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Ethiopia Criminalizes VoIP Services
An anonymous reader writes "The Ethiopian government has passed legislation criminalizing the use of VoIP services like Skype and Google Talk. Anyone using these services within the country now faces up to 15 years in prison. 'Ethiopian authorities argue that they imposed these bans because of "national security concerns" and to protect the state's telecommunications monopoly. The country only has one ISP, the state-owned Ethio Telecom, and has been filtering its citizen's Internet access for quite some time now to suppress opposition blogs and other news outlets. ... Reporters Without Borders also reports that Ethio Telecom installed a system to block access to the Tor network, which allows users to surf the Web anonymously. The organization notes that the ISP must be using relatively sophisticated Deep Packet Inspection to filter out this traffic.'"
You're looking at it. Great Britain, USA, Ethiopia, China, Saudi Arabia... are there *any* countries where an internet connection can be had with complete freedom of access and no censorship?
National Security is a threat to National Security. Anyone who uses National Security as an excuse should be locked up to protect National Security.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"The organization notes that the ISP must be using relatively sophisticated Deep Packet Inspection to filter out this traffic."
There is zero reason people *need* to use DPI to block Tor Traffic. You simply run compatible Tor connectivity software (i.e. The Tor Client) and create a list of those users who can accept communications with you--compare the nodes on that list with nodes that are within your networks; done.
You're looking at it. Great Britain, USA, Ethiopia, China, Saudi Arabia... are there *any* countries where an internet connection can be had with complete freedom of access and no censorship?
What the F are you yammering on about, you nob? It is completely common to have a completely free(from a libertarian perspective) and uncensored internet connection from a plethora of ISP in the United States and the United Kingdom. Genuine issues abound in many countries, including Ethiopia and the risk of the erosion of freedoms in many other places does exist. But, you hyperbolic patent falsifications erode people's willingness to take these matters seriously. In the long run, you are doing far more harm than good.
Please feel free to STFU!
What are they afraid of? They are the government. Oh wait ...
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Imagine the number of starving people they could feed, or development projects they could fund, with the money they channel into running computers to control the citizenry...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Exactly, just like a Christian government will provide for those who cannot provide for themselves a Muslim government would never spy on anyone.
so the prince can't contact people to get his money out.
Mod parent up. His useful explanation is overshadowed only by the in-depth article he linked to.
Wikipedia > Internet censorship by country > Pervasive censorship (the highest level) in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and of course, Iran.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_by_country
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Well, Sandvine is the big name in DPI tech, though there are others. Googling 'Lawful Intercept capability' brings up a fair list of vendors, pretty much everybody who sells networking gear, along with a few specialists.
Empirically speaking, there would appear to be a lot of competent techies who are either actively authoritarian or very good at the yuppie Nuremberg defense; because this stuff doesn't build itself, and it doesn't get built by throwing jackbooted morons at the problem...
but if you have a thought, and you put it on a wire that leads to a public network, you have just given up your right to privacy
not legally, but logically
even if the government was passionate about not snooping on the network in its borders, what of corporations? what of rogue government operatives? what of technically proficient and strangely motivated individuals?
it's a NETWORK, not a closed box in your garage
if you want something private, don't put it on a public network. once it gets out there, it is beyond your control. and you are the person who put it out there. so don't put it out there if it is important for you to keep private
this has nothing to do with legality. it has to do with a common sense understanding of the nature of the subject matter you are dealing with: a wide open public network. there is no such thing as privacy on that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So stealing 1 song worth $1 is worth $155000 in damages and making a phone call over Skype is worth 15 years in prison. Maybe I'll sell drugs or kill people instead; this other stuff is just too dangerous!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
They indeed solved the problem. They have other countries take care of the humanitarian help and provide the "starving children" images so that we all give money.
It is called outsourcing.
[sarcasm tag blew up; could not be contained in a tag]
Palm trees and 8
Ethiopia, Schmethiopia...
What do you do when *your* government treads all over *your* rights in the name of "national security"?
Make it look like IE6: anyone seeing that would roll their eyes and think the data belongs to a clueless grandmother.
A friend of mine was doing development work in Ethiopia and Somaliland back in the 90s. He's Dutch, and his wife's Somali, and he often worked from Addis Ababa, the capital. At one point he was having a phone call, and the phone operator came on and told him to stop speaking Dutch - speak English, Italian, Arabic, Amharic, or one of the other local languages the police could understand. We talked about whether he should use PGP, but he decided it would just give the police more of an excuse to "confiscate" his PCs, which they'd been wanting to steal anyway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks