Slashdot Mirror
Activists Worry About a New "Green Dam" In Vietnam
alphadogg writes "Human rights activists are worried that new software mandated by Vietnamese authorities may lead to an Internet clampdown in the country's largest city. In April, local officials issued new regulations covering Internet cafes and service providers in Hanoi, ostensibly designed to crack down on hacking and other service abuses. Buried in the regulations is a mandate that service providers must add special software to their domain servers, used to authenticate systems on the network. Nobody quite knows what the software is, but activists in the US worry that it may be used to clamp down on Internet usage in a country that has seen more and more grassroots information-sharing on social networks over the past year. Last year China tried to force PC makers to ship Green Dam censorware with all computers sold in the country, saying the software would help crack down on online pornography. But Chinese authorities — already known for their notorious Great Firewall — eventually backed off from their plans after critics raised a host of privacy, security and system stability concerns, and Chinese Internet users showed no interest in installing the program."
This may prove to be an unpopular POV among some of you, but seeing it from a bit of a different angle - US always has to worry about the way things are somewhere else. Why don't we let these figure it out for themselves, let them ask for help when they need to and only get concerned when they get a new line of centrifuges going, besides it's not like ./ is going to see a drop in traffic because of this. The only ones who have consistenly benefitted from this are the military and the big pharmas, handing out anti-anxiety and PTSD prescriptions. So let's do some real work for once - plenty of problems to take care of this end.