time such topics popped up - "The internet interprets restriction as an interruption and routes around it."
Seems to me that one of the basics of (pointed) redirection is blocking and/or interrupting - fine, bring it on.
This will probably get modded troll or some such shenanigans but I've got to say it.
When anyone decides what can and cannot be said, everyone loses. I totally disagree with terrorism, and islamic jihad and all that crap. But I have to defend their right to say and believe in it.
Attack me, or my family and I'll kill them myself. But their crazy religion instructs them that we are evil and must be killed if their religion is to flourish. This is no different than the Catholic/Christian regimes of western Europe 500 years ago. It's the same damn thing. Do I agree with what they have to say? HELL NO. will I defend their right to say it? Yes.
Speech and action are very different things.
The freedom to speak, and the right to believe in even the most unpopular ideals is what made America great.
Unfortunately corporate sub-culture and sheep mentality is what is making America terrible.
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
...censorship will make the internet only a little bit slower until there are enough TOR servers installed and everyone made the transition to TOR (Internet2.0).
Really, I like censorship since it will speed up the adaption of TOR.
Jack Thompson is my favorite game tester.
The RIAA will destroy bad music.
I love how crap lines up to great stuff. Just make sure you don't care about CNN style reporting which aims to make you sick of anger and resignating. Live isn't as bad. The political class is losing it's influlence the more people switch more tasks into virtual realities. Look at Second Life and think that 10 years in the future.
Society will change and the political class as we know it today will be the collateral damage.
End of Story.
The two parties are working together to make sure no one else gets in and spoils their "party". For example, there is an excellent article describing how the presidential "debates" are controlled to prevent any other parties from gaining traction. They realized that Ross Perot got 90% of his support after the debates, so they created a system to prevent any other parties from being able to join by raising the bar high enough. The "Commission on Presidential Debates" which runs the debates, is totally run by the two parties. In the article, it quotes Walter Cronkite as calling the CPD an "unconscionable fraud".
The "debates" are also very carefully controlled (according to the article) of presenting the appearance of being a debate without actually being a debate, so as to pose no danger to the candidates, and so that important issues can be avoided.
Ron Paul, a current presidential candidate and member of the Republican party, said recently on the Daily Show that he is only a Republican because he couldn't get elected if he were a member of another party. He wrote an essay on how the two-party system disenfranchises voters.
Your screed defending the freedom of speech made me think a bit about the difference between a simple belief and an ideology. In particular your reference to islam as a crazy religion. You see, I don't think that its islam that does this, certainly no more than Christianity, anyway. I think its ideologues within those religions that use the texts and the power of public opinion to push certain agendas (such as killing protestants in the middle ages, and Americans in 20th and 21st Centuries).
A belief in islam in and of itself is likely only to be a belief in a single God, His laws, and being generally more hospitable to your fellow man, including the poor and some such. In essence, that same sort of stuff that's in the New Testament.
But anyone can go into either of these books pick out a few passages and use them to justify to a frightened population as to why they should be killing Americans, Infedels, Jews, and why doing so elevates you to heaven, paradise, the Nazi superman ideal, or whatever. This is what islamism, nazism, christian fundamentalism, corpratism does. It uses language to change the opinions of a target audience.
I think that this is what most people seem to miss. I think that its ideologies that shout for censorship, because they don't want competing ideologies, and they certainly don't want free thought.
Perhaps the only thing we should censor are these ideologues and leave everyone else alone
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
If you think about it, the internet is the real time editable news source straight out of 1984.
I hate sigs.
I don't think this is so much "changeing the face of the internet" as allowing the internet to grow into places where censorship has long been a part of life. ... there is a long list of things that suck in most countries that censor heavily.
Don't you think that US companies have completely neutered the internet in China? That the same companies are busy planning the same thing for their own countries so that all of your future publications can be censored and participating in any way can be dangerous? That long list of things that suck is due, in part, to a complete control of information. Anywhere that happens, things get ugly but you never know just how ugly until it's your turn to have your organs harvested.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Want to know why fascism (even if clothed in democracy) is on the rise? This is why.
There's nothing that brings in money more than a captive market, and the best way to ensure a captive market is via the force of law. Fascism is the merger of the corporation and the state, in such a way that the corporation appears to be a separate entity but really isn't. In a fascist state, the corporations are in primary control over the government.
Money is power. Guns are power. Control both and you control it all. Those who run the biggest corporations want that power, but also don't want to take the blame for the consequences of the use of that power. Control of a government gives them that isolation. That isolation is especially good in a pseudo-democratic society in which the population thinks it has some kind of control over who gets into office, and therefore doesn't think to blame anyone but themselves when those in office do the bidding of the corporations and not the voters.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
"The richer you are the more useful content you get."
That wasn't headline news when the Sumerian began keeping records etched in baked clay tablets.
The pre-copyright regime in the U.S. seems scarcely idyllic:
Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Herman Melville was hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne had to pay publishers an advance, rather than vice versa, in order to have their books produced. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customhouses and in other government jobs, and Edgar Allan Poe, according to his biographer Sidney P. Moss, had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by soliciting 75 cents a head from his fellow West Point classmates, to whom he then dedicated the book. Copy Wrong
There is no place in this system like this for the working-class writer.
No place for the woman or the black - excluded from politics, the patronage system, the professions - they could scarcely be said to have any leisure time or an independent income.
Power needs only complimentary information available. You do not motivate groups of people by exposing them to contradictory information. Corporations do it with advertising, parents do it with cautionary tales, religions do it with fear of lack of immortality, and governments do it with force. The real question is how to build an international darknet that is impossible to oversee, and can "route around" the damage.
Anti-Globalism
So if a country sue an US company for breaking their own local law, let us say by selling nazi memorabellia, the answer is "well swallow it, it is a free itnernet baby !", when pointed out that the company do business IN the country and thus should respect local law (whether that law is censuring free speech or not see nazi memorabelia above) we get the same answer. But when the country starts ENFORCING their local law by cutting down the pipe to the www there is again a scream of murder.
/. will never be satisfied until the US constitution and law apply everywhere in the world (*)... Maybe you should wake up and smell the fresh coffee in the morning, and realize that ONLY the local people in a country can fight the law of that country. Once you realized and accepted that and see the way the WWW is no local law can be applied, then The natural answer is a balkanisation or at least filtering of the internet. Just like there are frontier for a reason.
/. is not one person but a group of person. If you don't feel targeted by this post ignore it.
I take it that
And , oh by the way, when and where is the next "free speech zone" set up in 2008 ?
(*) Yes I know
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
In Canada, you have a parliamentary system where third parties actually matter once in a while. Down here, we obey Duverger's law.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Not a good idea.
Its enough for the major players to have a bad-enough label they can attach you (for the States for example, the terms "terrorist"/"terrorist simpatizer"/communist come to mind), so they can have the appearance of legality when censoring you. The appearance of legality matters a lot for governments that claim to represent the people.
By using spammer-like tactics, you'd just make it easier for them to place the "spammer" label on you (and easier for them to discredit your information by association which is an effective form of censorship in itself).
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
I love how they blame search engines for obeying the law. Like they have a choice somehow that they can continue operating in those countries if they choose to the 'right thing' and not censor. There's not a shred of blame laid on every single other type of media in those same countries, it's just the search engines that are at fault for censorship.
"But those media aren't on the internet!" No, but if the local newspapers didn't censor information, would the government even bother trying to censor Google? Not a chance.
It's nice to have a scapegoat for something that's screwed up when you can't blame the actual cause: The government demanding the censoring, in this case. Might as well get angry at the store clerk that won't sell your son the Mature-rated game because he's 8 years old. (Yes, I know people do that, and it's just as useless.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Well... What is a lie when every man has his own truth?
(write-line *coolsig*)
What we should do is encrypt the whole internet! Everything outside your router to the internet will be encoded so that only the reciving end will know what the data is. I shall call this, Encrypternet!
If every office term was limited to ONE SITTING, thereby making it impossible for someone to 'play to the dumb people' to get elected again, but do the right thing
no matter if they disagree. You have one shot, make it good, prosper. Career politians are bad and wastefull because they just sponge of the system and get a 10x better
pension than the average dude because they claim they cant get a job after words but in truth they end up with 500k+ jobs and a 80k+ yearly pension!!! that is not even mean tested!!!
Thats criminal! Do a crap job for 10 years, and get 50 years of 80k/year. Wow! who wants to do a real job when you could be outsourced sacked, marginalized, be
a political power player, and retire in bliss mafia style.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Yes, yes. I submit to your explanation. No doubt, CNN, Fox, VOA, RFA, RFE speak the unqualified truth. Woe to those who question such sources. After all, the US & Europe have a God given monopoly on the truth. And anyone who conflicts with those views must be evil.
Small wonder, then, that Al Jazeera, among others, still doesn't have a US distributor.
I'm not Arab so I doubt I'd be a regular viewer of Arab television, but it would be informative to hear what 50 million or so people who don't consume a regular diet of CNN, FOX, et al are listening to on a daily basis. Or, more importantly, what news stories are covered there that aren't covered elsewhere.
Personally, I've never allowed myself the luxury of trusting that I'm right because everyone around is saying the same thing, or is otherwise in agreement with me. It's harder that way, but the alternative of settling for what passes as informed discussion on "talk radio", for example, is somewhere betweeen suspect and disingenuous at best.
Why does this seem to get zero press? I can only figure out what I read on wikipedia and their website, but it looks like a bonafide China-Style blocker.
Cleanfeed
At the moment, however, it does only block Child Pornography, Criminally Obscene (types of porn, i suspect) and "Incitement to Racial Hatred" content. These are noble goals (though I would not agree with enforcing them through a manditory content filter) but I'm certain that, once in place, the blocklist will expand significantly.
Funny you should mention... The censorship system in place at slashdot is one of the most insidious I have ever seen. It is the reason I post as an "anonymous coward" (the label itself is such a loaded phrase).
You see, were I to register and post an unpopular fact, one single negative karma point could gag me and prevent me from posting for another 24 hours.
Part two of the slashdot censorship system is the (ahem) "moderation" system. Unpopular facts (along with genuine chaff, granted) are simply moderated down to not be visible in the default view. OK then, you say use threshold -1 nested display... well I often do, but conveniently, unpopular facts are lost to buggy thread pagination. (Oh no, nothing is ever deleted on slashdot... but conveniently lost to display bugs all the time...) which of course forms part three of the censorship system here.
The beauty of it is the site admins/editors can claim innocence yet maintain a very effective "arms length" control over their censorship system. (Speaking of anonymous cowards.)
I always find it outrageously ironic whenever censorship is discussed here. Slashdot cannot say a damn thing about censorship, being one of the most insidiously effective examples of it anywhere in the world.
Now watch this post get moderated down, and conveniently lost to pagination display bugs... (but nyah, nyah... you can't gag me with negative karma). We all know what happens to facts we don't like to hear on slashdot...
My girlfriend is originally from Russia, so I get all kinds of details. I'm basing my $200-300 approximation on what she said her friend who worked in a govt treasury dept was making.
That page is from 2001, and there's been an incredibly growth in inflation since. So it may very well have been around $50 back then.
The thing is, even though her friend made something like $250 a month. Apartment rent was $200/month. So you are right in your general point, that it's difficult to afford much in the way of luxury items.