Slashdot Mirror
Community Choice Award "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Govt"
Last week we took nominations for a Slashdot category at the SourceForge Community Choice awards. Our category was 'Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government Agency'. Your nominations were tallied, and we arbitrarily selected a few that we think are the best. Today is the day where you can at long last determine the winner, using the incredibly scientifically accurate Slashdot Poll. Our nominees are
Truecrypt,
EFF Patent Busting,
GNU Software Radio,
WikiLeaks,
Cryptome.org,
Tor,
Freenet,
and CowboyNeal.
I challenge anyone to even find one credible attempt by anyone in government to shut down one of the nominees.
This story is just hysterical scaremongering.
What difference does it make if something is "likely" to get shut down by a government agency?
It matters if something is actually shut down. The answers on this "likely" poll are just a measure of the prejudice (in the dictionary sense of the word prejudice) of the people answering the question.
Where's the answer for "none of them should be shut down, but I prefer to keep an open mind and deal with reality rather than wallow in my own preconceptions about things that haven't happened yet"?
The government doesn't shut down websites. They can't, legally, unless there's something criminal going on.
Depends on your definition of shutdown. More likely, I see the service being manipulated by social engineering.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
As much as I think TPTB would like to kill off truecrypt (assuming it's on their radar), it can live on with underground distribution since it's a software project. Development might grind to a halt, since no one could easily validate the source for various underground successor projects. But checksums for the last known, good version would be as easy to find elsewhere as a bootleged disc of code.
The whole point of Wikileaks is to make things public, so driving leaked documents repositories underground would make them indistinguishable from conspiracy theorists and the lunatic fringe.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
Well.. if the government "shuts EFF Patent Busting down" by fixing the patent system, then that would be a Good Thing.
Seriously, even the patent office is complaining about the backlog of patents. I think they want a solution as much as the rest of us.
Copyright infringement is a maybe (depends heavily on how good your lawyer is...), but under US law Wikileaks can't be held responsible for displaying things that other people weren't supposed to be sharing. Wikileaks can't very well violate an NDA that they never signed onto and all that. Of course, this is also almost entirely irrelevant, since Wikileaks is based in Sweden, which is also noted for a rather laid back stance on the whole copyright infringement bit (of course, that doesn't mean that individual contributors can't get in trouble in their home countries, especially since many of them are Chinese, but Wikileaks itself isn't terribly vulnerable). So, um, yeah... What exactly is illegal here?
Nothing illegal about it... yet. The point is that WikiLeaks is the most likely to expose information that the government doesn't want the public to know about. That could be anything from treatment of political prisoners to uses of surveillance. Anyone in power who is abusing it (i.e. most of them) will want to avoid having that come to light. Okay, yes, I'm kind of paranoid. The U.S., at least, still has some protections on freedom of speech and press, as do some other countries, and those may actually protect WikiLeaks. But given some of the efforts that governments have been taking to reduce those rights, I'm not certain.