Slashdot Mirror
SourceForge Clarifies Denial of Site Access
Recently there were some complaints from certain users outside the US stating that they were no longer able to access SourceForge.net. SF.net (who shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) has outlined the reasons for these bans, and until someone with sufficient power to alter US law or the lists governing who is allowed to access what data from where, there is unlikely to be a change in these bans. It is worth noting that SF.net is not alone in these difficulties, as the same problems have been reported from other repositories, like Google Code. "As one of the first companies to promote the adoption and distribution of free and open source software, and one that still puts open source at the center of its corporate ideals, restrictions on the free flow of information rub us the wrong way. However, in addition to participating in the open source community, we also live in the real world, and are governed by the laws of the country in which we are located. Our need to follow those laws supersedes any wishes we might have to make our community as inclusive as possible. The possible penalties for violating these restrictions include fines and imprisonment. Other hosting companies based in the US have similar legal and technical restrictions in place."
With Canada, you have to be careful that no one on your site says anything critical of clubbing baby seals to death, because that'll land you in jail. Canada isn't exactly a land of freedom; there is no "freedom of speech" there.
If you want true freedom of speech, you'll probably need to move to Russia, ironically.
Moving a company overseas might be difficult, moving a server is a piece of piss and a few hours work with FTP and getting your DNS fixed.
Early opensource implementations of RSA encryption?
If efforts to stop these failed (and there were efforts, and they did fail), I suspect this will also fail.
Nothing to see here folks. Move along. Move along.
Can you remind me when was the last time the US was attacked by a Syrian terrorist? How come Syria sponsors terrorism but Saudi Arabia does not?
Here are some interesting numbers your government doesn't want you to know