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A Sad Day For the New Zealand Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Another one bites the dust, as New Zealand's Internet filter stealthily goes live with two smaller ISPs, and three of the largest already rumoured to have signed up to do the same. However, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is apparently 'committed to helping people to circumvent government internet filtering,' so perhaps the USA will launch an invasion to free the poor downtrodden Kiwis from their own evil government?" Clever of one of the acquiescing ISPs to have named itself "Watchdog."
It's called politics, mutual backrubs, one hand washes the other and so on; probably somewhat of a longterm investment that pays back in the form of favours and goodwill from the government.
Politics and business are about benefiting on the back of the least powerful party, i.e. citizens/customers. Communication companies help the government with their surveillance. In turn, governments keep new regulations and consumer protection laws to a minimum or erode existing ones.
Dropping connections that want to hanshake encryptions / look encrypted.
IP-bans of proxies; general useleness of open proxies; ease of proxy detections.
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Do not solve social problem with technical means, it will never work (see: drm).
That's probably true, but I wonder how far things will go? For example, where I live, there are already kids setting up local wireless mesh networks to share their music collections and other stuff around. Sure, these are small and operated by pizza-munching geeks, but if the idea gained general traction and the Internet as we know it simply became something similar to cable TV today (plus perhaps a comms network similar to email), would not the people be able to steal the Internet revolution back? I'm also interested in whether this might mean a return in some form at least to the ancient (and perhaps default) mode of human life: that of small, tightly-knit communities.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
This, to me, is the strangest thing about these filtering/censorship proposals. On the one hand, it's claimed that only really, really illegal stuff will be blocked by it -- the worst of the worst that pretty much guarantees a prison sentence merely for possessing, and that the lists will be accurate and won't block legitimate content. On the other, people who are detected trying to access this stuff won't be charged or even investigated?
It seems very strange. Obviously there's simple explanations for this lack of coherency, but the self-contradictory nature of the proposals is so much more transparent than usual in politics.
"voluntary" in politics is doublespeak.
It's doesn't mean: do whatever you feel like, there will be no consequences one way or another.
It means:
For now we leave you a choice but you better pick the right one or we'll just pass a law that will be even worse for you. By the way, nice tax-free service you're offering there, would be a shame if something happened to it.
You *do* understand what an encrypted ZIP file is ?
Rapidshare is full of them, and no filter in the world can block randomly encrypted bits.
Unless you are suggesting shutting down every FTP, filehost, P2P application, Yahoo Group and other massive swathes of the Internet, this filter like all others is a waste of taxpayers money and government resources and time.
I don't know why you think pedos are so dumb that they will name their files "little_naked_boy.jpg" ?
They are possibly some of the most sneaky and conscientious people around when it comes to incriminating evidence, simply because of the very act they perform.